US to work with current Venezuela leaders if they make ’right decision’: Rubio

WASHINGTON: The United States is ready to work with Venezuela’s remaining leaders if they make “the right decision,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday after an audacious US operation removed the oil-rich country’s president, Nicolas Maduro.

“We’re going to judge everything by what they do, and we’re going to see what they do,” Rubio told CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

“I do know this: that if they don’t make the right decision, that the United States will retain multiple levers of leverage.”

US commandos snatched Maduro from a compound in Caracas on Saturday in a risky operation involving jets, helicopters, warships and ground troops.

He is now in a New York detention cell awaiting a court appearance expected Monday on federal narcotrafficking and weapons charges.

Read more: ‘Dangerous precedent’: UNSC to meet tomorrow to discuss US military operation in Venezuela

Rubio appeared to significantly soften President Donald Trump’s extraordinary statements on Saturday that the United States will “run” Venezuela and that he would not be afraid to put military “boots on the ground.”

Instead, he made clear that Washington is ready to try working with Maduro’s vice president and now acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, and the rest of the ousted leader’s cabinet.

“We are going to see what happens moving forward,” he said.

“We’re going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what, you know, what they’ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward.”

Read more: Trump says US will run Venezuela after Maduro seized

He also gave no indication that the Trump administration will support opposition figures who have previously been hailed by Washington as the country’s legitimate leaders.

Asked about backing Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Rubio said he had “admiration” for her, but avoided any demands that she – or her party’s candidate in the 2024 election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia – become interim leaders.

He said the United States wanted to avoid getting mired in nation building.

“The whole foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan,” he said, referring to previous US interventions. “This is not the Middle East. And our mission here is very different.”

Rubio’s remarks contrasted with Trump’s statements that “we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place” and that his own cabinet officials would be in charge of the country.

Rubio said US pressure would remain on Venezuela in the form of the large naval presence in the Caribbean and an oil export embargo “that allows us to exert tremendous leverage over what happens next.”