What actually is the “Donroe Doctrine”?

The Trump administration is taking a shockingly interventionist approach to the Western Hemisphere, as shown by last weekend’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his threats of military intervention against several other countries in the region. But we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Donald Trump came into office a second time pledging to retake the Panama Canal and annex Greenland and possibly Canada. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Less than a month into his term, he was slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and Colombia for their perceived defiance of his agenda. His choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had such longstanding interests in Latin American affairs that many observers saw him as effectively running US policy toward the region from his Senate office during Trump’s first term. 

Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, Mike Waltz (now ambassador to the UN), had dubbed the White House’s regional approach “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.” Trump lately appears to prefer the New York Post-coined “Donroe Doctrine.” 

In Trump’s view, his predecessors had let the doctrine, which originally stated that foreign powers should avoid meddling in the Western Hemisphere but evolved into a view that the US should be the preeminent power in the region,dangerously lapse. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot,” he said on Saturday.

Whatever you call it, it’s clear that the region is no longer the “lost continent” of US foreign policy. Whatever else the Maduro operation was, it made clear that all the language in Trump’s recently released national security strategy about restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” after “years of neglect” wasn’t just bluster.

What’s less clear is the purpose of the new attention focused on the region. What is the US actually trying to get out of Latin America, and are the region’s governments going to provide it? 

US interventionism in Latin America is not new

For all the talk in the past few days about how a Rubicon has been crossed in the use of force and the violation of international norms, the use of military force or covert action to depose a government in Latin America or the Caribbean is far from unprecedented. 

Between the US invasion of Cuba in 1998 during the Spanish-American war and Bill Clinton’s military intervention in Haiti in 1994, there were roughly 17 instances of successful direct US-backed regime change in the region — and far more cases where indirect US pressure may have played a role in bringing down a government. 

“In the broad sweep of history, it’s amazing how unexceptional this is,” Brian Winter, Latin American politics analyst and editor of Americas Quarterly magazine, told Vox. “The exceptional period was the last 35 years” following the end of the Cold War. 

Winter added that “this White House is more focused on Latin America than any other since probably the 1960s,” referring to the era that followed Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, and included a number of military interventions meant to prevent the spread of Communism in the region as well as a confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. 

But US interventionism in the region was relatively common up through the 1980s and early 1990s. As many have noted, Maduro’s capture took place on the 36th anniversary of the arrest of Panama’s Manuel Noriega, another dictator indicted in US courts for drug trafficking. 

The administration has explicitly harkened back to this history with its invocations of the Monroe Doctrine.

In particular, Trump’s assertion of a “Trump corollary” to the doctrine links his policy to the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, which asserted that the US would use military force as a last resort in “flagrant cases of…wrongdoing or impotence” by regional governments — an approach that became known as “gunboat diplomacy.”  

If there’s a difference between the most recent case of US regime change and the previous era, it may be the lack of clarity in American motives. The US has intervened in the past to prevent foreign meddling (European imperialism in an earlier era, Communism later on), to protect US economic interests, or to remove a suspected drug trafficker. 

The justification for the Venezuela operation was a shifting mix of the three. For months, starting in December, as the US targeted suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, the administration’s messaging focused on Maduro’s role as an alleged “narcoterrorist” and cartel boss. 

Months into the campaign, Trump and his aides began focusing on Venezuela’s past nationalization of American oil interests and the president is now heavily focused on retaking Venezuela’s oil resources for American countries. 

Since the operation, US officials have made much of the 32 Cuban security personnel guarding Maduro who were killed as well as dismantling Iranian and Hezbollah networks in the country. It’s also interesting that Maduro’s capture came just hours after a meeting with Chinese diplomats. Foreign meddling wasn’t a major feature of the administration’s rhetoric in the months leading up to the event, however. Trump doesn’t appear particularly interested in restoring democracy to Venezuela, though the country’s democratic opposition are nonetheless hopeful this will work out in their favor. 

In the end, different high-ranking Trump officials may have been interested in Venezuela for different reasons —crime, migration, energy, foreign influence — and put together a strong enough case for Trump. Calling it emblematic of a “doctrine” is probably generous.

A one-man Cold War

Trump repeatedly stated the day after Maduro was captured that the US would be “running” Venezuela, though the reality appears to be that the country’s government will be left in place–minus Maduro–so long as it meets the administration’s as-yet unspecified demands. 

Given the US’s actions over the past year, citizens of other Latin American countries could be forgiven for wondering if this definition of “running” applies to their countries as well. Trump has endorsed favored candidates in elections in Argentina and Honduras this year, and threatened tariffs against Brazil in order to stop the prosecution of his ally, Jair Bolsonaro. 

More is likely to come in 2026 with presidential elections being held in Brazil and Colombia. At this point, it would be surprising if we don’t see Truth Social messages endorsing a preferred candidate. 

Colombia’s left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, has been a particular foil for Trump since the beginning of last year. In recent days, he has said that Petro — the leading regional critic of the Venezuela intervention — should “watch his ass” and called him a “sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.” (Colombia is a major producer of cocaine but there’s little evidence linking Petro to the trade.) Unlike Venezuela, which has been a thorn in the side of US administrations for years, Colombia is one of America’s closest security partners in the region. 

“If Colombian voters choose a Washington allied candidate, someone more on the right, the bilateral relationship might return to its normal state,” said Beth Dickinson, a Colombia-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. “But I do really worry about what could happen if a left-leaning candidate is elected.”

There’s precedent for this kind of meddling as well. President Woodrow Wilson famously quipped that he would “teach the South American republics to elect good men” and his successors intervened in overt and covert ways dozens of times in the region’s elections in the subsequent decades. 

In Trump’s case, the meddling often seems less motivated by ideology commitment (Trump has gotten along quite well with the Communist leaders of China and North Korea) than personal animus. “Petro and Trump have found one another to be useful political enemies,” Dickinson noted. 

In the case of Honduras, it appears to have been a concerted lobbying campaign by Trump allies on behalf of the country’s imprisoned ex-president rather than ideological affinity that prompted that caught his interest in the country. 

Likewise, Trump has chosen not to get behind Venezuela’s democratic opposition in the wake of Maduro’s ouster, but to work with his vice president, a committed if more pragmatic Chavista who seems willing to work toward better relations while continuing to publicly decry Yankee imperialism. (One major outstanding question of the past week is the degree of support the US may have had from elements of the Venezuelan regime in arranging for Maduro’s extraction.) As much as anything else, it was reportedly Maduro’s public displays of defiance and disrespect — notably his televised dancing — that pushed the administration to make the final decision to capture him. 

The personal factor also seems to be paramount when it comes to Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, on paper exactly the sort of lifelong committed leftist Trump should despise, who appears to have been able to keep him relatively satisfied over the past year with limited “wins” on fentanyl and border security and the two seem to have a friendly rapport. (Trump had a similarly friendly relationship with Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had literally written an entire book attacking the US president.)  

Whether that will continue now that Trump appears to be gaining a taste for military action is not clear. In the past week, Trump has resurrected an idea — discussed by him and allies in Congress since his first term — of taking military action against drug cartels on Mexican soil.”

“Is a unilateral use of force on Mexican soil probable? No,” said former Mexican ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhán. “Is it possible? Absolutely, and given what has just happened in Venezuela, I think the Mexican government should really take this very seriously.”

The stakes of Sheinbaum’s ability to manage the Trump relationship couldn’t be higher heading into a pivotal year in the relationship which will include a renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. 

Taking a pragmatic approach to managing Trump may be harder for the other country currently in the US crosshairs: Cuba. Even at the worst of times, there was always a degree of pragmatism built into the US-Venezuela relationship: US firm Chevron continued to pump oil in the country, for instance. That gave at least an opening for negotiations between the two countries early in the Trump administration and may yet allow the relationship to get back on track now that the dancing boogeyman is gone. That king of accommodation is much harder to imagine from the far more ideological Cuban regime.

The hope in Washington is that the loss of its ally and the ongoing embargo on sanctioned oil shipments will cause the sclerotic and economically distressed Cuban regime to collapse on its own. And yet this is a regime that has defied predictions of its imminent demise for more than 60 years. If it doesn’t fall, could it be the next target for military intervention?

“These folks could look at Cuba and say, ‘well, compared to Venezuela, which is a country of 30 million people, Cuba is easy. We can put boots on the ground,” said Michael Bustamante, a professor of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. “On the other hand, Cuba doesn’t have the largest oil reserves in the world, so is it worth the risk?”

Careful what you wish for

There’s always a risk when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy of retroactively trying to map a coherent worldview onto a set of seemingly impulsive and often contradictory actions. But in the case of Latin America, the foreign policy is tied to the Trump team’s much more consistent domestic priorities: crime and migration.

The view is that by neglecting the region, previous administrations have allowed crises to develop which have driven illegal drugs and migrants into the United States. This is not necessarily a view unique to this administration. The Biden administration also made a much maligned effort to address the “root causes” of migration, albeit with much different methods. The administration is also interested in countering Chinese, Iranian and to a lesser extent Russian influence (that’s what the Trump corollary actually discusses) and combating leftism.  These are not historically unusual goals. 

Whether the Trump strategy will actually accomplish any of this is another story. Maduro may have had a hand in the cocaine trade but deposing him isn’t going to stop the opioids that have devastated American communities. Migration numbers are down at the US-Mexico border now, but a full-scale collapse in Venezuela could lead to a new uptick. Perhaps governments will be dissuaded from deepening their ties with China, perhaps faced with an unpredictable America, they will look to hedge with security and economic partnership elsewhere. (Even Trump’s closest South American ally, Javier Millei, is not above selling soybeans to the communists.)

Then there are the unintended consequences. “There’s some level of ‘we’re big and bad and flexing our muscles’ [in the Trump policy.],” said James Saenz, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics in the Biden administration. “But in the past, we’ve chosen not to do these things for the long-term considerations of developing friends and allies around the world, because it provides for our security and our own economic opportunities.” The past year has already seen several European countries cut off the sharing of intelligence with the US that they believed could be used in illegal strikes against civilian boats. 

The international response to Maduro’s ouster has been somewhat muted and divided so far — very few, even on the Latin American left, are sorry to see him gone. Actions in Colombia, Mexico, or for that matter Greenland could have more profound consequences for US alliances. 

As for the political consequences in Latin America itself, at the moment, the region appears in an overall rightward political drift after recent elections in countries like Ecuador, Argentina, and Bolivia, which Maduro’s disastrous rule can take at least some credit for. The current generation of regional leaders won’t necessarily always look to do Trump’s bidding, but they may not be eager to defy him either. The longer term consequences are more unpredictable, but again, history can provide some guidance. 

“You can draw a direct line between, you know, Teddy Roosevelt’s use of the “big stick” and the rise of Latin American nationalism, which eventually gave us figures like Fidel Castro,” Winter said.

All of which is to say that future US presidents are likely to have to reckon with the legacy of the Donroe Doctrine.