JTA — In the wake of the operation that brought Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to the United States to face charges, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the mission is also about ending Iranian and Hezbollah activity inside Venezuela.

Rubio made the remarks on US television a day after elite American forces carried out a predawn raid in Caracas that resulted in Maduro’s capture and his transfer to federal custody in New York. US President Donald Trump and Rubio have framed the mission as aimed at dismantling narco-trafficking networks and foreign influence tied to Caracas.

Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Rubio said the United States will exert leverage, including continued sanctions and pressure on Venezuela’s oil sector, to ensure that the country “no longer cozy up to Hezbollah and Iran in our own hemisphere.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he offered a shorthand for US goals: “No more drug trafficking, no more Iran-Hezbollah presence there, and no more using the oil industry to enrich all our adversaries around the world.”

Rubio also dismissed comparisons between the Venezuela operation and US military interventions in the Middle East, saying Venezuela’s Western Hemisphere context is different.

“The whole foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan,” Rubio told CBS. “This is not the Middle East. And our mission here is........

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