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Monday on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said he believed Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s desire to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was behind the Trump administration’s military action in the Caribbean.
Coons said, “Is this about overthrowing Maduro? Then what’s the plan for dealing with the chaos and instability that would likely result from overthrowing a dictator? We’ve seen that before in Iraq and in Libya. And is this really about making a play for Venezuela’s oil and critical minerals? They owe us an answer because our role in the constitution, as the elected branch, is to represent the people when we make decisions about sending young men and women in harm’s way around the world. So hopefully we’ll get a better briefing tomorrow than we’ve gotten so far. But they’ve been very tight lipped and failed to answer any of our serious.”
He added. “I suspect that this is something that Secretary Rubio has principally been pushing, trying to overthrow Maduro. He has been focused for 15 years on the authoritarian regimes in our hemisphere, in Cuba and Nicaragua and Venezuela. This is something he feels very deeply and he’s very passionate about. That’s fine for him to have strongly held opinions. What’s not fine is for him to put Americans in harm’s way, with no clear plan for how we’re going to deal with the consequences, how it’s going to impact our standing in the hemisphere, and what kinds of costs we’re going to pay with what could end up being a quagmire in the Western Hemisphere, much like the ones that we got dragged into in Southwest Asia, in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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