Food lines stretching around the block, unsafe air travel, a paralyzing fight between the President and the opposition legislature. Washington this week was starting to feel like a caricature of a dispatch from a failing Latin-American dictatorship. On Wednesday afternoon, when I spoke with Senator Marco Rubio over the phone, the lack of progress on Capitol Hill to end the partial U.S. government shutdown, then in its thirty-third day, was positively alarming. But that wasn’t why he was calling. Rubio had just tweeted about another unfolding crisis, the one in economically devastated Venezuela. The tweet warned that the White House would consider “ALL options” in its rapidly escalating fight with the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro. Not long after, Rubio responded to my query about it. “I know for a fact the White House is considering various options,” the Republican senator from Florida told me, having been summoned to the White House a day earlier for an extensive strategy session. I asked if he was talking about actual war, recalling how President Trump had once randomly volunteered, in August of 2017, that he was considering the “military option” in Venezuela. “That’s not what we are doing now,” Rubio responded, though he wouldn’t rule it out.

For the better part of two years, Rubio has been lobbying Trump to take on Maduro, and on Wednesday he appeared to have succeeded in a big way. Around 1 P.M., the President briefly interrupted his public spat with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the time and place of the annual State of the Union address to unveil a major intervention in Venezuela: the recognition of Juan Guaidó, the little-known, thirty-five-year-old head of the opposition National Assembly, as the country’s legitimate interim leader. Tens of thousands took to the streets in Caracas, and more than a dozen other countries quickly joined the United States in backing Guaidó’s claim to the Venezuelan Presidency. Maduro called it a U.S.-backed coup attempt and, in retaliation, ordered the expulsion of American diplomats within seventy-two hours. It’s anybody’s guess what will happen next. Pretty much all we know for sure is that Trump’s surprise decision to throw the United States into the middle of Venezuela’s chaos represents a major challenge to a teetering government.

This is not the crisis we expected to be talking about this week. The U.S. government is in its own paralyzed gridlock and Trump’s approval rating is cratering because of it. In his announcement, Trump cited Venezuelans’ demands for “freedom and the rule of law,” which is not exactly the centerpiece of the President’s foreign policy toward any other country in the world. Trump and his Administration have not only ignored human-rights abuses in other countries but celebrated some of the world’s worst perpetrators of them. He began his Presidency by promising Arab dictators in Riyadh that he would not lecture them and, even in the face of the extrajudicial killing of a U.S. resident, he has stuck to it.

In typical Trump fashion, the decision about Venezuela happened quickly, at the last minute, and apparently without the normal process that would have accompanied such a significant move in any other Administration. On January 10th, Maduro was sworn in for a new term as President, even though the U.S., and much of the rest of the international community, had declared his reëlection, last year, as illegitimate. That seemed to be where the matter stood until January 15th, when Rubio, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere (and has used that perch to turn himself into what I’ve often heard referred to as the State Department desk officer for Latin America), took to the Senate floor. Citing the Venezuelan constitutional provision that calls for the head of the National Assembly to assume the Presidency in case of its vacancy, he demanded that the Trump Administration recognize Guaidó as the country’s interim leader. Rubio’s prodding, along with that of exile groups, sent the Administration “scrambling,” McClatchy News reported.

On Tuesday, Rubio and other Florida politicians attended a meeting with Trump and his national-security team, where, for an hour and fifteen minutes, they discussed the emerging plan to recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s acting leader and weighed “contingencies” that might arise in one of the world’s major oil suppliers. There was no final decision at that point, Rubio told me on Wednesday, though he believed Trump was leaning toward action. Just a few hours later, Trump went ahead and did it, joined by a strong lineup of other countries, including many of Venezuela’s neighbors, as well as Canada and France. “The phrases ‘Trump administration’ and ‘coordinated diplomatic response’ have not typically appeared in the same sentence over the past two years,” Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, noted in the Washington Post. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, tweeted, “Strong men around the world are befuddled.”

But it’s not so much a crazy aberration as a telling one. In fact, Trump, who governs by personal instinct, has had an odd obsession with Venezuela from early on in his Administration, when Rubio brought the wife of the jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López to make an in-person appeal to Trump in the Oval Office. Trump professed his willingness to take military action against Venezuela in the summer of 2017, at the same golf-course photo opportunity where he threatened to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea. I later reported in Politico that he repeated the possibility of a “military option” in a private dinner in New York with Latin-American leaders, who assured the President that that was not their preferred course for dealing with Maduro.

In the absence of long-standing views on many foreign-policy issues, the President has chosen, as he so often does, to personalize things with Venezuela. Rubio has figured that out, and adroitly played off it, especially since the Trump personnel shuffle last spring, which brought two like-minded hard-liners into the Administration’s key foreign-policy jobs: John Bolton, as the national-security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State. Both had advocated tough measures against the leftist regime of Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Now, with Venezuela descending into political and economic crisis, members of both parties, including those, like Rubio, who have been wary of Trump’s America First and damn-the-allies approach to much of the rest of the world, are supportive of Trump’s decision. “On this particular issue, he has taken on an autocrat and done so in a multilateral way that I think deserves credit,” Rubio said.

Other political leaders might agree as a matter of policy, but there’s something deeply unsettling, and very Trumpy, about inciting a full-fledged diplomatic crisis in this way. In our conversation, Rubio seemed to acknowledge that Trump made an abrupt move on Venezuela. “The President has acted boldly on this issue,” he said. “In a more traditional Administration, we would still be having interagency debates.”

That is precisely what is so worrying. “It’s characteristic of the way they do things,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, told me. “There’s no process, but there’s no process on any issue. I’m not sure the implications were really thought through. I’m not sure anybody really knows what this means in terms of the practical effects of having parallel governments.”