Barely 48 hours after toppling the leader of Venezuela and asserting U.S. rights to the country’s oil, President Trump threatened Colombia with a similar fate.
He declared that Cuba was not worth invading because “it’s ready to fall,” and he once again claimed that Greenland needed to come under American control. He seems to feel emboldened after the quick capture of Nicolás Maduro, the strongman who was seized on narco-trafficking charges.
“We’re in charge” of Venezuela, Trump claimed, as he described his plans to breathe new life into the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 foundational statement of U.S. claims over the Western Hemisphere. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal,” said Trump, who keeps a pensive portrait of the fifth U.S. president near his desk in the Oval Office. “But we’ve superseded it by a lot, a real lot.”
He called his update, named after himself, the “Donroe doctrine.”
A new doctrine?
Trump talks in blunt declarations. A more nuanced vision is described on Page 15 of the Trump administration’s two-month-old National Security Strategy, a document that appears to have been written with this moment in American territorial adventurism in mind. The strategy describes the “Trump Corollary” to Monroe’s principle that European powers have no business meddling in the Americas.
The Trump Corollary asserts an American right to “restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere,” and to deny “non-Hemispheric competitors” — namely, China — “the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets.”
What vital assets? Trump explained Saturday that the U.S. must have access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world. Trump was opening Venezuelan crude only for American companies — some owned or operated by his supporters. (He said he expected to keep selling crude to China, which takes most of Venezuela’s paltry output.)
It falls short of a global strategy; Trump has not said whether, if he claims the Western Hemisphere, China is free to do the same in Asia.
The president never discussed restoring democracy in Venezuela as an American objective, even though the country had a decades-long tradition of free elections until Hugo Chávez took power in 1999.
The promotion of democracy gets little attention in the document the White House published in November. (An exiled diplomat, Edmundo González, is widely considered the winner of the country’s 2024 election. He says he is the legitimate president. Trump hasn’t mentioned him.)
A new context
When Monroe devised his doctrine two centuries ago, the United States was a nation of roughly 10 million people. Its Navy was limited to a few dozen ships, manned by 3,500 or so sailors and 500 officers — about a fifth the size of the force the Pentagon amassed off Venezuela to oust Maduro.
Latin American countries were shaking off their distant masters, Spain and Portugal. Monroe worried that the European powers would seek to make them colonies again.
Here is the logic of this past weekend: Trump can claim resources that, in his view, America cannot live without. He is already setting up a parallel argument for Greenland, which may have substantial rare-earth minerals.
“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,’’ he told reporters on Air Force One last night. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”
At what cost? It will be expensive to restore Venezuela’s oil system. “The infrastructure is rotten, rusty,” Trump said yesterday. But the immediate price tags may not matter to him. Venezuela, Greenland, maybe Canada: These are legacies that will, over time, pay for themselves, he believes.
Credit: The New York Times
Author: David E. Sanger
