{"id":84760,"date":"2026-04-26T20:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T20:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/84760\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T20:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T20:35:10","slug":"no-reason-to-expect-it-would-go-any-better-than-iraq-trumps-venezuela-gambit-could-go-from-confusion-to-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/84760\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018No Reason To Expect It Would Go Any Better Than Iraq\u2019: Trump\u2019s Venezuela Gambit Could Go From Confusion To Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump\u2019s Saturday move to abduct Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and attack his country, killing 80 soldiers and civilians<\/a>, could reshape Venezuela \u2015 particularly after Trump subsequently said the U.S. will now \u201crun\u201d the country and bolster access to its huge oil reserves.<\/p>\n

While the Trump administration outlined its intentions for Maduro, aiming to prosecute him in New York on drug trafficking charges, Washington has provided few details on its hopes or plans for Venezuela, a nation of 28 million people that has already endured political repression, corruption and a severe collapse of living standards spurring a refugee crisis, in part because of years of American sanctions.<\/p>\n

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0U.S. involvement could be more modest than Trump suggested, using an American naval build-up off the Venezuelan coast to halt oil exports, the country\u2019s chief source of income, and to pressure the government in Caracas, now led by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, to alter its policies.<\/p>\n

But the drastic changes the administration appears to seek \u2015 American companies rebuilding the Venezuelan oil industry, an overhaul of Venezuelan society, and the country aligning with the U.S. against long-time partners Cuba and China and against drug traffickers \u2015 will likely require significant American resources and attention. And fears persist that Trump could pursue further military action and\/or other reckless moves, particularly given accusations the Maduro kidnapping was illegal and that the administration is shirking its responsibility to consult with Congress on entering a conflict. (Officials are calling the operation a law enforcement effort.)<\/p>\n

HuffPost spoke with Columbia University professor Elizabeth Saunders about what to expect next for U.S. policy on Venezuela and the dire implications of Trump running what she calls a \u201cpersonalist\u201d foreign policy, as global affairs takes up what she calls a surprising level of his second presidency.<\/p>\n

A day on from Trump\u2019s statement of \u201cWe\u2019re going to run the country of Venezuela,\u201d what would that take? I\u2019ve heard about folks inside the government feeling very unprepared for the task of running another country, particularly in teams like the Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau of the State Department, which covers the region. Some people have raised these questions of military contractors being brought in to help oil companies boost production in Venezuela, which seems to be Trump\u2019s chief goal. How are you thinking about what Washington might push for?<\/p>\n

Politics: Trump Leaves Republicans In The Dark On Plan To ‘Run’ Venezuela<\/a><\/p>\n

Twenty-four hours on, I\u2019m even more shocked by Trump\u2019s statements at the press conference than I was when I heard them. And I wonder especially in light of Rubio\u2019s comments this morning on the Sunday shows whether Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth and everyone standing behind him was also shocked \u2026 I don\u2019t think anyone could have been truly surprised that he went, but saying that he was going to do \u201cboots on the ground\u201d and run Venezuela was deeply shocking. I don\u2019t think we have any idea what it means for the Trump administration to \u201crun\u201d Venezuela. It doesn\u2019t seem like Marco Rubio, who is the secretary of state, the national security adviser and the acting national archivist \u2015- and I believe he\u2019s still the acting head of the remnants of USAID \u2015 knows what it means either. If he thought about it, he probably would like to have USAID for this task and certainly a more robust State Department that hasn\u2019t been gutted.<\/p>\n

I expected there to be a lot of walk back in the press\u2026 a clean up in aisle Venezuela. I don\u2019t think we have seen any coordinated effort to walk that back, which either means they\u2019re just onboard with what Trump says or they\u2019re just also still in shock.<\/p>\n

Do you feel the administration could reach some sort of agreement with the Venezuelan regime, given mostly everyone is still there? Trump loves various autocrats \u2015 can he get to some place of accommodation with acting leader Delcy Rodriguez (who has tried to negotiate with him)<\/a> or someone else around her?<\/p>\n

The range of outcomes here is enormous. It\u2019s even more enormous than we all thought between the time when the news broke that Maduro had been extracted and the press conference, because of his statements about running Venezuela… in that sense the possibility of accommodation fits well within the range of possible outcomes. It\u2019s no more outlandish than an occupation of Venezuela.<\/p>\n

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In the history of U.S. foreign imposed regime change or decapitations \u2015 which is really what this is, taking out the leader but not the regime \u2015 it\u2019s very common to find an accommodation with the subsequent leader and then to be quite dissatisfied that they don\u2019t do exactly what you tell them to do because, of course, they have their own interests. But Trump is not a detail-oriented leader, he wants to declare victory and go home, so it wouldn\u2019t surprise me at all. He\u2019s basically said that\u2019s what he\u2019s seeking, is an accommodation with Rodriguez. The question is whether she will play along, and so far, she hasn\u2019t been, so if there\u2019s going to be an accommodation, he\u2019s going to have to work for it harder than he has up to this point.<\/p>\n

How are you thinking about people in the military and government who are being asked to carry out these unclear and potentially illegal plans?<\/p>\n

One thing a famous international relations scholar, Robert Jervis, always used to say is that we have to have a lot of sympathy for policymakers who make tough calls \u2015 they often get them wrong, but they were trying their best. I wouldn\u2019t say that\u2019s true for the civilians in this case, for Trump and Rubio and Hegseth. I do think you have to have some sympathy for people all the way down the chain of command. … I have real questions about whether the whole thing is legal on any level.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s painful to watch the civil-military dynamics here because the military is a very competent organization. It can pull off operations like this which are dramatic and complicated, and it has jobs to do all around the world, but it\u2019s being sent to do things that are probably illegal on at least one or two dimensions.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday, Trump\u2019s comments were heavily about oil, certainly not about democracy for Venezuela. But we also know from The New York Times that this effort partly originated in Stephen Miller wanting a declaration of war to enable the use of the Alien Enemies Act for mass deportations. Then there are arguments about keeping China and Russia out of the U.S.\u2019 sphere of influence. How does that confusion about objectives make it harder to get to a coherent policy here?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a familiar dynamic from the Iraq War, where you had what political scientists like to call a logroll, where lots of people can support a policy because they get something out of it even if they don\u2019t all get the same thing out of it. Some people were for invading Iraq because of a true neoconservative belief in democratization by force; some people may have had oil motivations, although I don\u2019t think that was dominant; some people may have wanted to just destroy another country bigger than Afghanistan as a demonstration of toughness. That\u2019s what happens when there\u2019s a policy that people prefer for their own reasons, but then everybody had different views of what had to happen next, so I think that\u2019s what you have here.<\/p>\n

This has been Marco Rubio\u2019s pet project for a long time; Stephen Miller clearly saw that the drugs angle was something that could get Trump on board. So that\u2019s part of the problem: If the goal is fuzzy from the beginning then no, you can\u2019t have a coherent policy. Doing a foreign-imposed regime change and successfully rebuilding through occupation is extremely difficult and almost always fails. The best study we have of this, by David Edelstein, shows the times it worked, like in Germany and Japan. It worked because there was some other external threat. The Germans welcome the Americans because they would hold off the Soviets. But there\u2019s nothing like that here. So if they try to occupy Venezuela, there\u2019s no reason to expect that it would go any better than Iraq.<\/p>\n

But all that said, if they had a clear goal, at least they could do something more surgical and then declare a victory. Clarity of goals won\u2019t necessarily solve the post-war problem, but a lack of clarity in the goals will certainly not help.<\/p>\n

Politics: In Venezuela Takeover, Trump Makes It All About The Oil<\/a><\/p>\n

And we don\u2019t even know if we are post-war.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m used to saying it for Iraq. What do we call this? The post-maybe invasion? It\u2019s really bizarre \u2015 we\u2019ve declared that we\u2019re occupying the country, sort of, by a press conference.<\/p>\n

Linking to shifting goals are shifting narratives, particularly Rubio\u2019s messages about not telling Congress in advance. This gets to an issue you\u2019ve written about, with elites making foreign policy, the personalist dictatorship style of Trump, and the question of, \u201cAre there any guardrails?\u201d First, he said they didn\u2019t tell Congress because they would leak it. Then he said, \u201cI don\u2019t have to tell Congress because it\u2019s a law enforcement operation, not a national security operation or a war.\u201d Does any of that make sense to you?<\/p>\n

No. And I would say that\u2019s Rubio in an oddly twisted way doing his job, which is to talk around the truth and just sidestep the questions. I\u2019m not surprised he\u2019s given two different logically incompatible explanations for why he didn\u2019t tell Congress.<\/p>\n

All that said, presidents rarely tell Congress, or if they do, they do it in the most cursory way. They inform Congress, but they don\u2019t ask for authorization, they rely on old authorizations like 2001\u2032s authorization for the use of military force [after the Sept. 11 attacks]. The fact of presidential power and the lack of going to Congress, oversight, all of that, those are long-term trends that Trump didn\u2019t start.<\/p>\n

To me, the big difference is that there is no process, there\u2019s no guardrails internally inside the administration, which is often where the guardrails in most administrations come from. There was no stress-testing; they say they played war games, but if that press conference is any indication, it doesn\u2019t seem any of that planning made it to the top. You can\u2019t treat this like any other intervention \u2015 this is incompetent, inexperienced people. I think of Hegseth at the hinge point: it\u2019s the president, the secretary of defense and the combatant commanders. Hegseth is the hinge of the chain of command and just saying that out loud is breathtaking. So you have incompetent people, you have no process to course-correct here, you\u2019ve got a completely absent Congress which, even in the case of Iraq there was a backchannel for concerns \u2026 and we know how badly that went! This is worse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s bad that he didn\u2019t brief Congress, but I think that it\u2019s a bit of a red herring in terms of focusing on the big picture here, which is the utterly chaotic \u2015 and not just poorly planned, but not-planned \u2015 aftermath and the incompetence at every level of this administration with the fate of millions of Venezuelans in the balance. They will suffer for these events.<\/p>\n

If they had gotten a briefing ahead of time, it still wouldn\u2019t have made it OK. It still wouldn\u2019t have solved the problem that they had no idea what they were going to do on the day after. It\u2019s better they brief because processes matter, but it\u2019s not a cure-all. I often think of congressional criticism of process questions, like the War Powers Act or repealing the AUMF as things that are like flypaper. They\u2019re a place you can stick your angst \u2026 it\u2019s a safe thing to do, complaining about process. It obscures the real issues.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that process isn\u2019t important, but in this case \u2026 Congress is out. So let\u2019s talk about how there\u2019s no White House or national security process, because there used to be one \u2015 and Trump broke it. It\u2019s not that this operation would have gone well if there had been a great process, but it might not have ever happened at all, because in the first term, the advisers did constrain him from his worse impulses. Now he\u2019s in a permissive environment where there\u2019s nothing to stop his whims when he wakes up in the morning from being translated into policy that affects millions around the world. No amount of congressional briefing is going to fix that without serious action.<\/p>\n

Can you identify the levers that Congress or people inside the administration could use to try to get back from what you have described as a \u201cpersonalist\u201d foreign policy?<\/p>\n

Some of them are long-term\u2026 you have to pass legislation and get back to a place where expertise in Congress is valuable. The main mechanism through which Congress that actually constrains the president is not votes, and it\u2019s not even really oversight. It\u2019s the mechanism of what scholars call \u201canticipated reaction.\u201d The president sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is thinking, \u201cIf I do this, what would be the consequences?\u201d \u2026 By the time you get to a vote censoring the president or whatever it is, a lot of things have broken down. Those are not muscles that Congress is used to exercising.<\/p>\n

You might have thought of the 25th Amendment, but the people who\u2019d be invoking that, some of them standing behind Trump at that press conference, are not going to do it. Also, of course, Democrats don\u2019t control either chamber [of Congress].<\/p>\n

What you need are political stunts \u2015 something that will command the airwaves, that you can\u2019t look away from. I don\u2019t quite know what that is. A filibuster marathon session on the Capitol steps? Something that can create a counter-narrative. But we\u2019ve been in need of that since Trump took office, and that kind of elite leadership has been sorely lacking.<\/p>\n

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Political Updates<\/p>\n

Read the original on HuffPost<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump\u2019s Saturday move to abduct Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and attack his country, killing 80 soldiers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[10201,467,9073,94,210,294,772,864,293,30216],"class_list":{"0":"post-84760","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iraq","8":"tag-administration","9":"tag-congress","10":"tag-delcy-rodriguez","11":"tag-iraq","12":"tag-marco-rubio","13":"tag-nicolas-maduro","14":"tag-pete-hegseth","15":"tag-president-donald-trump","16":"tag-venezuela","17":"tag-venezuelan-oil-industry"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116472926889925819","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}