This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: This is Perry Bacon from The New Republic, and I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor at Columbia University who writes a lot about and studies international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and national security. And we’re talking in the wake of—less than 24 hours ago—the U.S. government deposing Maduro.
He’s probably either on a plane or has already landed in the U.S., where he’ll face criminal charges. So we are watching an active regime change and learning the details of it as we speak. So, Professor, welcome.
Elizabeth Saunders: Thank you for having me.
Bacon: So I guess the first question—the obvious question, even right now—is: Why did this happen?
Or even over the last few months—we’ve seen they’ve been building up toward—I was surprised it happened this way, but it seems like the administration has been building up toward this for a while. Trump and Marco Rubio have been talking a lot about [how] the Venezuelan situation must be changed, exaggerating the drug trafficking in a certain way.
So talk—do we know? What’s your sense of why this happened?
Saunders: So I think one of the similarities this has with the Iraq War is that there were a lot of people who supported it for a lot of different reasons. So you had, probably the number one driver of this, just from the reporting I’ve read, was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long been advocating regime change in Venezuela. He connects Venezuela, as he did in the press conference this morning with Trump, to Cuba; sees Venezuela as under the thumb of Cuba. Rubio’s parents fled Cuba when Castro took over. And I think this has been on his wish list for a long time.
You couple that with previous attempts in the first Trump administration by then-national security adviser John Bolton, who’s pretty much never met a regime change operation he didn’t like. There had been some efforts in this area, some covert; I don’t even think we know the whole story yet. So there had been plans. And then Rubio, and then the other piece of reporting that I’ve seen is that Stephen Miller had seized on this as a way of bringing Trump in on the drugs issue. So getting Trump to support this by folding it all into this narrative of narco-terrorism. And so you have Rubio and Miller making common cause. And Hegseth—Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense—likes anything that makes him look tough. And so you have what we call in political science a logroll, where everybody can find their reason and get on board.
And what was really shocking about the press conference—waking up this morning and seeing the news, given all that’s happened, I didn’t actually think it was really going to happen in the end. But then when you saw it, it’s like, “OK, it was a close call.” We were all making bets about whether he would do it or not, but he sent in an aircraft carrier, so it’s not that surprising. But hearing Trump himself talk about “boots on the ground” and “we’re going to run the government of Venezuela,” and “we’re not afraid of boots on the ground”—that was pretty shocking to me, just as an observer of Trump. I’ve never bought into the “Trump is a dove” idea. But he’s been pretty consistent. He likes these pinpoint operations, very risky, but he likes to bomb a target. And this is Pandora’s box. And that was ... it’s very odd to wake up to very surprising and unexpected news and then to be shocked on top of that. But his press conference, I would say, was very shocking.
Bacon: I think we’re going to hear a lot of talk about Venezuelan oil and oil reserves. You didn’t say that, though. I think it’s important—in Iraq, too—we had a lot of discussions about oil, and I was never totally convinced that was George W. Bush’s rationale, even if it seemed the most logical.
Do you see a role for that here? How do you see oil playing out? I’m open to any—I just want to hear your thoughts on that.
Saunders: So yes, there is this sort of persistent idea that the U.S. invades countries for oil. And I think it was really not the case in Iraq—at least not in ... only in the most indirect way. You never know what’s going on in Trump’s mind. But he didn’t mention oil for quite a while. All of this was in motion before he started talking about oil, and then all of a sudden there was the one day where he starts talking about oil. And you think to yourself, “Did somebody brief him on the nationalization of the oil?” Because up until that point, there had been discussions, even, and negotiations, between Trump and Maduro at the beginning of the second Trump administration. And Rubio disrupted that. And so it’s not clear that he would’ve preferred to do this the hard way with military force rather than cutting some deal.
And so maybe when things started—I’m purely speculating—but the fact that it has not really been about oil throughout this whole buildup says to me that it was a late addition to the stew of reasons why Trump might be persuaded to get on board with this. But again, I’m just speculating. It’s also a little bit odd, because it’s not as though Venezuela’s oil ... it doesn’t belong to the U.S. It was nationalized, but that’s a thing that happens. And it was a long time ago. And the oil, the price of oil—there’s too much of it right now for global demand. So it just—I’m not an oil expert or a Latin America expert—but it doesn’t strike me that it’s enough to drive this.
Bacon: Just to clarify, I think the Biden administration’s policy was that Maduro should be pushed out of office in some way—probably not like this—and I assume Harris would have had the same policy, that same goal. [But] this policy, we think, the way this happened last night would not have been done by Biden or Harris.
Saunders: Yeah, people forget that the official law of the land under Bill Clinton in the late years of his administration was to do regime change in Iraq. Congress passed the law; Clinton signed it. So the official policy of the United States was to get Saddam Hussein out of office. And of course, it wasn’t until Bush—and even after 9/11—that Bush decided to undertake that mission. Supporting regime change rhetorically is not the same as doing it, which is one reason why a lot of people were not surprised but saw it as a reasonable guess to think that he would not, in the end—Trump would not, in the end, change the regime by force.
If you oppose a regime and you think it’s illegitimate—and the grounds on which they opposed it are also that Maduro didn’t leave office when he was voted out; he’s not the legitimate president—but those are very different reasons than the ones that we’ve been hearing from the administration. And I don’t see illegal boat strikes in the Caribbean under Biden or—I just have a hard time imagining that’s how they would’ve gone about it.
Bacon: So moving forward—this was not authorized by Congress, and members of Congress are pretty explicitly saying, we asked about this and they told us they were not doing it.
So I know you’re not a lawyer, but what’s your sense? In terms of—we’ve had so many conflicts in which Congress has not voted affirmatively for them—where does this rank? How do you view this in terms of authorized, democratic small-d, authorized by Congress, not authorized, the American public read in, Congress read in, or not?
Saunders: So I’m a little bit cynical on this front. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t study international law directly, but I follow a lot of lawyers. Quite literally, some of my best friends are lawyers. They all seem to agree, almost universally, that this is illegal under international law.
Bacon: Is it undemocratic in a certain way?
Saunders: That’s more the stuff I study—and I actually, without endorsing in any sense the operation, tend to think we overestimate how much the small-d democratic process is actually involved in decisions about military force.
I think that most of the American public doesn’t pay that much attention unless things go really wrong. And I think you can look at the Iraq War again. It really wasn’t until 2006, the 2006 midterm elections, and there’s some very interesting history around that. The Democrats ran that midterm campaign on Iraq, but didn’t decide to do that until very late in the game in that campaign; they didn’t think it would be a winning issue. Only when things were just dreadful. If you lived through that time, you remember just that day in and day out, terrible violence inside Iraq, deaths of civilians, and then also deaths of U.S. soldiers every day. And I think that’s what it takes to really engage the American electorate on these issues.
And then when it comes to congressional authorization, I absolutely take the point that international law and constitutional law scholars make: that you can’t have a war without Congress declaring it. But we haven’t had declared war since Pearl Harbor, basically.
Bacon: Were Iraq and Afghanistan not declared wars?
Saunders: It wasn’t a declared war, but there was an authorization to use military force. If I’m not mistaken—actually, maybe they finally did get the Iraq one off the books quite recently. But the Afghanistan authorization is still on the books. The Afghanistan War is over; in fact, the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, which authorizes force in the Middle East, is still on the books, just for those keeping score. So authorizations to use military force—leave aside declared war—they are political instruments in and of themselves. Presidents ask for them when they think they can get them, when they think it would be beneficial. And they tend to stick around for a long time. And Congress doesn’t like to vote on anything if they can avoid it.
So I wrote a whole book called The Insiders’ Game, which is about how basically elites make decisions about war and peace, and the public sort of looks at what the elites are saying about it, and if there’s not much disagreement, they go along. It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened here. But I do think what happens on the ground in Venezuela is clearly ... I think what was shocking about this morning is there was no prospect that America would be entangled in the aftermath. It could be horrific for Venezuela on the ground—repression, we don’t know what’s happening. But when Trump started saying, “We’re going to run it,” that just raises the specter of a huge range of outcomes from, “Nah, we’re not going to get involved” ... I keep waiting for the reporting, the background walk-back.
Bacon: The walk-back? Yeah, I think it’s probably coming. Yeah, because he’s—let me ask, because in terms of what happened on Friday night—it was unprecedented. On the one hand, there are a lot of precedents of the U.S. doing regime change. On the other hand, I think we were surprised by this, because this is not exactly—there was a long discussion about what would happen in Iraq, and how, and so on. This feels different. So do you think this was weird and unprecedented, or not really?
Saunders: So on the one hand, there’s a really long history of this in Latin America in particular. It goes back to ... as far back as when the U.S. acquired the power to project power into other regions. So late nineteenth century, and we intervened in Cuba, in [the] Dominican Republic, several times. You can’t even count them. There have been so many, and that’s before you even get to the Cold War interventions that are quite notorious. The precedent I think people are pointing to is Panama and Noriega. But ... I don’t have a problem with making these analogies, but I do think that there’s a limit to how much the precedent really matters because we are in a different universe right now.
We are in a universe where Donald Trump has basically no constraints on his presidency. None, compared even to his first administration. So you were looking at this backdrop of the ... tableau down at Mar-a-Lago of Trump with Miller and Rubio, and Hegseth, and the chairman of the joint chiefs, Stan Cain, and somebody else I’m forgetting. There were five of them behind him, and those are not people who put any checks on Trump.
Whereas in the first term, you had Mattis and Kelly and others. His most instinctive whims would be checked. And so I think you can’t really compare the politics of today to the politics in the Cold War when the president really did have to worry about Congress. Even Trump had to worry about his advisers and would take advice, and this is just a permissive environment. It’s not that Trump has changed; it’s that there’s a permissive environment around him where his whims and instincts, or the ones he gloms onto from different advisers, get translated into action with no filter. No process, no consideration.
And what was really dramatic about it was in the run-up. I was waiting, I was listening to the chatter—you know, he was late to give the speech—and they’re saying, “Oh, this has been planned for months and months and months. They’ve done all this planning about what’s going to happen next.” And then he gets up there and says, “We’re going to run Venezuela.” The press did ask him. And they were like, “Really? Who’s going to?” and “Who’s the group?” And he said, “The people ... the five people behind me.” And you do wonder, was that news to them? Like to Rubio and company?
Bacon: I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. You said elites run foreign policy. You could even argue elites run American policy—particularly foreign policy. I agree. But in this case, it’s going to be different, because based on what I’ve seen so far, this is not going to be a bipartisan agreement.
There’s been some pushback—Schumer, in general, has been more careful, saying you should have gone to Congress first. But in general, this has been pretty widely condemned by Democrats, almost universally, [for] not going to Congress, [for pursuing] regime change. I don’t think you’re going to see the sort of—at least Iraq had initial bipartisan support. This does not look like it’s going to have that.
Saunders: Yes. Although we are in a more polarized time.
Bacon: Yes. That may be why.
Saunders: Yeah. And it used to be that when elites were united, that sent a signal. And when they were divided, that sent a signal. But now elites are divided all the time on partisan lines. So it’s no longer quite so clear what signal the public will take from that. And I should say, my take on this is cynical, but I don’t mean it in the sense that the public doesn’t pay attention and it should pay more attention. Or that elites are somehow this nefarious.... This is how we all make sense of the world.
You asked me on to talk about U.S. foreign policy in Venezuela and the action; if you’d asked me to come on and talk about health care policy, I would’ve said, “You’re crazy. Call my friend who studies health.” We all specialize. And none of us can keep up with ... I’m not a Latin America specialist. I don’t know the intricacies of who’s in and who’s out in Venezuela today.
And so I think we need to think about it more like we hire elites—I mean through elections and then delegating appointment power and all of that—to monitor this stuff. And we trust them, in normal times, to follow the intelligence and get advice and talk to allies. And this is all the stuff Trump doesn’t do. And follow a process and stick to it. And when you see him unleashing stuff like this in real time, possibly unbeknownst to his own advisers ... who knows? I would love to know some of the background reporting on that.
Bacon: They know they were involved in the operation. You’re saying this plan that we’re going to own Venezuela and rebuild it. It seems like—I didn’t have a sense that was true until I heard it, yes.
Saunders: Yes, even when they were at the press conference and they threw it back to the—I think I was watching BBC, or maybe I was toggling between them; CNN maybe—everybody seemed stunned. And Trump is a good politician in many ways, but he stepped on his own message here because now everybody’s talking about “We’re going to run Venezuela.”
Bacon: Not how tough [he] was, [how] he took down the corrupt leader, yes.
Saunders: Not that we should celebrate it as a success, but putting yourself in ... I always like to think about it from the very cynical point of view of the politician. And his job today, in addition to informing people, was to paint this in the best possible light for his administration. That’s what all presidents do. And he got Maduro out of Venezuela, and now all anybody is talking about is that we’re running it.
Bacon: This idea that ... I think Vance said this, like the U.S. filed criminal charges against him, so therefore that’s justification to depose a leader of a foreign nation. Is that something that happens? I don’t know, that’s ... I don’t love that idea, but is that ... is there a precedent for that?
Saunders: I wouldn’t want to ... I don’t want to say yes or no because I’m sure if I say one or the other, I’ll have a friend call me up and say, “You said this wrong.” But it’s one thing to indict somebody in absentia. But to then go in and ... I can’t think of one. Duterte was turned over by the Philippine government to The Hague.
Bacon: That’s a little different. That was an internal coup on some level or something like ...
Saunders: That’s a little different. There have been cases of, like, cartel leaders that I can think of who were extracted. I guess Noriega, but I don’t know. It’s ... even if there is a precedent, I come back to: Is it wise? Just because there’s a precedent doesn’t make it good policy.
Bacon: I’m trying to pin down… It felt very unusual to me, and I’m trying—I’m trying to tease it out. Like I said—I’ve been doing this a long time. Very few things outright surprise me. And I was like, oh, they’re hinting, he wants Maduro to catch the hint, but they’re not going to do this. So this happening so abruptly—I did think, and I guess I should ask you as we’re closing here—I’m not sure you’re allowed to say this, but this feels extreme, and I would say bad. I don’t want the U.S. doing regime change at random, with no international support or no congressional support. This feels—among the many things Trump has done that I don’t agree with—like one of the more outlandish ones. Would you put that in there, for this year, this term at least?
Saunders: I would say of all the things he’s done in his foreign policy—other [than his] general attack on world order and liberal allies, which is very important and very extreme and very big, but also didn’t happen in one day. Even bombing Iran ... Netanyahu had already done a lot of it for him. So by the time he did it, it was not ... I also was on record as saying I didn’t think that would happen either. So take my analysis for what it’s worth. That’s twice I’ve been wrong about him.
I have the same sense, and I do think that there’s a community of international lawyers that’s trying to pin down the nature of what’s illegal about it. And that’s important, the precedents. And there’s this community of Latin America scholars that are very much putting this in the context of all the long, infamous history of U.S. intervention. That’s also correct. But I just keep coming back to: Trump has unchecked power. The last time we did this, it went horribly wrong. And at least Bush ... felt the need to have a justification and all of that. And it’s just even more illustration that there’s no constraints. The fact that the MAGA-friendly press corps pushed him so hard in that press conference, I think, is quite telling. Because it meant that they were surprised and ...
Bacon: Do we know if there was MAGA reporters? Why are you saying that? I didn’t watch …
Saunders: I shouldn’t say that definitively, but my understanding is the pool that goes with him now is handpicked and doesn’t have the usual ... maybe there’s a couple from the networks, but the press pool is very much more MAGA-friendly than it used to be. But they pushed—I couldn’t see who was asking the questions, but they pushed harder than I... they just kept coming back: “Really? Who’s going to be running? What does this mean?” They had the bit between their teeth in a way that they haven’t on a lot of issues.
So I think you have to think of it in the context of today and American politics and the decline of American democracy today and the weakening of guardrails. And also we live in a different international environment now than a lot ... than we did when all the precedents people are citing. Our military is way overstretched, both at ... deployments at home. He makes threats on multiple continents, like, every week. We struck Nigeria over the holidays. Does anyone even remember that?
Bacon: I had you to remind me of that.
Saunders: I try to remind myself of these things because it’s so hard to keep track. And he’s gutted the diplomatic infrastructure—Marco Rubio is complicit in that—and he ended USAID, which would be a very handy thing to have around if you’re trying to do regime change and stabilize a country. We have an extreme border policy, which is ... it’s not clear whether this is going to unleash a new wave of migration. So that’s another sort of unintended consequence. But also, the U.S. ... it used to be the country—for better and often for worse—that underwrote the international order. We violated the rules a lot, but there were rules, and we are now going to learn what it’s like to live in a world without them.
We can’t even reimpose them if we wanted to because of Trump’s gutting of the diplomatic and foreign policy toolkit. And that wasn’t true when we invaded Panama. It may be the right precedent, but the context is ... George H.W. Bush had tremendous foreign policy experience. The Soviet Union was collapsing. Vladimir Putin is not pleased, I would think, about this. So this is just playing with fire in a totally different setting than previous precedents, and I think that, as much as anything, is part of what’s making me also feel like ... OK. Even if there is a precedent, this is still a different level of risk and uncertainty. The range of things that could happen is just enormous.
Bacon: I think I want to end there. The range of things that happen is enormous. I think that we both feel that way.
Saunders: Yeah. I’m not the one you invite to the party to be the cheerful, happy entertainment.
Bacon: This is the kind of thing where it’s hard to be cheerful, but that’s why we’re talking about it on a Saturday because it feels important and scary.
Saunders: Yeah. It is important and it is scary.
Bacon: Professor, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Nice to see you.
Saunders: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
