As promised, here are the key points from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has spoken to US media outlets this morning.
- This is “not a war against Venezuela”, he says - this follows strikes on the country on Saturday and the extraction of its president, Nicolás Maduro
- The US will judge Venezuela by “what they do” next, Rubio says, adding that Washington will keep “multiple levers of leverage” to protect its interests
- Speaking to ABC, Rubio says congressional authorisation wasn’t needed before the operation “because this wasn’t an invasion”
- He says that he hopes Maduro’s removal will lead to “a better Venezuela”, but adds that the “number one objective is America”
- Asked whether he thinks Interim President Delcy Rodríguez is now the legitimate president of Venezuela, he says the US does not believe the regime is legitimate
I heard about bombs and Maduro, but oil is new. How are they even accomplishing that? Is US taking over their fields?
They’re stealing oil tankers that leave the country and emptying the oil in the US
Just dumping it in a field so they can pump it back out and pretend it was there the whole time.
Trump and Rubio have said they’ll coerce the remaining government to open up the oil fields to US companies.
Trump also said that the vice president can remain in charge as long as she does what the US wants. Understand the implication here - the Venezuela government are bad people who stole an election and commit human rights abuses, but that’s all okay to the US. They can keep doing that - they just have to open up their oil fields. If the US had said “we’re making Venezuela a democracy again”, that would at least provide some moral cover. They’re not though. It’s just oil. The US doesn’t even pretend to value rights and freedoms anymore.
When I was a teenager during the 2000s, I bought the BS that the US’s motivations around the world were actually benevolent. The Iraq war might have been started on faulty information but at least they were spreading democracy. I thought the people saying the motivation was oil were overly cynical. Guess I was wrong.