Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics,

President Donald Trump has embarked on his own regime-change mission. And this time the United States intends to keep the oil.

American Special Operations Forces captured Nicolás Maduro in a daring raid, nabbing the Venezuelan leader from his bed early Saturday morning before sending him north aboard the USS Iwo Jima to New York, where he will face criminal charges related to an alleged narco-terrorism conspiracy.

The leftist strongman had ruled the South American state for more than a decade.

Now Trump will take over. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he told reporters during a Mar-a-Lago press conference, deputizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to manage in the interim as “a team.”

Though long a critic of the foreign entanglements that defined the presidencies of his Republican predecessors, Trump insisted he could do regime change right. “We’ll run it properly. We’ll run it professionally,” he said. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going in.” He will not, however, clean house.

Trump claimed Delcy Rodríguez, a Maduro loyalist and the current Venezuelan vice president, was already willing to work with the United States to remake the country. He said it would be “very tough” for opposition leader María Corina Machado to assume power. Just hours after perhaps the most consequential decision of his tenure, the once ostensibly isolationist president was suddenly and remarkably open-ended in his commitment to rebuild a nation thousands of miles away from his own. Of a potential American occupation force, Trump said, “We are not afraid of boots on the ground.”

Even if the newly announced nation-building mission may be something of a flashback to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Trump did not echo the language of the War on Terror. He spoke for nearly an hour. Not once did the president, or his assembled people, say the word “democracy.”

He ordered the removal of the foreign head of state to instead preserve American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela under Maduro had opened its arms to China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia by way of both trade and military cooperation. The White House alleged that this amounted to a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, a 19th-century precedent named for then-President James Monroe’s opposition to colonial meddling in the Americas by the Europeans. “They are now calling it the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’” the current president quipped before the press.

The turn of phrase was new. The strategy is not. The White House has shifted its focus to North and South America to establish what the new National Security Strategy released late last year described as “the Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The stated goal: U.S. dominance in the region. The specific application as described by the president last month: Any nation harboring drug cartels is “subject to attack.” Even as the administration designated drug cartels as terror organizations, sanctioned Maduro and members of his own family, and sent the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to blockade Caracas, the Venezuelan authoritarian doubted Trump.

The two leaders spoke as recently as last week in an attempt to avoid a conflict. The negotiations eventually broke down, according to Rubio, after Maduro failed to accept one of the “multiple opportunities to avoid” the kind of military intervention that led to his arrest. “We’ll talk and meet with anybody but don’t play games while this president is in office,” the diplomat warned, “because it’s not going to turn out well.”

Democrats feel they woke up hoodwinked. Trump had sidestepped calls last year to go to Congress for war authority even as momentum tipped toward conflict. The subsequent operation to capture Maduro caught lawmakers by surprise. Many learned of the strike like the rest of the country – through news reports. While Rubio spent the morning calling different members of Congress, he defended the decision to keep Capitol Hill in the dark.

“This is not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notifications on,” the diplomat said, insisting the decision to go was dependent on a number of factors. “It was a trigger-based mission.” The president offered another explanation. Congress, Trump said, “has a tendency to leak.”

Trump is not the first president to condemn Maduro as illegitimate. Former President Joe Biden briefly suspended oil sanctions on the now deposed leader in hopes that economic relief could entice him to hold free and fair elections. Those hopes were dashed when Maduro claimed victory, and a third consecutive six-year presidential term, in elections in 2024 that outside observers condemned as fraudulent.

But while there is broad agreement that Maduro is an authoritarian, there is no bipartisan support for overthrowing his government.

“Because the President and his Cabinet repeatedly denied any intention of conducting regime change in Venezuela when briefing Congress, we are left with no understanding of how the administration is preparing to mitigate risks to the U.S. and we have no information regarding a long-term strategy following today’s extraordinary escalation,” New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement on Saturday.

Trump justified the strike against Venezuela saying it was necessary to stop narcoterrorism and reclaim American oil assets seized by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. When pressed to explain how regime change fit with his America First mantra, the president replied, “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors.”

Most Republicans have accepted that explanation – but not all of them.

Outgoing Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch Trump ally, asked a series of uncomfortable questions for the administration, including why the White House hadn’t launched military operations against Mexican drug cartels and why Trump had pardoned a former Honduran president found guilty of trafficking cocaine. “Americans disgust with our own government’s never ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because we are forced to pay for it and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going,” she wrote on social media. “This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong.”

While Attorney General Pam Bondi characterized the operation as “an arrest with military support,” Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie wondered how that legal characterization applied to Trump’s promise to take over and run the country. That question will soon be litigated on Capitol Hill, though Democrats don’t have the numbers, nor Republicans the appetite, to check the White House.

Trump has offered different condemnations of Maduro at different times. He first condemned him as being complicit in the drug trade that brought “poison” to American shores, then reproached the authoritarian as a puppet of foreign adversaries, before finally flaying his regime for the nationalization of American oil producers in the region.

Perhaps a combination of those irritants has inspired Trump’s latest foreign policy evolution. Once averse to intervention, he now welcomes the opportunity to rebuild a regime immediately after he removed its leadership. He remains consistent on at least one count. After criticizing the Bush administration for not turning a profit in the War on Terror, Trump seems hell-bent on avoiding that same mistake.

He said that U.S. energy companies would rebuild the nation as they return to Venezuela and seeknew revenue streams. Any costs incurred would quickly be deferred by the new oil revenue, or what the president described as “the money coming out of the ground.”

Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.