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The political takeover of Venezuela does not appear to be going according to plan, if there ever was a plan. A day after the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump used the phrase “run the country.” A day later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio watered it down to “running policy” and made the next phase sound more like a series of strong suggestions. Trump also publicly suggested that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez might cooperate with the U.S. But then Rodríguez gave a televised address saying Venezuela “will never return to being the colony of another empire.” Trump followed that up with a threat, delivered through an interview with The Atlantic: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Unlike the precise military operation that whisked Maduro out of Venezuela, the political follow-up seems like improvisation and chaos, but maybe chaos is the point. In this episode of Radio Atlantic we talk with staff writers Michael Sherer, who talked with President Trump on Sunday, and Vivian Salama, who writes about the administration and Venezuela. They talk about Trump’s evolving vision of his role in the world and how it might be unsettling other world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Salama notes that world leaders now may “think twice about crossing the U.S. when President Trump is so unpredictable and uses the U.S. military in very unconventional ways, and shuns the guardrails that keep a U.S. president in check.”
Episode transcript forthcoming.
The post Is the U.S. Running Venezuela or Not? appeared first on The Atlantic.
