Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0 Outlines Imperial Intentions for Latin America

On Wednesday, December 10, Donald Trump announced that the United States had seized a tanker in the Caribbean carrying more than 1.6 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil.

“Large tanker, very large, largest one ever, actually, and other things are happening,” Trump told the press.

The seizure is only the latest move in a long build-up of U.S. military action in the Caribbean and increasing U.S. threats against Venezuela and its President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump — without evidence — says Maduro is the head of an international terrorist group running drugs into the United States. He has called Maduro’s days numbered.

Over the last three months, the United States has hit at least 22 alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing more than 80 people. The campaign is the first unilateral lethal action the U.S. military has undertaken in Latin America since the 1980s.

The United States has now amassed the largest military buildup in the Caribbean in decades, including the world’s largest warship, the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. Fifteen thousand U.S. troops are stationed in the region, on the ready.

Responding to news of the tanker seizure, Democratic Senator Chris Coons told NewsNation that he is “gravely concerned that [Trump] is sleepwalking us into a war with Venezuela.”

Even Congress has been shocked by how the administration has conducted the boat strikes. But a new document offers insight into the thought process behind Trump’s threats and actions in the region.

On December 4, the White House released a 33-page document titled the National Security Strategy. It lays out U.S. military goals and foreign policy strategies for the world.

“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” it reads on page two. “This document is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history.”

The National Security Strategy condemns U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. It champions the U.S. economy and military and says that the United States “must be preeminent” in the Americas and around the world. If there is one overarching principle it is the concept of “peace through strength.”

“Strength is the best deterrent. Countries or other actors sufficiently deterred from threatening American interests will not do so,” it reads. “The United States must maintain the strongest economy, develop the most advanced technologies, bolster our society’s cultural health, and field the world’s most capable military.”

Front and center is the Western Hemisphere. It’s the first region mentioned in the document — China isn’t mentioned until page 23. The priority and focus on the Americas clearly marks a shift away from U.S. attention elsewhere around the world.

One detail in the document stands out more than any other — a reference to a new “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. This is made twice — first it’s included top among the overall policy goals and then again in the section on the Western Hemisphere.

The term “corollary” may seem like an odd choice to describe Trump’s embrace of the foreign policy position, but it is actually a clear historical nod to a moment when the Monroe Doctrine was used to justify widespread U.S. military actions in the region.

Now, analysts believe this is the direction we are headed again.

The Roosevelt Corollary

When U.S. President James Monroe issued his state of the union address on December 2, 1823, it included in it an articulation of a foreign policy position that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Essentially, the doctrine was a message to European countries following the independence of most of the countries of the Americas: Foreign powers had no right to interfere in the politics of the newly independent nations of the Western Hemisphere.

The “doctrine” was applauded by many independence leaders in the Western Hemisphere, including Simon Bolivar.

But by the beginning of the 20th century, the United States had grown in prominence, power and ambition. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” vastly reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine, essentially turning it into a tool to justify U.S. intervention across the region.

“Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship,” read the Roosevelt Corollary. “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation. And in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

The United States would roll out exactly that police power — deploying marines, invading and occupying countries, intervening again and again across the Americas, under the guise of stability and security while advancing U.S. interests.

“Teddy Roosevelt basically says, our goal is still to kind of keep the Europeans out. But in order to do that, we’re going to be proactive. We’re going to be unilateral,” Alan McPherson, a professor of Latin American history at Temple University, told Truthout. “We’re going to be kind of a cop on the beat. And the beat is going to be our neighborhood. It’s going to be the Caribbean.”

“We’re going to patrol it, and walk softly, carry a big stick,” McPherson said. “And we’re going to have this sort of international police power to keep foreigners out. But sometimes you have to do it ahead of time.”

In the subsequent years, the United States would invade and occupy the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and many more countries, under the pretext of the Monroe Doctrine.

The late distinguished historian of U.S. foreign policy Walter LaFeber wrote that it got “to the point where the United States Marines become known in the area as ‘State Department troops’ because they are always moving in to protect State Department interests and State Department policy in the Caribbean.”

The Trump Corollary

Trump’s use of the word “corollary” is not an accident. It is a direct reassertion of a return to a Monroe Doctrine where the U.S. flexes military, political, and economic power to achieve its goals in the region. Though those goals still may seem unclear, the Trump Corollary reads as a veiled threat against countries who might be unwilling to bend to U.S. interests.

“We will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine,” the National Security Strategy document states. “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.”

Analysts say the Trump administration’s visible actions toward Latin America in recent months — the seizure of the oil tanker, the boat attacks, threats of war with Venezuela, intervention into Honduran elections, tariffs on Brazil — all fit into this rubric.

Arizona State University associate professor of Latin American history Alexander Aviña explains that, for him, the National Security Strategy is the “signal of a realistic assessment from Trump’s people that they can’t compete, or militarily or economically dominate China.”

“So the way to take on China is to retrench U.S. power and dominance in the Americas. No more space or tolerance for an alternative government or ideas of governance as represented perhaps by a place like Venezuela or Brazil,” where left governments are unwilling to submit to U.S. demands, Aviña told Truthout. In July, Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian goods, citing a trial against Trump ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup d’état following the 2022 Brazilian elections.

“It’s just all about sheer U.S. power,” said Aviña.

In moments of defeat or weakness, the U.S. has often returned its focus to dominating the hemisphere. This happened in the wake of the Vietnam War. By the early 1980s, Central America was the top focus for U.S. foreign policy, with the United States spending billions of dollars a year in interventionist policies across the region — backing bloody authoritarian dictators and training and supporting paramilitary groups fighting left governments.

Isolationism, for the United States, doesn’t actually mean isolation. It means the U.S. shifting its attention back onto its own hemisphere, and doubling down on the countries the United States has long considered its own backyard.

“If we think back historically, to the moment of so-called U.S. isolationism in Latin America,” said Aviña, “that was actually a period of constant U.S. military intervention to the tune of 34 invasions,” marked over a period from the end of the 19th century until the mid-1930s.

Like the Roosevelt Corollary, which, following 1904, would be used for years to justify intervention after intervention across the region, the new National Security Strategy is a means of justifying the policies, threats, and attacks Trump may unleash across the region.

“It’s going to take a while to digest everything, but it’s easy to think of this as a return to imperialism — sort of neo-imperialism — where the United States is using its military force to get what it wants,” McPherson told Truthout. “The National Security Strategy that the Trump Administration just published is essentially saying, we’re going to use our military to get more out of Latin America.”

That includes raw resources and markets. It is not by accident that Venezuela is Trump’s top target. Venezuela happens to be both one of the most antagonistic left governments to U.S. interests in the region and the country with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, just across the Caribbean from the United States.

McPherson said that the goal of the corollary is more about an intensification of neoliberalism, rather than a simple return to the past. “What really comes out of the National Security Strategy, at least in terms of Latin America, is that the priority of the U.S. government is U.S. corporations,” said McPherson. “What this government is essentially saying is that governments are neoliberal puppets of corporations. And so we need to apply this to foreign policy.”

Trump allies are excited for a heyday for U.S. corporations if Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is removed. “Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day,” Florida Republican Congresswoman Maria Salazar told Fox Business, in an interview in late November, where she called for increased U.S. pressure to overthrow president Maduro. “This is a number 1 goal for this administration from the economic standpoint.”

“It’s just pure extraction,” said Aviña. “It’s like that Elon Musk tweet about how we will intervene in Bolivia to get all the lithium that we want whenever we want.”

Bolivia is home to one of the largest reserves on the planet for lithium, a key ingredient in Lithium-ion batteries, which power the electronic vehicles made by Elon Musk’s Tesla.

“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” Elon Musk tweeted in July 2020, in the wake of the 2019 coup against President Evo Morales.

Gone are the past U.S. pretexts of spreading democracy, or standing for the good of humanity, or civilization building.

“This guy [Trump] shows up and he says, ‘I’m not going to waste my time with that. This is about sheer revanchism and power. And if you don’t do what we tell you to do, we’re going to make you pay’,” said Aviña. “I think this is why it’s difficult to define what a Trump corollary is other than ‘do what we tell you to do.’”

There is another way some experts see the Trump foreign policy and the new National Security Strategy: A repudiation of the liberal international order set in place in the wake of World War II and a return to a 19^th-century idea around sites of power.

“Trump believes that these big powers [Russia, China and the United States] are entitled to have their own spheres of influence,” University of Denver Latin American History Professor Rafael Ioris told Truthout. “And in terms of the United States, that region is, of course, the Western hemisphere, which does not bode well for Latin America.”

“It’s not entirely surprising given the extreme right logic, but it’s somewhat surprising because it hasn’t really been seen in the 21st century.”

Professor Alexander Aviña says on a scale of 1 to 10, he is highly concerned about the increasing possibility of direct U.S. intervention in Latin America.

“It’s seven or eight,” he told Truthout. “If you think about it, the U.S. hasn’t directly gotten involved militarily in Latin America many times since the end of World War II. Dominican Republic in 1965. They invaded Grenada in 1983. Panama, 1989. So the fact that we are where we’re at now … It’s a really scary moment that hopefully we will somehow avoid.”