Trump can now declare war on Venezuela. Will Rubio pull the trigger?
According to Nicolás Maduro, the strongman leader of Venezuela, there is one man responsible for the armada of American warships assembled off his country’s Caribbean coast.
President Trump may be the US commander-in-chief. But it is his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is widely seen as driving the Trump administration’s belligerent approach towards Venezuela.
“Mr President, Donald Trump watch out, because Mr Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood,” said Maduro in a recent speech.
On Thursday, senators voted by 51-49 to allow Trump to start a war against Venezuela without consulting Congress. Rubio played a pivotal role in convincing wavering senators, meaning Trump has a free hand to attack Venezuela whenever.
The largest aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald R Ford, is heading to the Caribbean and Trump has reportedly been presented with a list of targets for airstrikes on Venezuela with the aim of overthrowing the Maduro regime. At least 66 people have died in US attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats.
“Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans and we want to see him brought to justice,” said Tommy Pigott, principal deputy spokesman at the US state department.
The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio, 54, has long railed against leftist regimes in South America.
His views were shaped by his childhood in el exilio histórico of Miami, where half a million Cubans fled after the 1959 revolution. His family lived just outside Little Havana, where Spanish was the main language spoken in most homes.
“Marco Rubio grew up in a Miami that was a roiling hotbed of Cuban exile rhetoric and antipathy towards the Castro administration in Cuba,” said Manuel Roig-Franzia, the former Miami bureau chief for The Washington Post and the author of The Rise of Marco Rubio.
As well as Cubans, the Miami diaspora included Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, exposing the young Rubio to the region’s wider politics, according to Carlos Trujillo, who was US ambassador to the Organisation of American States during Trump’s first administration and who first met Rubio in the Florida House of Representatives more than two decades ago.
“People were as in tune as to what’s happening in Caracas as they were to what’s happening in Washington DC,” said Trujillo.
However, shortly after Rubio was elected Florida senator, riding the Tea Party wave of 2010, it emerged that his parents, a bartender and a cleaner, had emigrated from Cuba in 1956, three years before the revolution, a detail that provoked a minor scandal in Miami.
Rubio was accused of misleading voters by presenting his political beliefs as the result of his family’s persecution by communists, when in fact they had fled for economic reasons.
Although the truth transpired to be more nuanced, undoubtedly Rubio’s family felt unable to return to Cuba due to the political situation, and he grew up in a community estranged from its homeland.
“He tapped into that community and really established a very strong political constituency in Florida defined by his anti-communist stance,” says Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington DC think tank.
After arriving in Washington in 2010, Rubio was initially seen as a liberal voice within the Republican Party on immigration. A Catholic, he was seen wiping away a tear when Pope Francis addressed Congress in 2016 as “the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants”.
But Rubio’s views on immigration shifted to reflect the hardening mood of his party and, as secretary of state, he now finds himself responsible for dismantling USAid having once been an ardent proponent of overseas development spending.
Yet throughout these volte faces, Rubio’s opinions on South America have remained consistent. Now the former Florida senator, mocked by Trump as “Little Marco” during the 2016 presidential campaign, has been given wide latitude to set US foreign policy in Latin America.
In January this year, Rubio outlined his vision of an “Americas First” foreign policy, a revival of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine that asserts US dominance over the Western hemisphere.
Having been largely sidelined in the Middle East and Ukraine, where Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, have been the most important players in the Trump administration, now Rubio has the opportunity to create his own legacy in South America.
Briefly it appeared that diplomacy might win out when Richard Grenell, Trump’s special envoy, went to Caracas to meet Maduro earlier this year. But Hispanic communities in south Florida regarded Grenell’s promise that the US was not seeking “regime change” in Venezuela as a betrayal — and in the court politics of the White House, Rubio has outmanoeuvred Grenell, convincing Trump to ignore Maduro’s offers of Venezuela’s mineral riches and push ahead with military escalation.
“After multiple exhausted attempts at diplomacy, it seems like the president and the secretary of state have recommended a different path forward. I think it’s no coincidence that Rubio’s fingerprints and leadership are all over the president’s plan and policies when it comes to Latin America,” said Trujillo.
The next few weeks could be critical not just in Venezuela, but in determining whether Rubio’s aspirations to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2028 are realistic.
“What is happening in Venezuela right now is a defining moment for a politician who has clearly higher ambitions,” said Roig-Franzia.
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