Vice President Delcy Rodríguez — who Trump said would partner with Washington to “make Venezuela great again” — denounced the intervention as “barbaric” and a “kidnapping.” Adding to the confusion was that the White House offered few details about what running an oil-producing nation of about 30 million people would entail. A US official said Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who has spent his career criticizing Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez — would take the leading administration role. President Donald Trump said American oil companies will “spend billions of dollars” to fix oil infrastructure in Venezuela. For now, there’s no plan spelled out to have American troops or administrators in Venezuela. But Trump signaled he’s keenly focused on the country’s petroleum, saying the US would have a “presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil.” That could mean a greater role for Chevron Corp., which still operates in Venezuela under waivers from sanctions, as well as for other major American oil companies. Trump’s resistance to keeping American boots on the ground and his dismissal of Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado as a “nice woman” not ready to take power suggest he decided on giving Rodríguez and other Maduro loyalists a second chance over full-blown regime change. Trump is “essentially trying to control the vice president and people around her through carrots and sticks to get the outcomes the United States wants,” said Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. “We’ll see if it works.” On Sunday, Trump told the Atlantic magazine that some rebuilding will be needed in Venezuela as he issued a warning to Rodríguez. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” he said. Rubio said Sunday that the US would watch her actions more than her rhetoric. “We are going to make an assessment of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what we know, what they’ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “So we’re going to find out.” Trump warned of a potential second wave of American attacks if that cooperation isn’t forthcoming. “All political and military figures in Venezuela should understand what happened to Maduro can happen to them, and it will happen to them” if they weren’t “fair” to the Venezuelan people, he said. “A bigger concern really would be that this all falls apart here, that there isn’t an effort to make sure there’s a successful handoff,” said Matt Terrill, managing partner at Firehouse Strategies.