There is No Trump Doctrine

Trump doesn’t have a plan for what comes next in Venezuela, or anywhere else.

President Trump and his advisers monitor the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro. (Photo by the White House)

American foreign policy has never been perfect, but it has rarely been unplanned.

Major decisions have historically been exhaustively debated and chewed over by several layers of officials. International allies are consulted; members of Congress are briefed. Internally, for any given issue, the White House typically convenes a Policy Coordination Committee, composed of mid-level officials who work across agencies to discuss the best way to handle a situation. Deliberations are then kicked up to a Deputies Committee, made up of the relevant deputy secretaries; then a Principals Committee, including Cabinet secretaries and other key officials; and finally, the National Security Council, which includes those top principals, plus the president himself, the final forum for discussion.

At Georgetown, which exists partially to churn out the staffers who become part of this national security bureaucracy, I took a class one semester that was dedicated entirely to teaching just this interagency process, so students would know exactly how national security decisions carefully progress from one tier of officialdom to the next, until coming out the other side as Policy of the United States.

For a brief few hours on Saturday morning, as details began to trickle out after President Donald Trump triumphantly declared that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro had been captured by U.S. forces, it was possible to imagine that the American approach to Venezuela had followed such a planning process.

The predawn raid, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” was surgical and precise, a masterstroke of careful planning and execution of the kind that the U.S. military prizes itself on. According to several accounts, a team of CIA officers (assisted by a source inside his government) had secretly been surveilling Maduro from within Venezuela since August, watching his movements, his clothes, his meals, his pets. An exact model of his compound was built to train off of. After Trump OK’d the mission Friday night (a previous attempt was aborted due to weather), a U.S. cyberattack turned off the lights in the Venezuelan capital Caracas; a fleet of 150 aircraft moved in; bombs began to drop, crippling the country’s air defenses; and a team of elite Delta Force troops blasted their way into Maduro’s residence.

Not even 90 minutes after the compound was breached, Maduro and his wife were being taken to New York, where they will stand trial on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. (They are set to make their first appearance before a judge today.) Not a single U.S. troop was killed in the operation, although a handful sustained injuries.

The planning seems to have ended there.

An American president had just captured the leader of a foreign nation, and appears to have put little to no thought into what would happen to the country next.

Who would be in charge of Venezuela now? Apparently, him. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump told reporters at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Saturday, without offering any further details on what that meant.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to backtrack slightly from Trump’s assertion that the U.S. would now be the governing force in Venezuela. After bemoaning that people were “fixating” on that question — as if a president declaring dominion over a foreign country wasn’t going to spark follow-ups — Rubio went on to sketch out a plan where Americans wouldn’t quite be managing Venezuela day-to-day, but would maintain leverage to ensure that the future of the country aligned with U.S. interests.

“We expect to see changes in Venezuela,” Rubio said, making it sound like America would be coercing policy in a U.S.-friendly direction, but not necessarily managing or occupying the country itself.

By the end of the day Sunday, however, Trump had trampled on any note of caution, and returned to his earlier pronouncement. “Don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I’ll give you an answer and it’ll be very controversial,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, seemingly aware that he wasn’t offering the response some of his own aides would want him to give.

“What does that mean?” a journalist pressed.

“It means, we’re in charge,” Trump said, again declining to explain how that would be operationalized.

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The Trump administration cannot offer any clarity on what the future of Venezuela will look like partially because there it has not reached consensus on why Trump deposed Maduro in the first place. Answers about the future would flow naturally flow from answers about what brought us here (knowing why Trump undertook the operation would help us understand the outcome he was trying to achieve from it); it is partly because the reasoning is so muddled that the plan going forward has become so as well.

At his Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump offered no less than six explanations for capturing Maduro: that he was the “kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States” (the basis for his indictment and the stated reason behind the boat strikes in the Caribbean that preceded this attack); that Venezuela “stole our oil”; that Maduro had sent “savage and murderous gangs” of migrants into the U.S., “including the bloodthirsty prison gang, Tren de Aragua”; that the U.S. deserves to “surround ourself with stability” in the Western Hemisphere; that Maduro was the country’s “illegitimate” leader; and that the U.S. was working to achieve “peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela.” (Note that it is not quite accurate to say that Venezuela “stole” American oil and that U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Maduro did not direct the movements of Tren de Aragua.)

As is often the case, the Trump administration represents a coalition government, who may align on a shared goal but for different reasons. According to reporting by the New York Times, the key officials behind Trump’s Venezuela campaign appear to be White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, Rubio, and Trump himself. Miller reportedly supported the operation because of his longtime focus on drugs and migrants pouring into the U.S. (Never mind that Venezuela is not a major drug producer: Miller apparently initially considered bombing Mexico, but eventually moved his focus further south.) Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who has made opposition to socialist Latin American regimes central to his career, reportedly wanted to oust Maduro as part of this broader ideological project, and as a way to cripple the leftist government in Cuba. (Venezuela provides oil to Cuba, which provides security services to Venezuela in turn. The idea is that cutting off Cuba’s supply of Venezuelan oil would weaken the government there.) And then Trump seems to have been focused on a fixation of his own: oil. (Trump has previously questioned why the U.S. didn’t lay claim to oil in Syria, Libya and Iraq as part of operations in those countries. He also considered trying to oust Maduro in his first term, but was talked out of it. Afterwards, in 2023, he mused: “We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.”)

Each of the rationales offered by Trump on Saturday would suggest a different future for Venezuela. If the goal is stability in the hemisphere, that might require a surge of American troops to enforce order in Venezuela and possibly even an occupation-style provisional government appointed by Americans. If the goal is fostering “liberty” for the Venezuelan people, and getting rid of a government that was illegitimately elected and has intolerable ties to drugs and gangs, that would suggest that the U.S. would need to support full regime change, including by ousting other Maduro lieutenants and overseeing elections to install a democratically chosen government in Venezuela. However, if the goal is merely to increase U.S. oil rights in Venezuela — which boasts the largest known oil reserves in the world, with more than 300 billion proven barrels — then it might be acceptable to let the remnants of Maduro’s government stay in place, as long as they agree to give U.S. companies access to their oil.

So far, that last option seems to be the one Trump is going with. At his press conference, Trump dismissed the idea of elevating opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose stand-in candidate Edmundo González is recognized by the U.S. as having won the most recent Venezuelan election. (Machado was barred from running.) “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader,” Trump said of Machado. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.”

Instead, he appeared to support keeping on Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, as interim leader, as long as Rodríguez allowed the U.S. to assert its will. “She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump claimed.

It is unclear how pliant Rodríguez, a longtime Maduro loyalist, will prove. Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as acting president, condemned the U.S. attack in a televised speech on Saturday, declaring that Venezuela “will never return to being the colony of another empire.” But on Sunday, after Trump threatened that Rodríguez might “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” she changed her tune, extending an “invitation to the U.S. government to work together on a cooperative agenda” for Venezuela.

Several questions remain: What happens if Rodríguez ultimately decides not to work with Trump, or rebuffs one of his demands? Will she get captured too? Or what if harder-line factions within the Venezuelan government break with Rodríguez because she is working too closely with the Americans? Would the U.S. send in troops to prop her up? Trump says we “run” Venezuela, but how is that possible without any presence on the ground? (The U.S. has no embassy in Caracas and currently no troops there, although thousands remain nearby.) Also, the Venezuelan Constitution says that within 30 days after an acting president being sworn in, new elections must be held. Will the U.S. push for that to happen? Will we monitor such elections to ensure they are legitimate? How?

If any of this has been thought through, there is no sign of it from the Trump administration’s public statements. Rubio appears to be the biggest booster of viewing Maduro’s ouster as a move to liberate Venezuela: he has promoted Machado in the past, and said on “Meet the Press” that “we care about elections, we care about democracy” (although he made clear that elections would not take place immediately). Trump, meanwhile, did not mention the prospect of elections at his press conference on Saturday. Speaking to reporters Sunday, he made clear that a democratic transition was not his prime objective: “Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil, fix up the country, bring the country back, and then have elections.”

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to,” Trump also said on Saturday.

There have been attempts by various Trump allies to backfill his intervention in Venezuela into a larger foreign policy philosophy, but the president’s chaotic approach make this impossible. Rubio and other Cuban-American politicians from Florida have talked about Trump seeking to spread democracy, but his statements make clear that is, at best, a secondary goal. In its recent National Security Strategy, the White House declared that the president had created an addendum to the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 statement by President James Monroe that European powers should stay out of the Western Hemisphere. The White House said that it was adding a “Trump Corollary,” which was not only that other powers must say out but that the U.S. “must be preeminent” in its own hemisphere.

Trump referred to this on Saturday as the “Donroe Doctrine,” combining his name with Monroe’s; Rubio used this to emphasize that Trump’s interventionism was different than his predecessors’, because it was squarely focused on America’s backyard. “I still think that a lot of people analyze everything that happens in foreign policy through the lens of what happened from 2001 through 2015 or ’16,” Rubio said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “The whole foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan. This is not the Middle East. And our mission here is very different. This is the Western Hemisphere.”

But, again, Trump’s own statements contradict claims of such a narrow focus.

Since capturing Maduro, it is true that Trump has begun threatening other hemispheric operations, including in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland. (Trump said on Sunday, for example, that the president of Colombia will not be in place “for very long.” When a reporter asked if that meant the U.S. was planning an operation there, Trump responded “sounds good to me,” betraying the casual nature of foreign policy on his watch.) But he has also threatened to attack Iran, which is not in the Western Hemisphere, if the government there represses protests that are now entering their ninth day. “If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re gonna get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump said.

There is no broader philosophy at play here, because there is no plan. It is appropriate that the White House is calling its vision the “Trump Corollary” or the “Donroe Doctrine,” because its foreign policy is based entirely on the president’s own whims. Any officials who attempt to explain the standard for how the U.S. will now use force in light of the Venezuela attack — when another countries harbors drugs, or to foster democracy, or only when the Western Hemisphere is at issue — will immediately be embarrassed because there is no standard, as Trump quickly makes clear. And without a standard that explains why the U.S. captured Maduro, these officials will also struggle to explain what Trump intends to do with Venezuela, or where his newfound imperialism might extend to next.

Everything is ad hoc, based not on a broader principle but on Trump’s shifting mix of transactionalism, desire for U.S. profit, penchant for agreeing with whoever he spoke to last, and emphasis on personal relationships.

Why did the U.S. go so far as to invade another country in order to bring a foreign president back to the U.S. on drug charges, just weeks after pardoning a different foreign president who had been convicted on drug charges? Because, he explained on Saturday, the pardoned president “was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump.” Meanwhile, according to the Times, Trump didn’t like that Maduro appeared to be mocking him by dancing in public and otherwise appearing nonchalant in the face of American threats.

Why did Trump decide to elevate a socialist Maduro lackey instead of a conservative supporter of free markets, whose party his own administration has said is the rightful government of Venezuela and whose ideology is much closer to their own? Because, according to the Washington Post, Trump was upset that the opposition leader Machado accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump had coveted. (One person close to the White House told the Post that this was Machado’s “ultimate sin” in Trump’s eyes, adding: “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today.”)

It is hard to identify a broader doctrine at play here when everything is so wrapped up in the likes and dislikes of Trump personally — and when Trump has been so across the board, changing his foreign policy by the day. After all, this is the candidate who mocked nation-building and regime change as recently as the 2024 campaign, but now appears to have embraced both concepts. “You know, rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now. Can’t get any worse,” Trump told the Atlantic.

We know Trump delights in the shock-and-awe of standalone military operations (“I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show,” Trump marveled of the Venezuelan attack) but harbors a distaste for more drawn-out wars. But American presidents aren’t always in charge of deciding when a given attack becomes one or the other.

The “Trump Corollary” is really little more than a reheated version of the Roosevelt Corollary, Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration in 1904 (also due to a crisis in Venezuela) that the U.S. reserves the right to intervene in Latin America in cases of “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society.” This policy led to protracted U.S. occupations in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, which ended up stretching for eight, 19, and 20 years, respectively.

That’s the worst-case scenario for Trump, up there with the more recent U.S. misadventures in Syria and Iraq, which similarly led to chaos in those countries. The best-case scenario is probably Panama in 1989, when the George H.W. Bush administration similarly captured dictator Manuel Noriega, transported him back to the U.S. on drug charges, and managed to set up democratic elections in a matter of months.

The U.S. follows the complex foreign policy process I laid out above precisely to avoid its prior calamities, and to ensure the maximum odds of success — not just for a precisely planned military operation, but for the day after as well. But Trump has decimated the staff of the National Security Council, relying on an inner circle of Rubio, Miller, and a few others. Many international allies do not seem to have been consulted; certainly Congress wasn’t, despite its constitutional dominion over declaring war. (The White House has said this was a law enforcement operation, not an act of war, although most law enforcement operations don’t come with questions of regime change.) To the extent the U.S. planned for this moment, it was with a war game that suggested Venezuela would fall into chaos after Maduro’s ouster.

As recently as November, Politico reported that “post-Maduro talks in the [Trump] administration are not robust or well-coordinated.”

Of course, Trump would say that this process-oriented system has failed Americans in the past. (“We did a great job with stopping drugs from coming into this country, and nobody’s been able to do it until we came along. But they should say, ‘great job.’ They could say, ‘Oh, gee, maybe it's not constitutional.’ You know, the same old stuff that we’ve been hearing for years and years and years.”) Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at when Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in his first term, or when he bombed Iran in this one, both events that foreign policy hands warned would lead to much more catastrophic consequences than actually occurred.

And perhaps Trump will prove the experts wrong again, just as he has on some issues before.

But there’s another reason the traditional, deliberative process takes place as well: it gives the American people insight into what its government is doing, and provides them a chance to feel brought into the decision, either through a formal Oval Office address or through open debates on the Congress floor. It helps create broad support and buy-in.

None of that happened here, which means Trump is taking not just a foreign policy risk but a political one as well — all the more because it is his own base that supposedly moved the U.S. beyond its interventionist tendencies.

A quick operation to remove a dictator will likely be more popular than a drawn-out occupation, but the latter is more likely avoided with the sort of Day After planning that Trump seems to have scorned.

A recent CBS News poll, conducted during the boat strikes but before Maduro’s capture, found that 76% of Americans — including 64% of Republicans and 86% of Republicans — believe the Trump administration has not adequately explained its position on military action in Venezuela.

But, then again, how could it, when the administration has not even decided on a position amongst itself?