How ‘Little Marco’ Became Trump’s Biggest Asset in Latin America
Trump has always wanted to topple Maduro, and he has effectively positioned Marco Rubio to do it
On the day the Gaza peace deal was signed, President Donald Trump told his audience at the Israeli Knesset that Marco Rubio will go down as the greatest secretary of state in “the history of the United States.” He compared him to Henry Kissinger, and bestowed upon him much of the credit for the brokered plan that resulted in the ceasefire and celebrated hostage release.
This, a week, after the Miami Herald described how Rubio had amassed so much power inside the White House—just like Kissinger under President Richard Nixon, wearing both the hats of chief diplomat and head of the National Security Council—that he wasn’t just surviving the tumultuous Trump orbit, he was “thriving.”
This is clearly bad news for Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, who is reportedly preparing his country for an invasion. Reports that regime change is the endgame in an aggressive U.S. military counter narcotics operation in the Caribbean get more detailed every day, including plans for CIA covert operations in the country and “Little Bird” Army helicopters ostensibly carrying U.S. special forces 90 miles off the coast of the country. The administration has done little to deny it.
More importantly, these reports indicate that Rubio, a former Florida senator who came to Washington in 2011 and immediately cleaved to the neoconservative foreign policies driving the heady, regime-change crazy Global War on Terror, is at the helm of this operation’s policy and planning. This is no surprise, since toppling Maduro and the Castros in Cuba have been constants in his otherwise shifting foreign policy persona.
But unlike his days as a reliable vote for old-guard hawks who used democracy and freedom to justify overturning governments they did not like, he is now seen as an enlightened adherent of the New Right, which espouses a more nationalist approach that in part seeks to revitalize the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century.
His views on regime change, however, haven’t changed.
“The United States remains firm in its unwavering support to Venezuela’s restoration of democratic order and justice. Maduro is not the President of Venezuela and his regime is not the legitimate government,” Rubio said in a State Department statement on July 26. “The United States will continue working with our partners to hold accountable the corrupt, criminal and illegitimate Maduro regime. Those who steal elections and use force to grasp power undermine America’s national security interests.”
For many realists in the MAGA coalition, Rubio was never an easy fit. While Trump in 2016 was a strident critic of regime-change wars, democracy promotion, and global policing, Rubio ran his own presidential campaign opposing him on all of these fronts. His ascension to the inner circle today and seeming predominance over the diplomacy and national security realms, sidelining figures like Ric Grenell (who was recalled from talks with Maduro earlier this month) and even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, is a red flag, they say.
“Rubio was a hawk, and still is a hawk. It’s just that the kinds of justifications that he’ll use to get the policy outcomes he wants have evolved in light of the necessities of what’s happened to the Republican Party with Trump's takeover,” Damon Linker, longtime political columnist and now a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania, told TAC.
“I think Rubio is sort of he has assimilated himself to what he understands to be the reality of what it means to support Trump and be be a foreign policy guy in this world, and there’s a weird way in which his hatred of Maduro in Venezuela can like mesh with Trump’s strong, sort of neo-Monroe Doctrine outlook,” he added. “[This] allows someone like Rubio to treat Maduro as like an unrepentant communist who’s a kind of a holdover from the Cold War, and he’s a bad actor, and he’s sending drugs here, and so many of the refugees who came in under Biden came from Venezuela. That’s going to keep happening if we don’t stop the outflow of people from this failed state down there, and that’s how you talk to Trump if you want to topple the government.”
Vice President J.D. Vance is considered the spearpoint of the realist-restraint movement, having been one of the most vocal critics of the GWOT neoconservatives, regime change, and for putting military before diplomatic solutions during his time in the Senate. Some wonder if his voice on these matters has been sidelined too. And yet, the Miami Herald piece talked about Rubio, Vance, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles as forming a “triumvirate of power, along with a personal bond” alongside the president.
One senior career official who had worked in multiple Republican administrations in both the State Departments and NSC, said Rubio, with his own long experience in government and politics, now inhabits a space ripe for imposing a singular, even personal, agenda. In the radical shrinking and reshuffling at both agencies, much of the traditional processes have been tossed, along with institutional memory and experience. After decades of failed, sclerotic thinking this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves little room for healthy debate and red teaming on the use of force in this situation, critics say.
“It allows for any one person to have outsized power and influence. You have a very manipulatable situation and I think that’s potentially allowed Rubio to pick up on this fever dream” of regime change in Venezuela, the source said.
But is it only his fever dream? Other conservatives who spoke with TAC insist that while Rubio has been at the forefront of a movement to depose Maduro for sometime, he is still merely pursuing what Trump wants. Recall, Trump actively encouraged Maduro’s ouster during his first administration, recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as the legitimate president and even at one point encouraging Venezuelan military leaders to turn on Maduro.
A failed “Bay of Piglets” invasion in 2020 headed by retired U.S. special forces operators and connected to Venezuelan exiles raised the specter of more covert, kinetic Washington operations, yet the connections to the administration were too tenuous to confirm. At the time, reports said Rubio was “running” Trump’s Latin America policy, though he leaned heavily on another hawkish ideologue, Mike Pompeo, then serving as secretary of state.
Grenell was sidelined in early October, sources tell TAC, because he was trying to “freelance” a diplomatic policy that the president did not want. Rubio, on the other hand, has worked hard to earn Trump’s trust and in the early days of this administration was able to help pull off a deal with Panama and has been integral on both the Ukraine and Israel portfolios.
“Rubio is very smart. I think Trump came to realize that this is a guy who has enormous skills … and that he can trust him,” said the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in an interview with TAC. “What is driving Trump is not Rubio, but the degree to which Venezuela is a direct threat to the United States, and that’s why I think they just sank the fourth boat today, if I read the newspaper correctly, and they’re clearly moving towards regime change in one way or another.”
The conservative journalist and podcaster Emily Jashinsky said much of the skepticism over Rubio has been over his roots in conventional Republican party politics and neoconservatism, which have since been discredited in the new populist-nationalism, or the MAGA “New Right.” But he doesn’t think that his foreign policy contradicts what Trump has set out to do in this second term, which is to focus more on the Western Hemisphere and “protecting the homeland.”
“The biggest misconception about Marco Rubio is that his MAGA flip-flop was cynical and not sincere. It was entirely sincere,” she tells TAC. “It’s hardly surprising that Rubio is still interested in regime change in the Hemisphere, given his longtime involvement in Latin American anticommunism, but it also doesn’t mean he’s still the same Rubio of 2016. It’s easy both politically and morally to frame hemispheric hawkishness under the auspices of America First because proximity does change security calculations and drug trafficking is important to MAGA voters who’ve seen their communities ravaged by fentanyl.”
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“Some realists on the right like myself are skeptical of plans that sound like reheated Cold War era follies,” she adds, “but others see a coherent strategy that maintains America First rather than undermining it.”
Rubio of course enjoys a base of support for his agenda inside and outside Washington which is bipartisan in nature, very wealthy, super-connected, and already positioned at the highest levels of administration. Neocon think tanks as well as those representing oil and corporate interests have been making the case for Maduro’s ouster for years. An opposition is already primed to move in and has been courting American business and media in anticipation. By connecting narco-terrorism and the country’s illegal drug crisis directly to Maduro, conservative Americans (and voters) are ripe for support, too.
In essence, Maduro’s problems go way beyond Rubio. Yet the instrumentalization of this preferred policy rests on the ability of the American government, in particular the U.S. military buttressed by the State Department and National Security Council, to execute it. Rubio has his hands on the levers of power, and sources say he is clearing the decks of internal dissent. If this fails, or if Trump decides not to go forward with full scale regime change, it may be Rubio’s political fortunes that ultimately hang in the balance.
