Pressure on Maduro becomes litmus test for US secretary of state

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At the heart of the right-wing coalition that won last year’s elections, they now say they are mostly dissatisfied with the White House. They are grumbling, research shows, against rising prices and the economic suffocation of their communities, after almost a year of relentless raids by Immigration Service (ICE) agents dedicated to deporting migrants without legal papers to live in the country.

— Rubio knows that the hard line against Caracas and, by extension, against Havana, the main regional ally of Chavismo, is very popular in this layer. But if the operation gets out of control, the plan will backfire. And the bet that American military pressure alone would make Maduro resign has not, until now, given the result expected by Washington. The risk for the secretary of state is enormous, Jorge Heine, a professor at Boston University who served as Chile’s ambassador to China, told GLOBO.

Any action in Venezuela, including bombings against areas presented by the United States as drug production, in a scenario linked to the attacks, in June, against Iranian nuclear installations, but which do not result in the dismissal of Maduro, will be read, analyzes the academic, as a failure. They will weaken Rubio in the United States to the same extent as they will strengthen Maduro in Venezuela.

— The United States seems to have bet everything on the withdrawal of Maduro after the ultimatums and the demonstration of its military superiority. They would thus avoid internal attrition with an armed invasion, which Washington has never done in South America, with the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. And, in the event of an internal backlash, a protracted civil war, like that in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, Heine says.

The impression, Republican strategists tell GLOBO privately, is that the secretary of state has not developed clear alternatives to the scenario of resistance from Maduro and the military around him. He would also not have detailed how a possible democratic transition would take place. Even the prolongation of tensions without major US military action tends to be interpreted, they say, as a certificate of political defeat for Rubio, particularly by the Trumpist base.

The clashes between the Make America Great Again movement (Maga, its acronym in English) and Rubio are not new. His choice for this post displeased activists who were jealous of the extent to which he would push, at the head of American diplomacy, his ideological crusade against left-wing regimes.

Speaking to Politico, strategist Matthew Bartlet, who worked at the State Department during the first Trump administration, said that at the grassroots level, “there is no appetite for regime change in Venezuela.” And that, even if Maga “can accept military action with a precise objective”, he says, does not believe in supporting “ill-defined interventions”.

Rubio initially received broad support from the country’s political elite, who welcomed the nomination to the post as a veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seen by his peers, including Democrats, as a classic conservative. But the politician who later took over, at Trump’s request, the powerful US National Security Council, displeased his former colleagues by failing to stand up for human rights and the strengthening of democracy around the world, with the exception of left-wing totalitarian governments in Latin America.

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Last week, ahead of the November 2026 elections, which will decide control of Congress, Republicans close to Maga and with an isolationist profile joined forces with Democrats to try to ensure that any attack on Venezuela must be approved by Parliament. Representative Thomas Massie and Senator Rand Paul, Kentucky government officials, joined the opposition in bills that determine the withdrawal of American troops from the country in the event of possible military action without a formal declaration of war, which depends on congressional approval. They also demand to know how much and how taxpayer dollars are used by the Pentagon.

The Senate’s crowned names were angered by Rubio’s defense of intervention in neighboring countries as an emergency national security measure. In practice, this argument precisely reduces Congress’s prerogatives to approve armed actions, such as recent ones in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific against ships accused of transporting drugs to the United States. At least 87 people died in the attacks and Washington faces war crimes charges.

Known for his ambition and chameleon-like ability to adapt to the most radical table changes, Rubio made, as strategists on both sides of the US political spectrum point out, his boldest move in Trump 2.0 by uniting ideological opposition to left-wing governments in Latin America with the fight against drug trafficking in the region. At the same time, the most powerful Hispanic in the United States has also dedicated himself to the radical transformation of the country’s diplomacy, based on the unilateralism championed by Trump, in a show of affinity with the president, which has led the former enemy to publicly affirm that he considers the Florida politician a strong name to succeed him.

The announcement of the new national security strategy on Friday was seen internally as a victory for the Secretary of State in the corridors of the federal government. The document confirms Latin America as a “priority area for American strategic interests” and highlights the resumption of the Monroe Doctrine – that of “America for the Americans” – to reposition Washington as “leader of the West”.