This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is Perry Bacon from The New Republic, and I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor at Columbia University who writes a lot about and studies international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and national security. And we’re talking in the wake of—less than 24 hours ago—the U.S. government deposing Maduro.

He’s probably either on a plane or has already landed in the U.S., where he’ll face criminal charges. So we are watching an active regime change and learning the details of it as we speak. So, Professor, welcome.

Elizabeth Saunders: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So I guess the first question—the obvious question, even right now—is: Why did this happen?

Or even over the last few months—we’ve seen they’ve been building up toward—I was surprised it happened this way, but it seems like the administration has been building up toward this for a while. Trump and Marco Rubio have been talking a lot about [how] the Venezuelan situation must be changed, exaggerating the drug trafficking in a certain way.

So talk—do we know? What’s your sense of why this happened?

Saunders: So I think one of the similarities this has with the Iraq War is that there were a lot of people who supported it for a lot of different reasons. So you had, probably the number one driver of this, just from the reporting I’ve read, was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long been advocating regime change in Venezuela. He connects Venezuela, as he did in the press conference this morning with Trump, to Cuba; sees Venezuela as under the thumb of Cuba. Rubio’s parents fled Cuba when Castro took over. And I think this has been on his wish list for a long time.

You couple that with previous attempts in the first Trump administration by then-national security advisor John Bolton, who’s pretty much never met a regime change operation he didn’t like. There had been some efforts in this area, some covert; I don’t even think we know the whole story yet. So there had been plans. And then Rubio, and then the other piece of reporting that I’ve seen is that Stephen Miller had seized on this as a way of bringing Trump in on the drugs issue. So getting Trump to support this by folding it all into this narrative of narco-terrorism. And so you have Rubio and Miller making common cause. And Hegseth—Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense—likes anything that makes him look tough. And so you have what we call in political science a logroll, where everybody can find their reason and get on board.

And what was really shocking about the press conference—waking up this morning and seeing the news, given all that’s happened, I didn’t actually think it was really going to happen in the end. But then when you saw it, it’s like, “OK, it was a close call.” We were all making bets about whether he would do it or not, but he sent in an aircraft carrier, so it’s not that surprising. But hearing Trump himself talk about “boots on the ground” and “we’re going to run the government of Venezuela,” and “we’re not afraid of boots on the ground”—that was pretty shocking to me, just as an observer of Trump. I’ve never bought into the “Trump is a dove” idea. But he’s been pretty consistent. He likes these pinpoint operations, very risky, but he likes to bomb a target. And this is Pandora’s box. And that was ... it’s very odd to wake up to very surprising and unexpected news and then to be shocked on top of that. But his press conference, I would say, was very shocking.

Bacon: I think we’re going to hear a lot of talk about Venezuelan oil and oil reserves. You didn’t say that, though. I think it’s important—in Iraq, too—we had a lot of discussions about oil, and I was never totally convinced that was George W. Bush’s rationale, even if it seemed the most logical.

Do you see a role for that here? How do you see oil playing out? I’m open to any—I just want to hear your thoughts on that.

Saunders: So yes, there is this sort of persistent idea that the U.S. invades countries for oil. And I think it was really not the case in Iraq—at least not in ... only in the most indirect way. You never know what’s going on in Trump’s mind. But he didn’t mention oil for quite a while. All of this was in motion before he started talking about oil, and then all of a sudden there was the one day where he starts talking about oil. And you think to yourself, “Did somebody brief him on the nationalization of the oil?” Because up until that point, there had been discussions, even, and negotiations, between Trump and Maduro at the beginning of the second Trump administration. And Rubio disrupted that. And so it’s not clear that he would’ve preferred to do this the hard way with military force rather than cutting some deal.

And so maybe when things started—I’m purely speculating—but the fact that it has not really been about oil throughout this whole buildup says to me that it was a late addition to the stew of reasons why Trump might be persuaded to get on board with this. But again, I’m just speculating. It’s also a little bit odd, because it’s not as though Venezuela’s oil ... it doesn’t belong to the U.S. It was nationalized, but that’s a thing that happens. And it was a long time ago. And the oil, the price of oil—there’s too much of it right now for global demand. So it just—I’m not an oil expert or a Latin America expert—but it doesn’t strike me that it’s enough to drive this.

Bacon:........

© New Republic