U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks as U.S. President Donald Trump stands behind him during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Fla., on Jan. 3.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
After a year of one stunning intervention abroad after another, now might be a good time to finally stop calling Donald Trump an isolationist. That label was always an imperfect catch-all for critics who confused the U.S. President’s disdain for multilateralism with a desire to disengage internationally. In the past year, Mr. Trump has proved them spectacularly wrong.
“Like almost all of his predecessors, Trump has revealed himself to be a highly assertive internationalist rather than an isolationist,” Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon wrote this week in Foreign Affairs. “His administration has brokered peace negotiations around the world, if not as successfully as he claims; championed NATO, if offending European partners in the process; authorized the use of force against Iranian nuclear facilities and Venezuela’s sitting president and advocated for greater U.S. defence spending.”
Indeed, whatever you want to call the U.S. Army Delta Force raid that resulted in the arrest of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro – an illegal invasion of a sovereign state, a power play for the country’s oil riches, a law enforcement operation to apprehend an alleged narcoterrorist or the first step in a transition to a democratic Venezuela – it most definitely does not bear the hallmarks of an isolationist U.S. foreign policy.
No one is likely more responsible for that than Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator whose appointment as Secretary of State was both the most interesting and riskiest cabinet nomination Mr. Trump made as he embarked on his second term in the White House. Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has established himself as one of Washington’s most strident foreign-policy hawks, with a fixation on leftist Latin American despots.
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Mr. Trump had long been a critic of failed U.S. attempts at spreading democracy abroad, especially those undertaken at the barrel of a gun. Mr. Rubio, who first ran against Mr. Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has been a leading proponent of a principled U.S. foreign policy focused on upholding democratic capitalism.
Naming Mr. Rubio as his Secretary of State seemed like an attempt by Mr. Trump to co-opt a powerful critic from within his own party. Mr. Rubio appeared willing to be co-opted, especially if it helped further his own future post-Trump presidential ambitions.
Still, there were doubts that the partnership could last. Mr. Rubio appeared to have been relegated to a secondary role in negotiations aimed at ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, as Mr. Trump tapped his friend Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate developer with no diplomatic experience, to lead those talks.
As a former chair of the Senate intelligence committee, however, Mr. Rubio possesses strategic understanding of geopolitics that has made him indispensable to his low-information boss. Doing double duty as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Mr. Rubio sold a U.S. President wary of foreign quagmires on a strategy to oust Mr. Maduro that jibed with his own crusade to rid the Western hemisphere of its pro-China, pro-Russia socialist dictatorships. (Note to excitable anti-Trump types here: Canada is most definitely not on Mr. Rubio’s hit list.)
The U.S. President had reportedly discussed with Mr. Maduro several “deals” over the past year to step aside. But Mr. Rubio, a hard-liner in favour of ousting Mr. Maduro, apparently always believed that fate would be too good for the Venezuelan leader who had imprisoned thousands of political opponents, killed many of them, presided over a corrupt if decrepit petrostate and propped up Cuba’s communist regime by supplying Havana with oil in exchange for a personal protection racket.
Mr. Trump eventually agreed.
Critics seized on the U.S. President’s inelegant disavowal of Venezuela opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to dismiss the military intervention in Venezuela as a blatant attempt to seize the country’s oil industry while enabling a corrupt regime to retain power under American oversight. But if Mr. Trump seems uninterested in restoring democracy in Venezuela, the same cannot be said of Mr. Rubio. He is playing a longer game than the critics are willing to acknowledge.
After a quarter of a century of Chavismo – the pseudosocialist system of governance initiated by Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez – Venezuela remains a semi-police state in which most opponents of the regime have fled the country. Paramilitary groups and armed gangs dependent on the regime enforce a no-dissent policy. They will not lay down their weapons without a fight.
For now, Mr. Rubio has concluded that decapitation of the Venezuelan regime, rather than its outright toppling, stands a better chance of success in leading to democratic reform, provided consistent U.S. pressure is applied on Venezuelan leaders – including acting president Delcy Rodríguez – who may or may not have been complicit in Mr. Maduro’s capture.
Mr. Rubio’s political future, perhaps even more than Mr. Trump’s, is riding on it.