Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has pinned much of his political career on combating the far left, is having a big moment as he helps President Trump navigate the fallout of capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.
The son of immigrants who fled the communist Castro regime, Rubio now faces a daunting task in trying to help restore democracy in Venezuela and untangle the regime from Cuban influence.
Regime change efforts under the last Republican administration led to quagmires in the Middle East that eventually soured public opinion. Rubio is hopeful that the gamble in Venezuela will go very differently from Iraq or Afghanistan.
“The whole, you know, foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan. This is not the Middle East,” Rubio told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “And our mission here is very different.”
In contrast to the George W. Bush administration’s approach of mounting an invasion, then putting boots on the ground to prop up a government, Trump simply ordered a targeted operation to capture Maduro.
“This isn’t de-Baathification,” an ally of Rubio told Axios, referring to the purge of Saddam Hussein’s loyalists in Iraq. “This is intentional and methodical.”
Some proponents of Operation Absolute Resolve have likened it to the 1989 operation under George HW Bush to successfully depose Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama.
Either way, the outcome will almost certainly help define both Rubio’s and Trump’s legacies.
“Knowing his deeply-held views about the evils of communism and socialism, I think politics is the furthest thing from his mind,” Cesar Conda, a former adviser to Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign and his first Senate Chief of Staff from 2011 to 2014, told The Post.
“He’s doing all of this because it’s the right thing to do for America, for the people in Venezuela and for stability in our hemisphere.”
Fluent in Spanish, Rubio was tasked with speaking to Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez after the capture of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores during a pre-dawn raid.
The secretary of state has publicly declared that he doesn’t view Rodríguez as a legitimate president.
“We’re not going to judge moving forward based simply on what’s said in press conferences. We want to see action here at the end of the day,” Rubio told ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday.
“What we are going to react to is very simple: What do you do? Not what you’re saying in public — what happens? What happens next? Do the drugs stop coming? Are the changes made? Is Iran expelled?” he added, listing out the Trump administration’s demands of Venezuela.
During a press conference on Saturday, Trump suggested that Rubio would play a significant role in overseeing Venezuela’s transition away from the Chavistas who have ruled the country for decades.
“It’s largely going to for a period of time the people standing right behind me,” Trump told reporters Saturday when asked about who will run Venezuela. Rubio and War Secretary Pete Hegseth were behind him at the time.
“We’re going to bring it back. It’s a dead country.”
Rubio later clarified that “what we are running is the direction that this is going to move moving forward.”
To steer Venezuela, the Trump administration will leverage its oil blockade of the beleaguered South American country, according to Rubio.
“This leverage we are using and we intend to use — we started using already,” he explained on “This Week.”
“That will continue to be in place until the people who have control over the levers of power in that country make changes that are not just in the interest of the people of Venezuela but are in the interest of the United States.”
Rubio, who was a top candidate in the running to serve as Trump’s vice president, has been given multiple tough jobs by the president in addition to his busy day-to-day schedule as secretary of state.
This includes serving as the United States National Security Advisor, the Archivist of the United States, and the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which he held from February until last August.
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