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Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio sug­gest­ed Sun­day that the Unit­ed States would not take a day-to-day role in gov­ern­ing Venezuela oth­er than en­forc­ing an ex­ist­ing “oil quar­an­tine” on the coun­try, a turn­around af­ter Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump an­nounced a day ear­li­er that the U.S. would be run­ning Venezuela fol­low­ing its ouster of leader Nicolás Maduro.

Ru­bio’s state­ments on TV talk shows seemed de­signed to tem­per con­cerns about whether the as­sertive Amer­i­can ac­tion to achieve regime change might again pro­duce a pro­longed for­eign in­ter­ven­tion or failed at­tempt at na­tion-build­ing. They stood in con­trast to Trump’s broad but vague claims that the U.S. would at least tem­porar­i­ly “run” the oil-rich na­tion, com­ments that sug­gest­ed some sort of gov­ern­ing struc­ture un­der which Cara­cas would be con­trolled by Wash­ing­ton.

Ru­bio of­fered a more nu­anced take, say­ing the U.S. would con­tin­ue to en­force an oil quar­an­tine that was al­ready in place on sanc­tioned tankers be­fore Maduro was re­moved from pow­er ear­ly Sat­ur­day and use that lever­age as a means to press pol­i­cy changes in Venezuela.