Trump bursts with military threats after weekend of golf and abduction

(Originally published Jan. 5 in “What in the World“) Trump has launched an open-ended military commitment in Venezuela.

After abducting the country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, in a pre-dawn commando raid Saturday that killed 80 Venezuelans, the White House left his government in place and now plans to enforce a naval blockade against the country’s oil exports to maintain pressure on it, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview Sunday. U.S. forces took Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to a jail cell in Brooklyn to await trial for drug and weapons charges.

Rubio’s remarks, which cast the raid as Delta Force as bounty hunters apprehending a fugitive, appeared to contradict Trump’s regime-change line Saturday, when he said the U.S. would now “run Venezuela.” The blockade will remain in place, Rubio said, until Venezuela opens its state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment and makes other, unspecified, changes. But Rubio added that Trump may still deploy U.S. troops inside Venezuela if necessary. And Trump told The Atlantic in a telephone interview Sunday morning as he arrived at his golf club in West Palm Beach that if Venezuela’s acting leader, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

He repeated that threat to reporters later aboard Air Force One, adding that he might order similar strikes on Colombia and Mexico if they don’t cut the flow of narcotics into the U.S. “Cuba,” he added, “looks like it’s ready to fall.” Trump also reiterated suggestions that Greenland might be his next target. “We do need Greenland, absolutely,” he told The Atlantic. Trump has been saying since 2019 that the U.S. should take control of the island from Denmark, which has told him to cut it out.

Trump still faces a problem across the Atlantic in Nigeria. After ordering a Christmas Day airstrike against Islamic militants as retaliation for killing Christians there, the same group is believed to have been behind a Sunday assault that killed dozens more civilians.

And America’s allies on the Arabian Peninsula remain locked in a proxy war. On Sunday, Saudi-backed coalition forces recaptured the port of Al Mukalla from UAE-backed separatists after days of airstrikes by Saudi warplanes.

The U.S. isn’t the only nation exerting extraterritorial war powers, however. France and the U.K. on Saturday launched coordinated airstrikes against an Islamic State weapons bunker. Their joint attack follows a pre-Christmas strike by the U.S. fighter jets and helicopters against more than 70 suspected ISIS targets across central Syria.

In North Korea, meanwhile, Kim Jong Un—a week after launching tests of long-range cruise missiles and long-range surface-to-air missiles—spent his Sunday test-firing hypersonic missiles. For what it’s worth, Pyongyang on Sunday denounced the U.S. strike on Venezuela. Kim has also reportedly ordered that production of the country’s Bulsae-4 anti-tank guided missiles be more than tripled.