Venezuela: The ‘Donroe doctrine’ takes shape

President Trump “used to offer only vague answers” when asked to explain the U.S. military campaign against Venezuela, said The Economist in an editorial. He’d cite the need to stop drugs, or to reclaim oil assets. “Rarely, if ever, did he mention regime change.” But after last week’s “stunning predawn raid” that captured President Nicolás Maduro,
Trump laid out “an extraordinary view of the use of American power,” saying he would impose “American dominance” over the entire “Western Hemisphere.” Under this muscular revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, now the “Donroe Doctrine,” all countries from Canada to Argentina will yield to Washington. Venezuela will sell oil on terms set by the U.S. Cuba’s leftist regime will be replaced. Troops could be deployed against the cartels “running Mexico,” Trump said, while Colombian President Gustavo Petro will have to “watch his ass.” And Greenland, part of NATO ally Denmark, could be seized. This abrupt return to a “spheres of influence” model of geopolitics is a death blow to the “law-based, humanistic world order,” said M. Gessen in The New York Times, and a gift for Russia and China. By declaring his right to invade and plunder America’s neighbors, Trump has greenlit Chinese leader Xi Jinping to seize Taiwan, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “to take as much of Europe as he wants to bite off.”

Trump likes slapping his name on things, said Rich Lowry in National Review, but the Donroe Doctrine just rearticulates a principle that has guided our foreign policy for 200 years. The 20th century alone was “littered” with examples of the U.S. using its military dominance to advance its interests in Latin America, from Teddy Roosevelt’s “grabby maneuvering to secure the territory for the Panama Canal” to the 1989 raid ordered by George H.W. Bush that captured Panama’s Manuel Noriega. Trump’s rhetoric is more “blatantly self-interested” than we’re used to, but there is a long and sensible “American tradition” of our policing and controlling our own geographical backyard.

Rhetoric matters, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. Yes, at certain moments the U.S. has acted without regard for international law, or respect for smaller nations’ sovereignty. But if the American-led world order that emerged after World War II stands for anything, it’s a belief in those “moral precepts,” and in the system of international rules that was built upon them. That Trump justified the Maduro raid purely in terms of American self-interest, and seems more interested in extracting loot than spreading democracy, confirms that we now live in a world—as Trump adviser Stephen Miller bragged to CNN this week—“that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

It was always going to end this way, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Some critics are wasting their breath on the “hypocrisy” of our supposedly “isolationist” president embracing overseas adventures. But “expansionism is baked into the cake” of authoritarian movements, where the obsession with dominance always “eventually requires demonstrations of greatness at other countries’ expense.” As his poll numbers slide, the Epstein scandal festers, and the midterms draw closer, the allure to Trump of more military conquests “will only grow,” said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. And few would be splashier or easier than seizing Greenland. Anyone who thinks Trump is “merely trolling” with his renewed fixation on Arctic real estate should go “book a holiday in Caracas.”