POWER TRIP

As Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has become the unlikely executor of Trump's disruptive foreign policy.

- BY DEXTER FILKINS

For Rubio, taking down the regimes in Venezuela and Cuba has long been seen as a means of ascending to the White House.

Just after midnight on January 3rd, as American commandos surged into Caracas to seize President Nicolás Maduro, large sections of the city went dark. Blackouts are common in Venezuela, but the blasts that followed confirmed the arrival of the United States military, which for weeks had kept thousands of troops poised offshore. The sky filled with helicopters—some skimming the rooftops—along with fighter jets and B-1 bombers. They had been dispatched to protect a Delta Force team heading to the Fuerte Tiuna military complex, where Maduro and his wife were hunkered down. There, the commandos undertook an operation that they had spent months practicing at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky: they shot their way past the defenses and, as the Maduros struggled to shut a heavy metal door, took them into custody. More than fifty of Maduro’s guards were killed, but the Americans left nearly untouched. President Donald Trump told Fox News afterward that it was like “watching a television show.”