Is there a real plan for Venezuela?

High school history lessons about President James Monroe’s 1823 foreign policy will need updating. While the United States still claims dominance over the Western Hemisphere, President Donald Trump’s ambitious gamble to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and remake the country’s economy could drag us into another costly and complex foreign entanglement for a goal that is unclear.

After being captured in a U.S. military strike over the weekend, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, made their first court appearance in New York City Monday. Pleading not guilty to federal drug and terrorism charges, Maduro insisted he’s still the nation’s leader. But also on Monday, Maduro’s trusted confidante, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president. She is a firebrand socialist who is under U.S. and European sanctions for allegedly undermining democracy and contributing to human rights violations.

That’s not an encouraging sign true democratic leadership will be restored, but Trump needs Rodríguez to end the nation’s drug trafficking and stop supporting narco-terrorists in neighboring Colombia. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump told The Atlantic. That does little to reassure that a real plan is at play.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio dubiously emphasizes that the United States is not at war with Venezuela but with its drug cartels whom Maduro empowered. But if Trump’s goal was to make an example of Maduro, why, less than a month ago, did he pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, a drug trafficker who was serving a 45-year sentence in this country?

If the reason for Trump’s actions was to restore U.S. influence in the region to keep China, Iran and Russia out of our backyard, there must be a consistent focus on making that happen through diplomacy and economic sanctions. Not the breast-beating by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who said Maduro’s abduction restored the military’s “warrior ethos.” There is considerable risk that Maduro’s removal could lead to an armed insurgency by Venezuela’s many competing factions. If so, let’s keep our “warriors” out of their civil war.

In the days since Maduro’s capture Trump has gushed over Venezuela’s deep’s oil reserves, claiming we’re “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Trump contends that rebuilding the nation’s moribund industry will end its reliance on illegal drugs for revenue. But many of the professionals who ran its oil industry have long since fled and the extraction infrastructure is decayed after most foreign operators were forced out. Why would they quickly return to invest in a nation where stability can’t be guaranteed and almost $150 billion in debt needs to be restructured?

Trump likes to say that his “Donroe Doctrine” has now overtaken the Monroe Doctrine; he must remember another rule might come into play. In 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell, warning of the consequences of invading Iraq, reminded President George W. Bush of what is known as the Pottery Barn doctrine: “If you break it, you own it.”