With his dramatic weekend actions in Venezuela, President Donald Trump has commenced implementation of his vision for Latin America and the Western Hemisphere, presaged in his recently announced National Security Strategy.
In that document, released last month, the Trump administration declared that the United States will “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” – a 21st-century addition to the 19th-century vision for hemispheric relations.
The corollary proclaims a more aggressive stance toward perceived national security threats in the region and a willingness to take military and other coercive actions in pursuit of U.S. interests.
Why We Wrote This
What was behind the seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro? The Trump administration’s hemispheric strategy recalls the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts a U.S. right to intervene in Latin America in cases of “chronic wrongdoing.”
Saturday’s actions – the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas to face federal drug-trafficking charges in the U.S., and the deadly bombings of military installations and some civilian buildings across the country – had “Trump Corollary” written all over them.
As did the president’s repeated references to Venezuela’s oil wealth and assertions that U.S. oil companies will return to revive the country’s oil production and take back what he said the U.S. is owed.
For the administration, the “Trump Corollary” is a dusting off and updating of Monroe’s 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, which asserts a U.S. right to intervene in Latin America in cases of “chronic wrongdoing.”
Yet for some analysts, the developments of recent weeks are less about drugs and oil – although those factors are not negligible – than about a reasserting of American power.
“What has become clear over the past month of the new National Security Strategy and assertion of the Trump Corollary – the boat strikes and other military actions in the Caribbean, and now the actions inside Venezuela Saturday – is how this is all about power and the Trump administration reasserting that might makes right,” says Britta Crandall, a political scientist specializing in Latin American studies at Davidson College in North Carolina.
“Driving this escalation and emerging vision for the region is a worldview defined much less in terms of the strategic alliances built up over decades,” she adds, “and more by the exercise of power in the pursuit of U.S. national interests.”
The world will have its first opportunity to collectively respond to the U.S. actions when the United Nations Security Council meets in emergency session Monday. Also on Monday, Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are expected to be arraigned in federal court in Manhattan in New York.
Mr. Trump and other administration officials took the position they had warned Mr. Maduro as they proclaimed U.S. hegemony in the region.
“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot,” Mr. Trump said in remarks to the press Saturday. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
Assertions that, going forward, it will be “America’s interests first” in the hemisphere were underscored by administration officials on Sunday news programs.
Addressing Venezuela’s oil wealth and U.S. plans to take control of it to affect Venezuelan policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on ABC News’ “This Week,” “We’re hopeful … that it does positive results for the people of Venezuela.” But, he added, that “ultimately, most importantly, [it would be] in the national interest of the United States.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told “Fox News Sunday” that the U.S. would insist on leadership in Venezuela that will be “a partner that understands that we are going to protect America.” She said the U.S. is “not going to allow you to continue to subvert American influence and our need to have a free country … to work with.”
Saturday’s military intervention sent shock waves through Latin America and indeed the entire hemisphere.
“This action underscores that the U.S. is very blatantly looking to the countries to the south in the pursuit of resources and certain key minerals,” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “The U.S. will be looking for the same ‘coerced obedience’ from the region, and especially from smaller countries, that it imposed in the case of tariffs.”
In terms of individual countries, Cuba (and its communist regime) could be the first to feel a real impact from the Venezuela intervention, some analysts say, suggesting that financially beneficial arrangements between the two countries, including state-to-state payments, are unlikely to last.
“If you consider the number of Cubans working in Venezuela who have been a significant source of hard currency for the island, it seems likely that this is going to hit hard and fast,” says Dr. Freeman.
Cuba has gradually reduced its dependency on Venezuelan oil over the past decade as production has declined. But a blow to income could further impair Cuba’s already strained services, especially electrical generation.
“If blackouts start to hit the capital,” Havana, Dr. Freeman says, “that could lead to huge demonstrations and political instability.”
Others say Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia, led by leftist anti-Trump President Gustavo Petro, may also have something to worry about.
“Leaders in the Western Hemisphere are looking at the world differently today and realizing that the norms we’ve lived by have been eroded and changed,” says Dr. Crandall. “But I think at the top of the list of those concerned would have to be Petro,” especially after Mr. Trump warned him Saturday to watch himself, she says.
In remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Mr. Trump repeated unfounded claims that Mr. Petro “has factories where he makes cocaine.” He also cited the fact that Colombian cocaine is being shipped to U.S. markets.
Beyond the hemisphere, analysts say the two key world leaders to watch for their response to the Venezuela intervention will be China’s Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The big powers, and especially China and Russia, are likely to draw two very different lessons about the U.S. from all of this,” says Michael Desch, an international affairs professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
“First lesson is that America’s big stick is back, and so they are going to have to take America’s perception of outside malefactors in the region into account,” he says. “But the alternative is that they see the U.S. applying a spheres-of-influence approach to relations with its near region,” he adds, “and they seize it as an opportunity to apply something similar” in their own spheres.
“Does this set the stage for a ‘Xi-roe’ doctrine that China applies to Taiwan and elsewhere in the region?” he quips. Or as others have speculated, does the arrest of Mr. Maduro encourage Mr. Putin to consider swooping into Kyiv to abduct Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy?
For many foreign policy analysts, Mr. Trump’s surprising declaration Saturday that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela raises questions about whether Mr. Trump, who came into office eschewing “forever wars,” is tempted to try his hand at nation-building.
After the setbacks and failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, could Mr. Trump be tempted to demonstrate his prowess with nation-building 3.0?
Mr. Rubio appeared to back away Sunday from his boss’s vow to “run” Venezuela. But benefiting Mr. Trump if he does choose that road is that Venezuela has a solid base of political and economic institutions to build upon, despite the deterioration under Mr. Maduro and his mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez.
“Venezuela is not Afghanistan,” Dr. Crandall says.
Others suggest that Mr. Trump is likely to lose interest in “running” Venezuela, especially as he realizes that the country’s dazzlingly vast oil reserves are not going to be tapped for billions in revenue anytime soon.
Dr. Desch, citing the president’s “track record” in Gaza and elsewhere, says, “I suspect that before long, the president will declare victory in Venezuela and move on to something else.”