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| U.S. President Trump said recently he had authorized covert C.I.A. action in Venezuela and was considering ground strikes. |
U.S. President Donald Trump has been amping up action against Venezuela, so whether or not a military strike will be launched warrants close attention. The U.S. military has increased its deployments in the Caribbean. It has attacked Venezuelan boats and caused casualties.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. Southern Command would lead a joint task force — sending a strong signal that the military would carry out a strike. What's more, Trump has approved covert operations by the CIA inside Venezuela. These are rumored to include the attempted assassination of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, according to some sources.
There's no doubt that after its strike on Iran in June, United States is seen by many as willing to attack Venezuela for purposes of regime change. This could be a step in the U.S. government's attempt to control the Western Hemisphere. An article by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 30 in which he wrote that the diplomacy of Trump 2.0 includes an “American first” foreign policy. Back in 1823, James Monroe, the U.S. president, warned European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the Americas, just as the U.S. would not interfere in the internal concerns of any European nation. This became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Trump not only adores the Monroe Doctrine but is also working to create his own doctrine. According to Trump, the Western Hemisphere is the traditional sphere of influence of the United States. Thus, he lauded the Monroe Doctrine during his first term and in September 2018 remarked at the 73rd UN General Assembly: “It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe that we reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs.” Since the beginning of his second term, a key focus of U.S. foreign policy has been enhancing control over the Western Hemisphere, citing illegal immigration, the need to reshape supply chains and the desire to push forward great power competition.
The New York Post coined the term “Donroe Doctrine” — a bastardization of Donald and Monroe — to characterize Trump's policy in the Western Hemisphere. Amused by this portmanteau, Trump even posted a picture of the article on his social media platform, Truth Social. It seems he has gone much further than Monroe, however, as he talked about taking over Greenland and making Canada the 51st state of the U.S. According to Trump, border lines are “imaginary.” So the U.S.-Canada border is an “artificially drawn line.” Such rhetoric has a sense of the concept of manifest destiny — the belief that the U.S. was entrusted by God with the right to expand its sphere of influence.
Apparently, Trump is seeking to amplify the power within the Americas during his second term to pressure other countries to coordinate with the U.S. on its immigration and economic agendas. With his declaration that the U.S. was “under attack” on its southern border, Trump mobilized the U.S. military, claiming a national emergency, to infringe upon the sovereignty of other countries in the hemisphere. His orders included deploying 1,500 additional troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, using helicopters to patrol the border and changing the status quo. Previously, there had been no active-duty troops there.
As a result, the military zone in southern U.S. continues to expand and is expected to cover nearly one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border area. Additionally, Trump has designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations to legitimatize U.S. military strikes. Accusing the Venezuelan government of being a drug smuggling terrorist regime, he deployed a slew of warships and nuclear-powered submarines off the Venezuelan coast as part of his expanded war on drugs.
Immigration is an even more critical issue in Trump's second-term. The U.S. government has been increasingly coercing other nations located in the Americas over immigration and border security. Under the pressure of tariff threats, Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala have agreed to accept U.S. deportees and step up border patrols. Trump even used military aircraft to fly migrants abroad, an act that Colombian President Gustavo Petro described as a violation of the “dignity that every human being deserves” because “a migrant is not criminal.” For those who cannot be directly deported to their countries of origin, the Trump administration sought to forcibly send them to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and several countries in Africa.
Matias Spektor, professor of international relations at Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Brazil, characterized Trump's actions as “predatory” — discarding any pretense of transactional diplomacy and using threats of tariffs or military action to compel other countries to yield.
The “Donroe Doctrine” is also aggressive geopolitically, as it attempts to cripple the influence of the world's other major powers on the neighbors of the United States. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt developed a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting that the U.S. might “exercise international police power” in flagrant cases of wrongdoing. The Trump administration calls certain countries' cooperation with China a mistake and attempts to constrict diplomatic exchanges.
During an interview in January, Rubio hyped up the notion of a “China threat” in Latin America and expressed concern over China's supposed control of the Panama Canal. Calling this “unacceptable” to the United States, he added that when its core national interests were threatened, Washington had the right to regain control through force.
Under pressure from Trump, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced plans to curb imports from China. The U.S. administration pressed Argentina to dismantle its currency swap arrangement with China. Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone warned that the U.S. would withhold support for Argentina's loan request from the International Monetary Fund if the agreement with China remained in place. China-Chile cooperation in outer space has also been subjected to U.S. obstruction. The two nations plan to build an observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert to track near-Earth objects. A U.S. Space Force official said that this observatory would accelerate China's space expansion, especially its low-orbit satellite deployment.
In addition, the Trump administration is seeking to curb the expansion of China's Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America. It has forced Panama to quit the initiative and sees the China-backed Chancay Port project in Peru as a thorn in its side. The Trump administration is attempting to use the threat of military force to deal with competition from China and to use security issues as leverage to pressure Latin American countries. During a meeting in May at the Pentagon with Peru's Minister of Defense Walter Astudillo and Foreign Minister Elmer Schialer in May, Hegseth remarked that China poses a grave “threat” to Latin America and suggested that Peru should join the U.S. to deter China.
It is not hard to see from these developments that “contraction” might not be the right word to summarize Trump's foreign policy in his second-term. The U.S. does hope to reduce its burden in safeguarding the international order, but what the it wants in the Western Hemisphere is only expansion.
Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it succinctly: “Trump is not an isolationist.” The U.S. president opposes other countries expanding their sphere of influence to the U.S. periphery and expects to handle global affairs within the U.S. sphere of influence in a U.S. sort of way. The international community should heed Trump's military strikes on Venezuela and other countries in the Americas to prevent the calamity of war from taking hold in Latin America.
