The New York Times reports:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to pivot away from President Trump’s assertion a day earlier that the United States would “run” Venezuela, emphasizing instead that the administration would keep a military “quarantine” in place on the country’s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there.

When asked how the United States planned to govern Venezuela, Mr. Rubio did not lay out a plan for a U.S. occupation authority, like the one that the George W. Bush administration put in place in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but instead spoke of coercing a Venezuelan government run by allies of the jailed leader Nicolás Maduro to make policy changes.

U.S. forces will continue to prevent oil tankers on a U.S. sanctions list from entering and leaving the country until the government opens up the state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment — presumably giving priority to American companies — and makes other changes, he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News.

“That remains in place, and that’s a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes, not just to further the national interest of the United States, which is No. 1, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela,” he said.

And in a testy exchange later on “Meet the Press” on NBC News, Mr. Rubio complained that people were “fixating” on Mr. Trump’s declaration at a news conference in Florida on Saturday that the U.S. government would run Venezuela. He added that “it’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this.”

Mr. Rubio said on CBS that the U.S. naval force that Mr. Trump massed in the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela over recent months — “one of the largest naval deployments in modern history, certainly in the Western Hemisphere” — would remain in place to enforce the quasi blockade, with the aim of “paralyzing that portion of how the regime, you know, generates revenue.”

And he added that Mr. Trump could put U.S. troops on the ground in Venezuela beyond the recent operation in which Army Delta Force soldiers seized Mr. Maduro, if it served American interests. The president “does not feel like he is going to publicly rule out options that are available for the United States,” Mr. Rubio said.

A White House official said Mr. Rubio had detailed in his interviews on Sunday what Mr. Trump had meant when he used the word “run,” and that there was no contradiction in their remarks. The official said top Trump aides “will continue to diplomatically engage” with the current leadership in Venezuela.

In Venezuela, the official line of the government remains fierce resistance to the United States. Vladimir Padrino López, the defense minister, gave a speech demanding the return of Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were flown to a Brooklyn detention center on Saturday. “Our sovereignty has been violated and breached,” he said, backed by uniformed soldiers.

Mr. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday that if the current acting leader of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, a vice president under Mr. Maduro, “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” [Continue reading…]