Trump, Vance, Rubio, and Miller might hope that by keeping American troops out for now that they can keep this palatable to the MAGA coalition. Republicans around Trump are stating again and again that American troops won’t be a part of this, presumably to keep away those fears of another quagmire like Iraq or Afghanistan. Working with Delcy Rodríguez might seem like a way to do this with minimal fuss for the U.S., but it puts her in an impossible position: She has to be seen publicly cooperating with a foreign government that is very transparent about taking the country’s natural resources, all amid the country’s economic crisis that will likely be worsened by the Trump administration siphoning off the country’s oil revenues. The country’s opposition leader Maria Machado has just been sidelined by Trump — reportedly in part because he’s mad that she didn’t give him the Nobel Prize she won last year — but still opposes the ruling party. This is not a recipe for stability.
What happens if Rodríguez is ousted or loses control of the country, and her successors don’t want to continue accommodating Washington? Will the Trump administration tolerate a black eye like that? Can we keep boots off the ground if riots in Caracas force the government out of power, or threaten American investments? Trump is practically haranguing oil companies into returning to the country; if their business is threatened again, what will we do?
In terms of likely historical models, we have plenty to pick from in our own history, namely earlier U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. We’ve tried this type of gangster capitalism before. The Second Iraq War is not a useful model to follow for this, but the U.S. occupations and incursions into Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Panama, and elsewhere are. These occupations might have seemed small; many Americans at the time were likely only dimly aware of them. But they had far-reaching consequences that lasted for decades.
Nicaragua’s an excellent example of what a U.S. “occupation” of Venezuela might look like. The country was of interest to American presidents because of the possibility of building a canal there that could join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; it also received a great deal of American capital. Ongoing clashes between the country’s Liberal and Conservative Parties, fueled in part by the ties of the Conservative Party to the United States led to the U.S. Marines being deployed to “keep the peace.” They sided with the Conservative Party and remained off-and-on in the country for the next 20 years.