Give the New York Post full credit. That paper seems to have invented the term the Donroe Doctrine for a front-page story it ran last January, based, of course, on that classic phrase for the historic expansion of U.S. power in this hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine. Donald Trump (the Don) evidently loved the idea enough to repost an image of that cover on Truth Social. Let me quote a recent New York Times piece on the subject: President Trump opened the year with pledges to seize the Panama Canal, take control of Greenland, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. He is ending it by bombing boats from South America, stationing the worlds largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean, and exploring military options against Venezuela's autocratic leader. The Donroe Doctrine indeed!
And its only growing more extreme as Trumps crew continually obliterate those supposedly drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea (and the Pacific Ocean) and continue to threaten Venezuela (not to speak of Mexico) with who knows what. No more wars for the U.S. in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, not when, in his second term in office, Donald Trump has decided that its time to come home home, of course, being anywhere in the Western hemisphere from Greenland and the 51st state (oh, sorry, Canada) to Venezuela, where the Trump administration is offering nothing short of a $50 million (no, that is not a misprint) reward for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of [Venezuelan leader] Nicols Maduro for violating U.S. narcotics laws.
As I was writing this introduction, Trump and crew had already blown to smithereens 22 boats, killing at least 83 people in the Caribbean Sea (and the Pacific Ocean) and, by the time today's piece and this introduction are published, those figures will likely have gone up. And with all of that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Eric Ross put the Donroe Doctrine and the events to come in Venezuela and elsewhere in this hemisphere in true (and truly grim) historical perspective. Tom
The Trump Corollary
U.S. Imperialism in Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to Maduro
By Eric Ross
In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicols Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct intervention.
A recent wave of extrajudicial killings at sea, the directing of the CIA to launch covert ops inside Venezuela, the surge of U.S. troops into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered naval base in Puerto Rico, and the deployment of the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Gerald Ford in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench U.S. power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.
That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and distinctly dangerous. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared, echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, The Western Hemisphere is Americas neighborhood, and we will protect it.
The results of that doctrine have long been clear: immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation, and economic devastation for the many. While Washington's imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging U.S. dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not so good neighbor.
Its no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the Southern Cone became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as Operation Condor, establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands disappeared, and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.
During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct U.S. interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive U.S.-supported strongmen Juan Vicente Gmez and Marcos Prez Jimnez). That changed in 1998, when Hugo Chvez, Maduros far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of popular sovereignty and resource nationalism aimed at ensuring the nations vast oil reserves (the largest in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the latest target of Washington's efforts to undermine, discipline, and ultimately neutralize troublesome progressive governments across Latin America.
To fully understand Washington's current warpath in the region, its necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the U.S. intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.
The Rise of Plattismo in Cuba
Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington's imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as essential to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, described Cuba, then a Spanish colony, as indispensable to the country's political and commercial interests. He noted ominously that, should the island be forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, it could gravitate only towards the North American Union. Thomas Jefferson similarly maintained that the possession of Cuba was exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation. In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents Polk and Pierce sought to purchase Cuba from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.
Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid U.S. territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a providential destiny and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like land purchases could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the war of aggression that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to U.S. control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.
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