The Don-Roe Doctrine

But was that what this was? Despite efforts from officials to make this look like a law enforcement operation, this was, in reality, the current administration putting countless lives in harm’s way to force a desirable political change. If this were about drug trafficking, as Vance would like us to believe, Trump would not have issued a pardon to the former president of Honduras who was recently convicted by a jury in the United States for drug trafficking. Trump would not have made statements saying how he would allow Maduro to go free if he stepped down from the presidency. The administration themselves admitted that regime change was on the table, and have only resorted to this law enforcement justification as a way to circumvent congressional authorization requirements. If they were to get away with this, there doesn’t seem to be any limiting principle to the logic given that this already seems like the maximalist position one could take. If the President of the United States invading another country and capturing their leader can be differentiated from an act of war, then anything could be. Needless to say, this is the exact type of thing congressional authorization of military force was intended to prevent: rash, arbitrary action decided by one individual that puts the country at risk of war and endangers the lives of both soldiers and civilians. 

Whatever label we apply to it, it happened and we’ll see what happens next. I’m loath to speculate about something so wide open and serious, but certain things will likely be true regardless of what shape the next months take. If the United States is interested in actually deposing the rest of the regime, they will likely not be able to do so without a fight. Maduro sat at the head of a large state security apparatus that NGOs have for years accused of heinous crimes against humanity.⁵ Venezuela is currently defending itself at the ICC against allegations that the regime turned a blind eye to systemic state violence and abuse.⁶  The individuals at various levels of government responsible for such crimes probably won’t peacefully accept a changing of the guard, which, if it were to be a meaningful change, would come with accountability. The other prediction I feel safe in making is that the revenues from Venezuelan oil will make their way to coffers in the United States. 

So that was basically the end of what I had planned on writing upon waking up and finding out what had happened. I thought that I would simply add that it would likely be Maria Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan political opposition and recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, who would facilitate the flow of money into the pockets of American oil corporations. After all, Machado has been beating the regime change drum in recent months. She has gone on podcasts to state explicitly that she would open up Venezuelan oil fields to foreign investment, while at the same time rubbing shoulders with those close to the Trump administration—the entity able to make that vision a reality. 

Then came the press avail and what amounted to probably the most surreal moment of politics throughout the entire Trump era for me. I watched from my computer screen at approximately 11:30 in the morning, when Trump came out into a makeshift conference room flanked by various members of his cabinet. The navy blue curtain serving as a backdrop looked like it had been hastily pulled across the space to create a slightly less garish setting. He seemed to melt against the podium as he spoke. His words came out slightly slurred as he began to describe how successful the ‘United States armed forces’ had been in conducting their ‘military operation,’ rhetorically belying his administration’s position that this was all law enforcement.  

His eyes remained mostly glued to his binder as he read out remarks others had prepared for him, his eyes swinging up to sluggishly sweep over the scribbling reporters. He continued bragging about just how the operation represented “one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.” The thought immediately occurred to me as he spoke: he is going to try this again. Trump has already accused Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, of overseeing cocaine trafficking into the United States. He has also made it clear that he wouldn’t mind having full U.S. ownership over the Panama Canal. I didn’t realize that if I just waited a few minutes they would reiterate some of these threats explicitly.

And we were only just getting started.  “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” he read from the binder. So have we conquered the country of Venezuela and transformed it into a fiefdom? What exactly does it mean to “run it”? Who exactly is the “we”? What does that actually look like in practice? Is there a timeline for transition? He was quickly asked to clarify some of the specifics. Now, maybe I’m being unfair, but given that his answer was “We’re designating people, we’re talking to people, we’re designating various people,” I don’t think he is up to speed on where his administration plans to go from here. That said, in response to the very next question he clarified that it meant what we all might assume, that “it’s largely, for a period of time, going to be the people that are standing right behind me.” Those people were heads of the Department of Defense, Department of State, C.I.A., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Stephen Miller.

I’m not sure if it was petty jealousy of the fact she won the Nobel Peace Prize he wanted so badly, plain misogyny, or a desire to rule Venezuela directly that motivated the administration’s decision to slough Machado, but, when asked why she would not serve in that role as everyone had assumed she would, he answered that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman…”⁷ He added that the U.S. has not even been in contact with her.

We weren’t even close to done after news the United States would take control of Venezuela. While other administrations have tried to cloak their imperialist resource extraction efforts in moral or retaliatory language, this one has no time for such trivialities. Trump went to great lengths during his speech to ensure everyone knew that this was all about the oil. Just after stating that the U.S. would be running the country because “we can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind,”⁸ he just so happened to immediately turn to the topic of oil production. I am going to quote him almost in full to convey how explicitly he stated the administration’s intentions:

“So, we’re going to stay until such time as we’re going to run it essentially until such time as a proper transition can take place. As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so… This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America, a country that everybody wants to be involved with because of what we were able to do and accomplish, will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe.” 

He then made a very focused, intentional, and not at all senile detour through some of the greatest hits from the stump speech—emptying prisons and mental institutions, roving bands of migrants assaulting women, and how nice he has made D.C—before snapping back to the topic of black gold. 

He continued once more: 

“In addition, Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets, and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars. They did this a while ago, but we never had a president that did anything about it. They took all of our property. It was our property. We built it. And we never had a president that decided to do anything about it. But instead, they fought wars that were 10,000 miles away.⁹ We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations… Massive oil infrastructure was taken like we were babies and we didn’t do anything about it. I would have done something about it. America will never allow foreign powers to rob our people or drive us back into and out of our own hemisphere… All of these actions were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries, and not anymore. All the way back it dated to the Monroe doctrines [sic]. And the Monroe doctrine is a big deal but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Don-roe 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. Won’t happen.” 

Hopefully it’s apparent why I wanted to include that whole chunk. The explicit embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, the colonial idea of American dominion over the Western Hemisphere, is simply astounding in the big 2026. Perhaps based on this concept, he has gotten it into his head that Venezuela, in nationalizing their oil industry, stole from the United States—or is using the idea as a palatable pretext for invasion. What is true, is that Venezuela first nationalized its oil industry in the 1970s, creating the state-controlled PDVSA to oversee production. This gentle process valued the experience engineers had gained working in the private sector and invited them to stay on. But most of Venezuela’s oil reserves lie in the Orinoco Belt, a region along the Orinoco River that contains the largest known reserves of petroleum. These reserves, however, happen to be filled with heavy and extra-heavy crude oil, a kind of resource that costs a lot of money to extract. In the 1990s with domestic production of light and medium oil declining while the global price of oil sank, the Venezuelan government under Chavez began offering incredibly low royalties to foreign companies who possessed the capital to access the Orinoco Belt’s bounty. 

As oil prices climbed and the deals became unbelievably profitable for the corporations, Chavez sought to renegotiate Venezuela a bigger portion of the windfall. In 2001, Chavez decided to pass a law that raised taxes on future projects and mandated state majority ownership. Then, in 2004, Chavez changed the terms of the Orinoco contracts signed during the Apertura, or the Opening. He mandated that they revert back to the default 16.7% royalty earlier than the contracts had initially stated. In 2006, against a backdrop of oil prices that continued to rise, Chavez demanded that all contracts shift to joint ventures where the Venezuelan government controlled a 60% stake.¹⁰ Besides Exxon and Conoco, whose assets were seized after declining the new terms, the other major corporations remained in Venezuela. It is worth noting that those companies that had their assets seized have won billions of dollars in judgments against the Venezuelan government for lack of compensation. 

So, that is the extent of the thievery cited by the Trump administration to justify sending American boots to Venezuela’s shores, something he specifically stated he was “not afraid of.” He has said that the United States was “ready to stage a second and much larger attack,” if he deems it necessary. However, Trump recently stated that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, was ready to work with the United States. She, meanwhile, has released a video of herself surrounded by military leaders, calling Maduro’s abduction an abduction and stating he must be released. So we’ll see where this goes. 

Trump received a question about how this particular instance in the saga of American-led regime change would differ from some of the catastrophic episodes of the past. In response, the president pointed to other military operations he had overseen—like the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in his first term, and the more recent strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities—as evidence that he knew how to handle a regime change operation. While it obviously makes no sense to compare whatever ‘success’ the United States achieved in those instances with potential success in this one, it speaks to his tendency to escalate his military actions as his confidence grows. The success of this operation, combined with the fact that he is an aging, lame-duck president, could mean we are in for a rocky few years. Trump even skirted questions posed about a timeline to retransition 

As an aside, it irks me quite deeply that, in the middle of this major announcement that changes the tenor of global politics, Pete Hegseth wriggles into my ear to tell me about the “guts and grit, gallantry and glory of the American warrior,” and how he is “simply humbled by such men.” And, as if listening to an alcoholic weekend TV anchor give alliterative, seemingly sensual praise to his favorite big strong men weren’t enough, he made sure to tacitly demean those who choose to serve differently by hailing the soldiers as “the best of our country.” 

But this thought about Trump’s tendency to follow the momentum on things like this leads me to what really stuck with me throughout the entire hour long announcement. I could not shake a nagging feeling that this would not be the last time this administration would try something like this. I suppose there is always the chance that they intended this operation to serve as a kind of proof of concept to cow others into submission without having to actually effectuate a similar operation, but I doubt it. Marco Rubio, who spoke quite a bit, has sought to knock off Maduro as a way to isolate, and eventually overthrow, the Cuban government—a personal passion project of his. And, sure enough, it did not take long for him and the president to start threatening other countries with similar. One of the first questions Trump received concerned comments he had made that Colombian President Petro needed to “watch his ass.” Trump doubled down, alleging once more that Petro was overseeing cocaine trafficking and reiterated that he “does have to watch his ass.” Then, when he received a question about Cuba, he called Marco up for his moment, but not before saying that “Cuba is going to be something we’ll end up talking about.” Rubio then stressed Venezuelan security ties to Cuba, saying that one of the South American country’s biggest problems was that Cuba had “basically tried to colonize it…” He then stated plainly: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit.” Trump followed up his comments on Colombia the next day, adding that “Colombia is very sick too—run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and sending it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long.”¹¹

As additional evidence of potentially far-reaching intentions, the Justice Department’s indictment of Maduro mentions how the Venezuelan leader “and other corrupt members of the regime facilitated the empowerment and growth of violent narco-terrorist groups fueling their organizations with cocaine profits… Those organizations include the FARC and ELN, which control cocaine production in the mountainous regions of Colombia.”¹² 

The indictment also did not stop at Maduro’s ties to Colombia. It alleges that the defendants “enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout the region. The transshipment points in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico similarly relied on a culture of corruption, in which cocaine traffickers… paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them… Thus, at every step—relying on the producers in Colombia, transporters and distributors in Venezuela, and recipients and re-distributors on transshipment points north—the traffickers enriched themselves and their corrupt benefactors who aided them.”¹³ I think it is hard to overlook the administration building a legal justification for undertaking regime change disguised as law enforcement throughout Latin America. Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba are all led by governments left of center. 

Addendum

This took me a little longer to write and get out than I would have liked. With as big of a story as this is, I knew the story would change quickly and it would be impossible to write and keep up with the changing facts. The New York Times came out with a story yesterday, the day that I was finishing this up, that featured Marco Rubio walking back some of the most insane statements that Trump made during the press conference. I mentioned earlier that, when asked to clarify what he had meant by the idea that the U.S. would control Venezuela, he had initially said that “it’s largely going to be, for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me,” referring to Rubio, Hegseth, Caine, John Ratcliffe, and Stephen Miller. Rubio, however, told the Times the next day that the United States would merely impose a blockade on Venezuelan oil exports to effectively coerce allies of Maduro who still lead the country. Time will tell if this differs in any meaningful way from the seizure of covert Venezuelan oil tankers we saw in the leadup to the invasion.¹⁴

For one, it’s much easier to see how this process will work than the one laid out by Trump the day after the attack. That said, this massive swing in narrative raises other questions. Was this the plan the whole time and they walked it back after realizing how insane it was? How did they not realize how insane it was before rolling it out? Or was it never the administration’s position and Trump just went out there and said that? I would say that could be the case given his tendency to ramble off the rails, but he was clearly reading off of something prepared during that statement and made further remarks about a “partnership” between the two countries, something quite different from the coercive relationship described by Rubio. Concerning the shifting plan for governing Venezuela, Trump told reporters on Sunday, “don’t ask me who’s in charge because it will be controversial. We’re in charge.”

Yesterday, Maduro pleaded not guilty in court, describing himself as “a decent man.” He said that he remains “a president and a prisoner of war.”¹⁵ His next hearing will be March 17. I can also say that they successfully got me to forget about Epstein for a few days.

Notes:

1. The Cartel de los Soles is not a cartel in the same way that the Sinaloa or Medellín cartels are. The very phrase ‘Cartel de los Soles,’ refers to the suns worn by high-ranking officials within the Venezuelan security apparatus who have, on occasion, had their ties to the drug trade proven. That basically means we invaded a country to enforce our own anti-corruption laws. ↩︎
2. New York Times ↩︎
3. New York Times ↩︎
4. J.D. Vance Tweet ↩︎
5. Amnesty International Report – Venezuela – This is no way to live
   Human Rights Council Report
   Amnesty International Report – Venezuela – Detentions without a trace
   Human Rights Watch – Venezuela – 2024 events ↩︎
6. International Criminal Court – Venezuela I  ↩︎
7. I’m adding this footnote after Rubio’s statements to the NYT the day after the press conference. In that story he says that rather than fully taking over the task of governance, the United States would try to take coercive control over Venezuela’s oil while allowing Maduro’s allies to still govern the country. So it looks like it wasn’t the desire to rule directly. It could also have been that this pathway allowed them to control what they wanted from Venezuela—the resources—while avoiding the drawn out fight of full regime change. Maybe GPT-5 is smarter than we had thought.  ↩︎
8. Something no reasonable person could possible doubt for even a heartbeat. ↩︎
9.  I personally found this reference to the wars involving the United States in the Middle East a bit amusing, though I’m not sure that is the right word considering the subject matter. During the 2016 Republican Primary, Trump famously differentiated himself by showing a willingness to criticize the Bush administration for its policy in the Middle East. But this statement here just reaffirms that, where most people who oppose U.S. forever-wars in the Middle East do so on the basis of some anti-imperialist or anti-interventionist sentiment, Trump finds them intolerable because imagined he could improve on the particularities. For instance, back in 2016 he stated on numerous occasions that the U.S. should’ve taken the oil out of Iraq “for economic reasons.” CNN. One should pause and consider, though, that the distance between the Middle East and the United States was part of what made the region such an attractive prospect to the movers and shakers at the time. Given that destabilizing countries in this manner is something of a prerequisite for the kind of exploitative extraction desired by capital, the far away Middle East offered the theoretical protection of distance; as an aside to this footnote, the next paragraph of the NBC story that included the Trump quote says this: “His challenger, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, criticized Trump Thursday morning, saying the United States ‘does not invade other countries to plunder and pillage.’” In retrospect, what a perfect encapsulation of the dynamics of the 2016 election. Trump being a moron but Hillary Clinton insulting the basic intelligence of the American population and proving how out of touch she was with how people felt. ↩︎
10. Rice University Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies – The Collapse of the Venezuelan Oil Industry, 11-12. ↩︎
11. Politico ↩︎
12. Justice Department – Maduro Indictment, 10. ↩︎
13. Justice Department – Maduro Indictment, 9. ↩︎
14. CBS News ↩︎
15. BBC News, CBS News ↩︎