How will Trump ‘run’ Venezuela?

In the Tea Room of his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday morning, Donald Trump triumphantly announced details of the overnight US mission to topple and capture Nicolás Maduro in the heart of Caracas.

But the US president went far beyond that: he also pledged that Washington would now “run” Venezuela until further notice, raising the prospect of a heavy-handed, open-ended American involvement in the Latin American country.

“We’re not doing this in vain,” Trump told reporters, with his top national security and military officers by his side. “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbours. We want to surround ourselves with stability. We want to surround ourselves with energy.”

On its face, the US operation in Venezuela marks a stark departure from the non-interventionism that has been a hallmark of Trump’s stated foreign policy goals.

Not only did Trump — who proclaimed himself “the president of peace” this year — return to the White House pledging to keep his country out of foreign conflicts, but his recent national security strategy ridiculed the “decades of fruitless ‘nation-building’ wars” of previous administrations.

Yet Trump has now committed the US to establish Venezuela, a country two and a half times the size of Germany with a population of around 28mn, as a temporary protectorate.

He offered few details on how it might work.

The US president said secretary of state Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, defence secretary, would be “working with the people of Venezuela to make sure that we have Venezuela right”.

“We’re not going to do this with Maduro and then leave like everybody else, leave and say ‘let it go to hell’,” Trump said. “We’ll run it properly. We’ll run it professionally. We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going in and invest billions and billions of dollars”.

Trump appeared to dismiss María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel peace prize winner who remains popular inside the country, as an option.

“I think it’d be very tough for her to be the leader, she doesn’t have the support,” he said. “She doesn’t have the respect.”

Machado has called for her ally Edmundo González, whom polling station tallies showed was the true winner of last year’s presidential election stolen by Maduro, to take power. But Trump did not mention González.

In the immediate aftermath of the US operation, Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s second-in-command, emerged as Washington’s main interlocutor. “I understand she was just sworn in . . . and she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said, adding that Rubio had spoken to her.

But later on Saturday, Delcy appeared on Venezuelan television flanked by leading members of the government, and referred to the US extraction of Maduro without any indication that she had officially succeeded him.

She insisted that Maduro was still “the sole president of the nation” and demanded his immediate release. “The Venezuelan people are suffering. They are indignant at the kidnap of Maduro and the first lady. What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity,” she said.

Some members of Venezuela’s opposition were baffled by the US strategy.

“My opinion: IMPECCABLE military operation, BIZARRE political plan,” wrote Pedro Burelli, an opposition figure close to Machado, on X after Trump’s press conference. “Venezuela is broke and needy, but it is not about to surrender to absurd whims . . . The term ‘bizarre’ doesn’t even begin to describe what we just heard.”

Venezuelans fear that a regime hardliner, such as interior minister Diosdado Cabello, could now step into the power vacuum. Rubio’s challenges in rapidly bolstering the American connections in Venezuela will be compounded by the lack of a US permanent presence in the South American nation. The US closed its embassy in Caracas in 2019.

Meanwhile, the Chavista movement, named after its founder Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, is strongly anti-imperialist. Trump’s remarks on Saturday emphasising the potential of the country’s oil industry for American companies could provide Chavistas with a powerful propaganda weapon.

Any attempt to install an occupation force would face a hostile reaction from Venezuela’s fiercely nationalist government and armed forces, as well as from a network of well-armed neighbourhood militias.

US regime-change efforts in recent decades in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya all faltered.

Trump declined to rule out sending more US military to Venezuela, saying he was “not afraid” of deploying American troops, signalling that they could be needed to protect the oil sector. Nor did the US president mention the need to restore democracy or set new elections — justifications for previous American military interventions overseas.

Trump has however evoked the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, named after president James Monroe, to establish US dominance in the western Hemisphere.

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot,” Trump said.

Trump’s domestic critics slammed the president’s lack of a strategy and promise to deepen US involvement in Venezuela.

“Looting a nation is contrary to governing a nation, and that would be my chief worry about Donald Trump and those that he would entrust with this completely ridiculous mission,” Tim Kaine, the Democratic senator of Virginia, told reporters.

Some Republican critics were wary too.

“The only country that the United States of America should be ‘running’ is the United States of America,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania.

“The United States should join the international community in monitoring and overseeing a free and fair election in Venezuela, allowing the Venezuelan people a pathway to a true democracy,” he added.

Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor