Perry Bacon: This is Perry Bacon from The New Republic, and I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor at Columbia University who writes a lot about and studies international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and national security. And we’re talking in the wake of—less than 24 hours ago—the U.S. government deposing Maduro.
Elizabeth Saunders: Thank you for having me.
Or even over the last few months—we’ve seen, like, that they’ve been building up toward this. I was surprised it happened this way, but it seems like the administration has been building toward this for a while. Trump and Marco Rubio have been talking a lot about the situation in Venezuela needing to change, exaggerating the drug trafficking in a certain way.
Saunders: So I think one of the similarities this has with the Iraq War is that there were a lot of people who supported it for a lot of different reasons. So you had, I think probably the number one driver of this, just from the reporting I’ve read, was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long been advocating regime change in Venezuela. He connects Venezuela, as he did in the press conference this morning with Trump, to Cuba; sees Venezuela as under the thumb of Cuba. Rubio’s parents fled Cuba when Castro took over. And I think this has been on his wish list for a long time.
And what was really shocking about the press conference—right, I woke up this morning and seeing the news, given all that’s happened, I didn’t actually think it was really going to happen in the end. But then when you saw it, it’s okay, it was a close call. We were all making bets about whether he would do it or not, but he sent in an aircraft carrier, so it’s not that surprising. But hearing Trump himself talk about “boots on the ground” and “we’re going to run the government of Venezuela,” and “we’re not afraid of boots on the ground”—that was pretty shocking to me, just as an observer of Trump. I’ve never bought into the Trump as a dove. In the end, he’s been pretty consistent. He likes these pinpoint operations, very risky, but he likes to bomb a target, right? And this is Pandora’s box. And that was... it’s very odd to wake up to very surprising and unexpected news and then to be shocked on top of that. But his press conference, I would say, was very shocking.
Do you see a role for that here? How do you see oil playing out? I’m open to anything—I just want to hear your thoughts on that.
And so maybe when things started—I’m purely speculating—but the fact that it has not really been about oil throughout this whole buildup says to me that it was a late addition to the stew of reasons why Trump might be persuaded to get on board with this. But again, I’m just speculating. It’s also a little bit odd because it’s not as though Venezuela’s oil... it doesn’t belong to the U.S. It was nationalized, but that’s a thing that happens. And it was a long time ago. And the oil, the price of oil—like, there’s too much of it right now for global demand. So it just—I’m not an oil expert or a Latin American expert—but it doesn’t strike me that it’s enough to drive this.
Saunders: Yeah, people forget that the official law of the land under Bill Clinton in the late years of his administration was to do regime change in Iraq. Congress passed the law; Clinton signed it, right? So the official policy of the United States was to get Saddam Hussein out of office. And of course, it wasn’t until Bush—and even after 9/11—that Bush decided to undertake that mission. Supporting regime change rhetorically is not the same as doing it, which is one reason why I think a lot of people were not surprised but saw it as a reasonable guess to think that he would not, in the end—Trump would not in the end change the regime by force.
Bacon: So moving forward—this was not authorized by Congress, and members of Congress are pretty explicitly saying, we asked about this and they told us they were not doing it.
Saunders: So I’m a little bit cynical on this front. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t study international law directly, but I follow a lot of lawyers. Quite literally, some of my best friends are lawyers. They all seem to agree, almost universally, that this is illegal under international law.
Saunders: The way this happened—and that’s what democratic process, small-d democratic process, is more what I study—and I actually, without endorsing in any sense the operation, think the small-d democratic process should be involved in decisions about military
And then when it comes to congressional authorization, I absolutely take the point that international law and constitutional law scholars make: that you can’t have a war without Congress declaring it. But we haven’t had declared war since Pearl Harbor, basically.
Saunders: It wasn’t a declared war, but there was an authorization to use military force. If I’m not mistaken, actually, maybe they finally did get the Iraq one off the books quite recently. But the Afghanistan authorization is still on the books. The Afghanistan War is over; in fact, the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, which authorizes force in the Middle East, is still on the books, just for those keeping score. So authorizations to use military force—leave aside declared war—they are political instruments in and of themselves. Presidents ask for them when they think they can get them, when they think it would be beneficial. And they tend to stick around for a long time. And Congress doesn’t like to vote on anything if they can avoid it.
Bacon: The walk-back? Yeah, I think it’s probably coming. Yeah, because he’s—let me ask, because in terms of what happened on Friday night—it was unprecedented. On the one hand, there are a lot of precedents of the U.S. doing regime change. On the other hand, I think we were surprised by this, because this is not—there was not a long public discussion about what would happen, the way there was with Iraq, and how and so on. This feels different.
Saunders: So on the one hand, there’s a really long history of this in Latin America in particular. Yeah. It goes back to... as far back as when the U.S. acquired the power to project power into other regions, right? So late nineteenth century, and we intervened in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic, several times. You can’t even count them. There have been so many, and that’s before you even get to the Cold War interventions that are quite notorious. The precedent I think people are pointing to is Panama and Noriega. But I don’t have a problem with making these analogies, but I do think that there’s a limit to how much the precedent really matters because we are in a different universe right now.
Whereas in the first term, you had Mattis and Kelly and others where his most instinctive whims would be checked. And so I think you can’t really compare that—compare the politics of today to the politics in the Cold War when the president really did have to worry about Congress. Even Trump I had to worry about his advisors and would take advice, and this is just a permissive environment. It’s not that Trump has changed; it’s that there’s a permissive environment around him where his whims and instincts, or the ones he gloms onto from different advisors, get translated into action with no filter, right? No process, no consideration.
Bacon: I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. You said elites run foreign policy. You could even argue elites run American policy—particularly foreign policy. I agree. But in this case, it’s going to be different, because based on what I’ve seen so far, this is not going to be a bipartisan agreement.
Saunders: Yes. Although we are in a more polarized time.
Saunders: Yeah. And it used to be that when elites were united, that sent a signal. And when they were divided, that sent a signal. But now elites are divided all the time on partisan lines. So it’s no longer quite so clear what signal the public will take from that. And I should say, my take on this is cynical, but I don’t mean it in the sense that the public doesn’t pay attention and it should pay more attention. It’s not that, or that elites are somehow this nefarious. This is how we all make sense of the world, right?
And so I think we need to think about it more like we hire elites—I mean through elections and then delegating appointment power and all of that—to monitor this stuff. And we trust them in normal times to follow the intelligence and get advice and talk to allies. And this is all the stuff Trump doesn’t do, right? And follow a process and stick to it. And when you see him unleashing stuff like this in real time, possibly unbeknownst to his own advisors... who knows? I would love to know some of the background reporting on that.
Saunders: Yes, even when they were at the press conference and they threw it back to the—I think I was watching BBC, or maybe I was toggling between them; CNN maybe—everybody seemed stunned. And Trump is a good politician in many ways, but he stepped on his own message here because now everybody’s talking about “We’re going to run Venezuela.”
Saunders: And no, but not that we should celebrate it as a success, but putting yourself in... I always like to think about it from the very cynical point of view of the politician. And his job today, in addition to informing people, was to paint this in the best possible light for his administration. That’s what all presidents do. And he got Maduro out of Venezuela, and now all anybody is talking about is that we’re running it.
Saunders: I wouldn’t want to... I don’t want to say yes or no because I’m sure if I say one or the other, I’ll have a friend call me up and say, “You said this wrong.” But it’s one thing to try to indict somebody in absentia, right? Yes. But to then go in and... I can’t think of one. Duterte was turned over by the Philippine government to The Hague.
Saunders: That’s a little different. There have been cases of, like, cartel leaders that I can think of who were extracted. I guess Noriega, but I don’t know. It’s... even if there is a precedent, I come back to: Is it wise? Just ’cause there’s a precedent doesn’t make it good policy.
So for this to happen so abruptly—I did think, and I guess I should ask you as we’re closing here—I’m not sure you’re allowed to say this, but this feels extreme, and I would say bad. I don’t want the U.S. doing regime change at random, with no international support or no congressional support. This feels—among the many things Trump has done that I don’t agree with—like one of the more outlandish ones. Would you put it in that category for this year, for this term at least?
I have the same sense, and I do think that there’s a community of international lawyers that’s trying to pin down the nature of what’s illegal about it. And that’s important, the precedents. And there’s this community of Latin America scholars that are very much putting this in the context of all the long, infamous history of U.S. intervention. That’s also correct. But I just keep coming back to: Trump has unchecked power. The last time we did this, it went horribly wrong. And at least Bush felt the need to have a justification and all of that. And it’s just even more illustration that there’s no constraints. The fact that the MAGA-friendly press corps pushed him so hard in that press conference, I think, is quite telling. Because it meant that they were surprised and...
Saunders: I shouldn’t say that definitively. My understanding is the pool that goes with him now is handpicked and doesn’t have the usual... maybe there’s a couple from the networks, but the press pool is very much more MAGA-friendly than it used to be. But they pushed—I couldn’t see who was asking the questions, but they pushed harder than I... on the... they just kept coming back: “Really? Who’s going to be running? What does this mean?” Like they had the bit between their teeth in a way that they haven’t on a lot of issues.
Bacon: I had you to remind me of that, right?
We can’t even reimpose them if we wanted to because of Trump’s gutting of the sort of diplomatic and foreign policy toolkit. And that wasn’t true when we invaded Panama. It may be the right precedent, but the context is George H.W. Bush had tremendous foreign policy experience. The Soviet Union was collapsing. Vladimir Putin is not pleased, I would think, about this, right? So this is just playing with fire in a totally different setting than previous precedents, and I think that, as much as anything, is part of what’s making me also feel like... okay. Even if there is a precedent, this is still a different level of risk and uncertainty. Like, the range of things that could happen is just enormous.
Saunders: Yeah. I’m not the one you invite to the party to be the cheerful, happy entertainment.
Saunders: Yeah, it is. It’s important and it is scary.
Saunders: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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