The Return of the American Protectorate

Summary

In a midnight raid on Caracas on 3rd January, the US quickly deposed Nicolas Maduro as President of Venezuela by kidnapping him and the First Lady, and bombing several locations. At a press conference the following morning, President Trump remarked that following the ousting of President Maduro, the US is "going to run the country until such time as [we] can do a safe, proper and judicious transition."There are still a lot of questions about what happens now that President Maduro is not in control anymore. Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, together with other senior government members, was on national television a few hours after the press conference saying that Venezuela “will never again be anyone’s colony – neither of old empires, nor of new empires, nor of empires in decline”.At the same time, President Trump seemed determined that Venezuela is under the control of the US, saying there's a team that would be running it and that this team includes the people standing behind him at the press conference: among them Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of War Hegseth, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, as well as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller.If history were to be of any guidance, Cuba might give us an indication of how the US could run Venezuela. In 1901, Cuba, right after the Spanish-American War, included the Platt Amendment in its constitution as a condition for the US to withdraw its troops from the island, but it also gave the US the right to intervene militarily in Cuban affairs, prohibit Cuba from signing treaties that could undermine its independence, and require it to lease naval stations to the US, such as Guantánamo Bay.Cuba was de jure sovereign, it had elections, its own government, but ultimate authority always rested with Washington. Indeed, throughout the time that the Amendment was in force, the US intervened militarily three times in Cuba.The consequences of this were predictable. Cuban...