Maduro abduction shows influence, limits of US Secretary of State Rubio

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expressed his desire to see Nicolas Maduro overthrown in Washington, DC.

Infamously, the former Florida senator even posted a series of photos of slain deposed leaders, including a bloodied former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as tensions with the US and Maduro’s government spiked in 2019.

But it wasn’t until the second administration of US President Donald Trump that Rubio’s vision of a hardline approach to Latin America and his longtime pressure campaign against leftist leaders was realised – culminating on Saturday with the illegal abduction of longtime Venezuelan leader Maduro.

Even though his wider ideological objectives, including the ousting of Cuba’s communist government, are likely to remain constrained by the administration’s competing ambitions, experts claim Rubio relied on an ability to capitalize on the overlapping interests of opposing actors in the Trump administration to accomplish this.

It required a lot of political acumen on his part to marginalize other administration and other voices who were claiming, “This is not our conflict. This is not what we stand for. This is going to upset our base, according to New York University associate professor of history Alejandro Velasco.

Among those agendas were Stephen Miller’s fixation on mass deportation, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s desire for a more pugilistic military approach abroad, and US President Donald Trump’s obsession with opening Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry.

“So that’s the way that Rubio was able to bring into line not quite competing, but really divergent agendas, all of them to focus on Venezuela as a way to advance a particular end”, Velasco said.

A hawk in “America First”

A traditionalist hawk who has regularly supported US military intervention in the name of spreading Western democracy and human rights abroad, Rubio initially appeared to be an awkward fit to be Trump’s top diplomat in his second term.

Trump’s campaign season was defined by his pledge to end international wars, reject US-backed regime change, and support a wider “America First” transition.

However, Trump’s actual foreign policy bears little resemblance to that vision, with the administration adopting a so-called “Peace Through Strength” doctrine, according to observers, which has given the president more room for military adventurism. That has, to date, seen the Trump administration launch bombing campaigns against Yemen and Iran, strike armed groups in Nigeria and Somalia, and attack alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

Trump 2.0’s strategy more closely complies with Rubio’s vision of Washington’s role abroad, which has long supported US intervention and high-pressure sanctions campaigns.

The US secretary of state’s personal ideology dates back to his South Florida roots, where his family settled in the 1960s after moving from Cuba three years before Fidel Castro’s rise, in what Velasco called an “acerbally anti-communist” political climate.

“I think for him, it started as a question of finally making real the hopes and dreams of Cubans in Florida and elsewhere to return to their homeland under a capitalist government”, Velasco explained.

If we consider it more hemispherically, it changed from that to what this might represent, which would increase US hegemony in the region for the 21st century.

Vacuum was the place he needed to fill.

After tangling with Trump in the 2016 presidential election, in which the future president deridingly dubbed his opponent “Little Marco” while Rubio decried him as a “con man”, the pair forged a pragmatic working relationship.

Rubio eventually helped deliver Florida by backing Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. Rubio’s role as the president’s “shadow secretary” for Latin America in Trump’s first term was unusual because it influenced the president’s choice to recognize Juan Guaido as the interim leader in opposition to Maduro.

Analysts note Rubio’s approach to Venezuela has always been directly aimed at undermining the economic support it provides to Cuba, with the end goal of toppling the island’s 67-year-old Communist government. Rubio quickly returned to the island nation after Maduro was kidnapped on Saturday, telling reporters: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned.”

Rubio continued to appear largely marginalized in the first few months of Trump’s second term, with the president favoring close friends and family members to lead the way toward major ceasefire negotiations in Ukraine and Gaza.

During this time, Rubio was slowly amassing a sizeable portfolio. Rubio also served as the acting director of the newly-dissolved US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the acting director of the US National Archives. He became the acting director of National Security, making him the first top US diplomat to hold a significant White House position since Henry Kissinger, most notable of all.

According to Adam Isacson, the director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Rubio eventually found himself in a White House power vacuum.

Isacson compared Trump’s special envoys Richard Grenell and Steve Witkoff to Rubio, who “knows Washington better than the Grenells and Witkoffs of the world.”

“At the same time, other powerful figures inside the White House, like Stephen Miller and]Director of the Office of Management and Budget] Russ Vought haven’t cared as much about foreign policy”, he said, “so the vacuum was his to fill”.

Rubio also demonstrated his ability to be an “ideological weather vane,” according to Isacson. That approach was exemplified by the White House’s National Security Strategy, which was released in December.

The document, which is drafted by the National Security adviser with final approval from the president, offered little in tough language towards Russia, despite Rubio’s previous hard lines on the war in Ukraine. Despite Rubio’s years-long support for the system, it backed the elimination of US foreign aid. It lacked the human rights language that Rubio had earlier used to express his own appeal.

It did, however, include a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which dovetailed with Rubio’s worldview by calling for the restoration of US “preeminence” over the Western Hemisphere.

A victory in the pyrrhic?

Although Maduro’s toppling has far fared far short of the radical change he has long favored, it has so far been a partial, if not pyrrhic victory for Rubio.

In a news conference immediately following Maduro’s abduction, Trump doused support for exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has hewed close to Rubio’s vision for a future Venezuela. Since then, several news outlets have reported that US intelligence had determined that installing an opposition figure would cause a lot of unrest in the nation.

Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s former deputy and replacement, has long been a steadfast supporter of the Hugo Chavez-founded Chavismo movement, which Rubio has long criticized. Elections remain a far-off prospect, with Trump emphasising working with the government to open the oil industry to the US.

The secretary of state has been referred to as the “viceroy of Venezuela” in some US media, but he has not been officially given a position in the country.

Rubio has been given the task of refuting Trump’s claim that the US would “run” the South American nation while conveying the administration’s oft-contradicted claim that Maduro’s abduction was a law enforcement action, not a war, or a bid for the country’s oil on news programs.

“I think he’s sort of lying through his teeth”, Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera.

Even so, he said, “He doesn’t seem to believe a lot of the rhetorical and discursive pretexts that have been used in the context of a Department of Justice indictment,” he said.

According to Schlenker, working with Rodriguez and reportedly Venezuela’s security czar and minister of interior Diosdado Cabello has been “a bucket of cold water on Rubio’s broader illusions,” noting that Rubio’s ultimate goal still stands at “the end of the Chavista project.”

Rubio is also likely to face further reality checks when it comes to his expected attempts to pitch the overthrow of what he will likely argue is a weakened Cuba.

Trump and many of his supporters don’t seem to be as interested in the island because it lacks Venezuela’s economic resources and a known drug trade.

Source: Aljazeera