有消息称美国。对委内瑞拉进行了“大规模打击”周六夜间，美国人抓获了该国领导人尼古拉斯·马杜罗(Nicolas Maduro)，他们可能会问，为什么向选民承诺不再发动战争的特朗普会发动一场危险的地面行动来抓捕一名外国领导人。
到目前为止，自今年早些时候特朗普在拉丁美洲的军事集结开始以来，特朗普和他的高级助手一直在提供不断变化的解释。
起初，特朗普为他在委内瑞拉附近的军事行动辩护，称其将毒品挡在了美国之外，尽管专家们表示，通过委内瑞拉的可卡因大多流入了欧洲，而芬太尼来自中国。
特朗普还指责马杜罗将委内瑞拉的监狱和“精神病院”清空到美国，尽管也没有证据证明这一点。根据无党派的移民政策研究所(Migration Policy Institute)的数据，近年来，由于本国的经济和政治不稳定，成千上万的委内瑞拉人在美国定居。
到12月中旬，特朗普指责马杜罗“窃取”美国石油和土地。特朗普似乎在暗指西方石油公司上世纪70年代在委内瑞拉所做的工作，当时委内瑞拉政府选择将其储备国有化，最终迫使美国公司出局。
在12月17日的一篇社交媒体帖子中-大约在同一时间，消息人士称特朗普决定为1月3日的军事行动开绿灯-特朗普表示，美国对委内瑞拉的军事威胁“只会越来越大，对他们的冲击将是前所未有的-直到他们将他们以前从我们这里窃取的所有石油、土地和其他资产归还美利坚合众国。”
特朗普的助手斯蒂芬·米勒提出了类似的说法。
“美国人的汗水、智慧和辛劳创造了委内瑞拉的石油工业。它的暴虐征用是有记录以来对美国财富和财产的最大盗窃。
两天后的新闻发布会上，国务卿马克·卢比奥(Marc Rubio)给出了比获得石油储备更笼统的解释，称马杜罗的总统任期“不可容忍”，因为他在与“恐怖分子和犯罪分子”合作，而不是与特朗普政府合作。
卢比奥是古巴移民的儿子，他的政治生涯大部分时间都押在反对古巴共产党政府上。他一直指责马杜罗是该地区不稳定的主要来源，包括古巴政权仍然依赖委内瑞拉的廉价石油。
卢比奥12月19日对记者说，“存在地区威胁，在委内瑞拉问题上，我们没有合作。”。“首先，这是一个非法政权。第二，这是一个不合作的政权。它的所有言论和行动都是反美的。第三，这个政权不仅不与我们合作，还公开与危险分子、恐怖分子和犯罪分子合作。”
委内瑞拉政府发表声明，谴责所谓的“美利坚合众国现政府实施的严重军事侵略”
Why Venezuela? Trump's shifting explanations about military buildup
Amid the news that the U.S.carried out a "large scale strike" on Venezuelaovernight Saturday and captured the country's leader, Nicolas Maduro, Americans may be wondering why Trump, who promised voters no more wars, would launch a risky ground operation to capture a foreign leader.
So far, Trump and his top aides have offered shifting explanations since Trump’s military buildup in Latin America began earlier this year.
Initially, Trump defended his military operations near Venezuela as keeping drugs out of the US, although experts say the cocaine that passes through Venezuela winds up mostly in Europe while fentanyl is sourced from China.
Trump also accused Maduro of emptying Venezuela’s prisons and “mental institutions” into the U.S., although there’s no evidence of that either. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have settled in the U.S. in recent years due to economic and political instability in their home country.
By mid-December, Trump accused Maduro of "stealing" U.S. oil and land. Trump appeared to be alluding to work done in the 1970s in Venezuela by Western oil companies before the government there opted to nationalize its reserves, eventually forcing out American companies.
In a Dec. 17 social media post – around the same time sources say Trump was making a decision to greenlight the Jan. 3 military operation -- Trump said the U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Trump aide Stephen Miller made a similar claim.
“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property,” Miller wrote on X.
Two days later at a press conference, Secretary of State Marc Rubio offered a more general explanation than access to oil reserves, calling Maduro’s presidency “intolerable” because it was cooperating with “terrorist and criminal elements” instead of the Trump administration.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has staked much of his political career as opposed to the communist Cuban government. He has long blamed Maduro as a primary source of instability in the region, including in Cuba where the regime still relies on Venezuela’s cheap oil.
“There is a regional threat, and in the case of Venezuela we have no cooperation,” Rubio told reporters Dec. 19. “To begin with, it is an illegitimate regime. Second, it is a regime that does not cooperate. It is anti-American in all its statements and actions. And third, it is a regime that not only does not cooperate with us, but also openly cooperates with dangerous, terrorist and criminal elements.”
The Venezuelan government issued a statement condemning what it called "the grave military aggression perpetrated by the current government of the United States of America.”
