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Donald Trump ran for President three times pledging to avoid the type of military entanglements that unfolded on Saturday: U.S. forces had captured Venezuela’s leader and his wife in a pre-dawn operation, flown them to New York, and were installing American national security hawks as open-ended stewards of the oil-rich nation.
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It was a dramatic break from what many in Trump’s MAGA coalition had imagined when they rallied a decade ago behind an isolationist, America First agenda. Trump’s move in Venezuela cut directly against that creed, leaving even some allies on Capitol Hill uneasy about how little warning Congress received.
The unanswered question is how Trump’s core supporters will respond. They are voters who helped upend a half-century of Republican hawkish instincts and who viewed regime change as a discredited relic of a bygone era. What is clear, however, is that this is a moment of enormous reset for U.S. posture in global intervention, and one whose consequences are difficult to predict.
“We’re going to be running it,” Trump said of Venezuela from his private club in Florida. And, he hinted, Venezuela might just be his opening gambit.
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Trump, lured by the promise of an oil-rich nation he might control as a viceroy, saw nothing but upside for the U.S. energy sector. But what he was unsure of—even among his inner circle—was the tolerance for this type of expansionist viewpoint. While Trump’s advisers have described the policy as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, many of his most ardent supporters have been far less comfortable with the notion that the hemisphere should fall under American political and commercial dominance. In the simplest terms, it was game on.
“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” Trump said. “They were pumping almost nothing, by comparison to what they could have been pumping, and what could have taken place.”
Instead, Trump adopted a colonial posture to replace that stagnation—and take the spoils of war, as the United States did not do in Iraq, much to Trump’s dismay. It was, in a way, the first steps at unfurling a new American empire.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said, hinting that the real reason for toppling the government was well beyond narco-terrorism charges.
Venezuela, a nation of 30 million people and home to the largest proven oil reserves globally, has been on the receiving end of Trump’s ire for months. The U.S. military has carried out repeated strikes against boats accused of drug trafficking much to the dismay of even his hawkish allies in Congress.
But this weekend’s mission, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, went far beyond those actions. It took less than three hours to extract the nation’s leader from his bedroom and involved roughly 150 aircraft swarming the skies over South America. It ended with Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife blocked from their safe room and flown toward New York to face criminal charges.
Read more: Venezuela Isn’t Panama—No Matter How Much Trump Wishes It Were
Trump’s rise to power was fueled by vows to end “forever wars” and limit U.S. involvement in other nations’ affairs. On the campaign trail, he promised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would end on “Day One” and he would bring a swift end to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But his rhetoric has not always aligned with reality, and Trump’s ability to manifest global affairs has often fallen short. If anything, the last few days have felt like a bitter throwback to an earlier era of U.S. intervention—from Panama to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—whose outcomes proved far messier than their architects anticipated.
The reaction from Congress was so far muted, although it was hard to ignore its potential rancor. For many conservatives, the Trump rejoinder to nation building and regime change was the main selling point to his candidacy. Trump’s incursion into Venezuela, the capture of its First Family, and its about-face of campaign promises stung something bitter.
“This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a one-time Trump loyalist who is set to resign this week from her seat representing Georgia. “Boy were we wrong.”
In an hour-long news conference explaining the strike to the American people, Trump made no concessions that he perhaps betrayed his campaign pledges. Instead, he warned that the aggression may not stop inside Venezuela. Specifically, he called out Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who condemned the operation. “[Petro] has cocaine mills. He has factories where he makes cocaine. … He’s making cocaine. They’re sending it into the United States,” Trump said. “So he does have to watch his ass.”
Trump has similar warnings for the leaders of Cuba and Mexico. Regime change, it seems, has reached its ripe moment in this hemisphere, cycling back to a Cold War-era ethos of American might is right.
That messaging, right there, is why so much of the Washington foreign policy blob is stuck in a holding pattern to see if Trump finds the reaction to this first strike sufficient or if he wants to keep feeding this fire. In an administration dictated almost entirely by the principal’s whim, the next chapter is one almost always written in pencil. It’s why no one in Washington’s wonk circles is leaving their phones on the coffee table right now.
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