Follow us on social

Ric Grenell  Nicolas Maduro

Grenell vs. Rubio: Team Trump's competing Latin America visions

Old maximalist policies vs. making deals with adversaries — which one wins out?

Analysis | Latin America

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s five-country tour of Central American allies last week — the first time in a century the U.S.’s top diplomat has made their inaugural foreign trip to Latin America — was aimed at curtailing China’s growing regional influence, stemming the flow of migrants and drugs to the U.S. and identifying “safe third countries” that will temporarily hold thousands of Trump’s deportees.

Yet the administration’s first stop in the region was not, in fact, to a close friend but rather to an adversary: Venezuela’s embattled socialist leader Nicolás Maduro, whom presidential envoy Richard Grenell rewarded with a surprise visit to Miraflores Palace on January 31.

Grenell, who referred to Maduro as the country’s president and said Trump wanted a “different relationship” with the country, was on a laser-focused mission to bring back detained Americans and secure a commitment from Maduro to receive deported Tren de Aragua gang members, according to a pre-trip call with reporters held by the State Department’s Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone.

Yet the questions surrounding Grenell’s visit only a day before Rubio’s trip are just the tip of the iceberg in a series of emerging contradictions in President Trump’s incipient Latin America policy — notably between hardline hawks focused on rewarding allies and punishing enemies (represented by Rubio and his fellow Cuban-American ally Claver-Carone), and White House officials like Grenell whose realpolitik and strategic engagement with adversaries to advance national interests could prevail.

As a result, some Republican lawmakers have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to reconcile Trump’s transactionalism toward the region’s illiberal regimes with Rubio’s maximalist hardline, complicated by their razor-thin majority in Congress.

As expected, Rubio’s tour to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic notched some high-profile wins for Trump’s “America First” strategy in the region, namely Panama’s decision to let its Belt and Road Initiative membership expire, El Salvador’s offer to incarcerate U.S. convicts in its supermax prison, and the seizure of a Venezuelan presidential plane in the Dominican Republic due to sanctions violations.

These outcomes are consistent with Claver-Carone’s remarks that Rubio’s trip would kick off the “re-Americanization of the Panama Canal,” a return to a “golden age” of U.S. dominance in the region, and the inevitability that the 21st century would be an American one — not Chinese..

But at the same time, Grenell’s concurrent Venezuela mission confounded veteran GOP Latin America hands like Elliot Abrams and Carrie Filipetti, who ran Trump's “maximum pressure” Venezuela policy from the State Department in his first term. They, like Rubio and Claver-Carone, consider the Biden-era OFAC licenses allowing Chevron to operate in Venezuela — which were automatically renewed the day after Grenell’s visit — to be counterproductive, keeping Maduro afloat after his widely contested re-election in July.

While Grenell said after his trip that Trump’s first-term maximum pressure sanctions “didn’t work,” Rubio continues to pursue the same strategy.

Shortly after taking the helm at Foggy Bottom, Rubio met on Zoom with Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González, whom he called the country’s “rightful president.” Rubio then met with González in Panama on his first stop on his Central American tour. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) invited González to attend Trump’s inauguration, though Trump rebuffed a meeting with the leader, who weeks earlier met with President Biden in the Oval office.

Like Scott, Rubio and Claver-Carone's Cuban-American allies in Congress, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), are struggling to keep their maximalist hard-line toward Maduro relevant among the more pragmatic positions staked out by other GOP figures, including the one at the top, President Trump.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump regards the González-led opposition challenging Maduro’s claim to power as "losers" who "failed" despite giving them significant support during his first term. There's "no way he's going back down that road again," a source close to Trump said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), said in January that "Trump will work with Maduro because he's the one who will take office,” while Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelans because Venezuela had “made improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime” — just a day before Rubio called the country an “enemy of humanity.”

Trump’s need to fulfill his promises on mass deportations seems to be undermining the South Florida delegation's illusion of regime change in Caracas.

Its members are now lobbying Trump officials to make exceptions for their Venezuelan and Cuban constituents not to be deported, knowing these actions could drastically undermine their base of electoral support.

Rubio and Claver-Carone assure that Grenell’s face-to-face with Maduro won’t change the administration’s commitment to Venezuela’s opposition, but U.S. interests like stemming migration to the U.S.-Mexico border and lowering gas prices — which the reimposition of oil sanctions would complicate — have, for now, taken precedence over support for an opposition whose exorbitant and seemingly ineffective USAID awards during Trump’s first term have attracted more scrutiny amid the agency's unraveling.

What remains to be seen is whether Trump officials’ overtures to regional adversaries will be limited to Venezuela or whether it will extend to countries like Cuba, also the target of “maximum pressure” during Trump’s first term in office. While Rubio has already announced a return to a “tough Cuba policy,” Trump confidantes Elon Musk and Sergio Gor have both traveled to the island, where Trump has registered his trademarks and his executives have long eyed prime beachfront property.

Rubio may have been received with open arms by U.S. allied countries on his Central America tour, but leaders of many of the region’s economic powerhouses like Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, all led by center-left presidents not particularly amenable to Rubio, have been resistant to the administration’s heavy-handed impositions and ultimata, notably on the treatment of their deportees.

Unless Rubio is able to extract the sort of concessions from ideological adversaries that Grenell could in just one afternoon, some within the administration could begin to question Rubio’s ability to deliver for President Trump — setting up a potential clash that may lead to his early, albeit undesired, departure from Foggy Bottom.


FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro and U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy Richard Grenell shake hands at the Miraflores Palace, in Caracas, Venezuela January 31, 2025. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS
Analysis | Latin America
US military border
U.S. Army Strykers from 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, assigned to Joint Task Force - Southern Border (JTF-SB) in May 2025. (Army Spc. Michael Graf)

Military seizing massive swaths of public lands at the border

North America

The Trump administration has transferred thousands of acres of federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border to be controlled by the Department of Defense (DoD). The transfer is part of an ongoing expansion of the military’s presence along the border which the administration claims is necessary to “control” illegal immigration.

Critics of the land transfer, including some who live near the affected areas, have raised concerns about the environmental impact of military operations on these large swathes of land. Additionally, much of the land now under the jurisdiction of the military encompasses national parks and other federal lands which the public is losing access to.

keep readingShow less
Warfare movie A24
Top photo credit: (official trailer for Warfare/A24)
'Warfare': Rare Iraq film that doesn't preach but packs truth

'Warfare': Rare Iraq War film that doesn't preach but packs punch

Media

Unlike Alex Garland’s Civil War, his Warfare, co-directed with war vet Ray Mendoza, is not just another attempt at a realistic portrayal of war, in all its blood and gore. Warfare, based on a true story, is really a parable about the overweening ambition and crushing failure of empire, a microcosm of America’s disastrous adventure in Iraq.

A Navy Seal mission reconnoiters a neighborhood in Ramadi. “I like this house,” says the team commander, reflecting the overconfidence of the empire at its unipolar moment. But it soon becomes clear that the mission has underestimated the enemy, that the whole neighborhood has, in fact, been tracking the Seals’ movements. Surprised and scared, the mission requests to be extricated. But extrication becomes a bloody, hellish experience despite the Seals’ technological edge in weapons, IT, and logistics, and it barely succeeds.

keep readingShow less
vietnam war memorial washington DC
Top photo credit: Washington, DC, May 24, 2024: A visitor reads the names of the fallen soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Mall ahead of Memorial Day. (A_Kiphayet/Shutterstock)

Veterans: What we would say to Trump on this Memorial Day

Military Industrial Complex

This Memorial Day comes a month after the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, which was largely used to recall the collapse of the entire American project in Vietnam. In short, the failure of the war is now viewed as both a rebuke of the American Exceptionalism myth and the rigid Cold War mentality that had Washington in a vice grip for much of the 20th Century.

“The leaders who mismanaged this debacle were never held accountable and remained leading players in the establishment for the rest of their lives,” noted author and professor Stephen Walt in a RS symposium on the war. “The country learned little from this bitter experience, and repeated these same errors in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other places.”

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.