The Trump administration seems to be unprepared for the consequences of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, one foreign policy analyst says.
David Rothkopf told The Daily Beast Podcast that the president’s effort to bring Maduro to the U.S. to face drug-trafficking-related charges has resulted in questions that should have already been resolved, like who would govern the South American country and the fate of its lucrative oil reserves.
“As exquisitely planned as the military operation was, the minute that Maduro was put on a helicopter and flown out of the country, there was no remaining plan,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles.
“We don’t know who’s in charge in Venezuela. We don’t know who’s on our side in Venezuela. We don’t know what we’re going to do next in Venezuela. We don’t know how we’re going to control the oil in Venezuela. We don’t know which oil companies are going to participate in this in Venezuela,” he continued. “Frankly, I don’t even think they understand really how the Maduro trial is going to play out because a lot of what they’re accusing him of isn’t actually true.”
Maduro, 63, and wife Cilia Flores, 69, both pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday to conspiracy to import cocaine, among other charges. The two were captured in Caracas early Saturday by about 200 U.S. special operations forces in an operation about which Trump alerted oil executives—but not Congress—beforehand, he admitted to reporters.
After the operation, Trump, 79, declined to support Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as the country’s de facto leader. The reported reason: She accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump coveted. Trump said the U.S. would “run” the country instead, in part by seizing its oil industry to revive it.
“His justification doesn’t hold water,” Rothkopf countered. “How could it be a law enforcement operation if what we were doing was illegally intervening in a country to illegally kidnap the leader of another country and then essentially conduct what is a giant armed robbery where we’re going to steal the world’s largest oil reserves from that country and put them to our own purposes?”
“So what we’re doing actually is a crime. It’s not a law enforcement operation,” Rothkopf added.
“[Trump] also then said we’re going to run the country, and you could literally see Marco Rubio, tiny little guy that he is, shrink further as he said that, because he knew on who that would fall,” Rothkopf continued. ”In the days since, he’s like, well, we don’t really mean we’re going to run it. We’re going to influence their behavior, and they better do what we tell them to do because we have the military there and we can cut off their oil supplies."
The situation in Venezuela, as well as Trump’s bluster about potential moves in Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland, is a mafia doctrine, Rothkopf explained.
“Trump likes to call it the ‘Don-roe’ doctrine, and he seems to be proud of that. But essentially what it means is...we have a new kind of mafia foreign policy: ‘This is our territory.’ The Don is going to tell his people what to do and take over. And like the mafia, we’re going to use the fact that we have muscle and we don’t care about the law to do whatever we want in our neighborhood. And so that’s where we are.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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