By Terence Smith
The Trump Administration’s overnight snatch of Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their unsafe house in Caracas, Venezuela, is being presented as the prosecution of a drug kingpin. In fact, as President Trump made crystal clear in his rambling news conference Saturday, it is all about Venezuela’s vast and under-developed oil reserves.
The formal indictment speaks of the Maduros’ alleged role in shipping drugs to the United States, even though Columbia and other nations clearly produce and ship more illegal drugs than Venezuela.
But Trump made the true motive and purpose of the operation crystal clear when he talked repeatedly about Venezuela’s oil, which was once profitably developed by U.S. oil companies until it was nationalized decades ago. Of all the U.S. firms, only Chevron continued to operate in Venezuela and most of the profits went into the coffers of the Maduro regime.
“Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars, ” Trump asserted, “they took all of our property.”
Trump also told reporters that Venezuela’s Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, could remain in power “as long as she does what we want” while the U.S. would “run” the country. He seemed to be describing an arms’-length occupation of a sovereign nation that would be enforced by the vast U.S. armada just offshore.
This was immediately dubbed the “Donrow Doctrine,” a unilateral update of the Monroe Doctrine, in which the U.S. feels free to grab everything in the Hemisphere and turn a profit in the process. Tina Brown defined the Donroe Doctrine online as “chin-jutting hubris, flailing testosterone and greed, greed, greed.”
It fell to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to clean up the President’s comments on the Sunday shows. He said it was not right to say that the U.S. was “running” Venezuela, but that it was “running policy, the policy with regard to this.” The “this” clearly referred to Venezuela’s oil.
Bottom line: there seems to be no coherent strategy for managing Venezuela and its deeply divided people, much less its oil reserves, beyond a remote-control occupation run out of Washington D.C. It is hauntingly familiar to the chaos that followed in Iraq two decades ago after the unseating of Saddam Hussein: another forever war.