How long will the United States claim control over Venezuela? “Only time will tell,” President Donald Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday — potentially years. U.S. troops invaded the country over the weekend, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism charges in New York on Monday. They now sit in a Brooklyn jail, awaiting trial.

Trump and administration officials have justified ousting Maduro by claiming it was consistent with the Monroe Doctrine — a doctrine that through the years “has been expanded into something like a universal police warrant that allows the United States to intervene,” says historian Greg Grandin. “Trump has redefined the Monroe Doctrine to mean, the Monroe is as a weapon that the United States can use in order to protect its interests wherever it wants, whenever it wants. So it’s a substitute for liberal international law.”

This week on the Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington discusses the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela, its larger aims of controlling the Western Hemisphere, and bringing Latin America to heel with Grandin, the author of numerous books, including most recently “America, América: A New History of the New World.”

“There’s an affiliation between the Monroe Doctrine and American First nationalism,” says Grandin. “They imagine United States sovereignty expanding well beyond its borders within its hemisphere.”

The administration’s vision is outlined in the National Security Strategy the White House released in December. “This is a strategy that announces that the Monroe Doctrine is back in the especially bellicose form. But what’s also interesting, if you read further, the United States is not withdrawing from any of those old regions. … It’s reserving the right to treat the rest of the world like it treats Latin America.”

Trump and administration officials — from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime advocate for Venezuelan and Cuban regime change, to White House chief of staff Stephen Miller — have threatened to expand military operations to Colombia, Mexico, and other Latin American countries that don’t fall in line. Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at The American Prospect, who recently wrote a profile of Rubio headlined “The Narco-Terrorist Elite,” also joins the conversation to discuss the former Florida senator’s history and ambitions.

Tkacik points out that Rubio, a driving force behind Maduro’s ouster, represents a wing of the Republican Party fixated on battling nominally left leaders in the region. That mentality is at odds with a key faction of Trump’s base, who say they’re against foreign intervention because they think the government should keep its attention on U.S. soil.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela and fixation on so-called “narco-terrorists,” Tkacik says, “represent an attempt to reconcile these two poles — the Steve Bannon guys and the Marco Rubio neocons — that really have different definitions of America First.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.

U.S. troops invaded Venezuela on Saturday, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism charges, and the Venezuelan President now sits in a Brooklyn jail cell, awaiting trial.

The invasion was preceded by months of U.S. military strikes on alleged “narco-terrorist” boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

Stephen Miller: The United States is using its military to secure our interest unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

Marco Rubio: We’ve seen how our adversaries all over the world are exploiting and extracting resources from Africa and every other country. They’re not going to do it in the Western Hemisphere.

Donald Trump: They now call it the Donroe document. I don’t know. It’s Monroe Doctrine. We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore. Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

JW: While Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, was sworn in as interim leader after his abduction, President Donald Trump says the U.S. is in charge.

Trump and administration officials — from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime advocate for Venezuelan and Cuban regime change to White House chief of staff Stephen Miller — have threatened to expand military operations to Colombia, Mexico, and other Latin American countries that don’t fall in line.

Meanwhile, the administration has been threatening renewed strikes on Iran and escalating efforts to acquire Greenland. Rubio told lawmakers that Trump wants to buy the island from Denmark, but the administration hasn’t ruled out taking it by force.

So, what’s to make of the Trump administration’s aggressive foreign policy ambitions?

Joining me now to break all of this down is historian and professor at Yale, Greg Grandin. He’s the author of numerous books, including most recently “America, América: A New History of the New World.” Also joining us is Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at the American Prospect, who recently wrote a profile of Rubio headlined, “The Narco-Terrorist Elite.”

Greg and Maureen, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Greg Grandin: Thanks for having us.

Maureen Tkacik: Thank you so much.

JW: To start, Maureen, Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, was sworn in as interim leader after his abduction, but Trump says the U.S. is in charge — exactly who is, is unclear at the moment. But what does it mean to govern Venezuela right now?

MT: To govern Venezuela is a task that’s difficult to comprehend. We are talking about a country that has experienced the equivalent of three Great Depressions in the past decade. A lot of that was oil prices and a lot more of that is the draconian sanctions that successive administrations — especially the Trump administration — imposed that effectively criminalized commerce when it comes to dealing with that country.

When he was still in charge, Maduro was very open to doing whatever we wanted him to do to lift those sanctions to get a little bit of relief, because a little bit of relief could start to mend the state. But what is the terrifying prospect is that — if the Chavistas are completely overthrown — really relies on a competent government with some ability to enforce the rule of law and to when they have enough money, get basic needs out to the populace. I don’t think that it’s easy at all, but the Chavista government has done that hard work for several decades now, despite meager and meager resources with which to do it.

And I think that somebody in the Trump administration — there’s been a lot of press about how Trump was put off by [Maria Corina] Machado accepting the Nobel Prize and not just getting up there and saying, “This really belongs to that peacemaker, Donald J. Trump.”

What I have heard is that Marco Rubio has an unusually — for this era of Republican affairs — unusually competent chief of staff, I think formerly of [think tank] American Compass. And this gentleman is apparently behind the scenes saying, “She ain’t it. This opposition ain’t it. There’s so much infighting just among them. We can take out Maduro, we can get that sort of public relations coup, but really what we should do is take the deal that Maduro offered, which is, whatever you want.”

GG: One question that I did have was, who in the Trump administration was smart enough to know that Machado was a non-starter?

MT: Michael Needham.

GG: Michael Needham [laughs]. Because if one of the ways you look at this is that Marco Rubio as the head of the war party, Hegseth, and JD Vance and Miller and the head of the DEA, and they’re all eager to go in, and they want to kneecap the people who want to negotiate a normalized relationship like Richard Grenell. If they started this war, and obviously, they started this military buildup, and obviously the end goal isn’t just Venezuela — it’s Cuba. Then Greater Miami and Greater Florida must be feeling enormously betrayed about Machado........

© The Intercept