In Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, we heard “no more forever wars.” Now, as part of his seeming thirst to plaster his name on everything, we have the “Donroe Doctrine.” The Monroe Doctrine, issued by President James Monroe in 1823, was certainly an assertion of U.S. dominance over the Western Hemisphere. It also rejected old-style European colonialism, in which European powers seized an “underdeveloped” country, installed a local puppet, or one of its own nobles or generals, and looted the new colony of its resources.
We always talked a better game than we played in Latin America; for more than a century our reputation was stained by a continuing series of coups, invasions, filibustering, dollar diplomacy, and bullying. Latin American countries are vividly aware that Puerto Rico was the only territory we took permanent possession of that was left in a permanent colonial status rather than achieving statehood.
We made some progress in restoring good relations in Latin America since the 1978 Panama Canal Treaty, which undid the most egregious of our territorial grabs. There have been notable exceptions, including the 1989 invasion of Panama and the support of death squads in El Salvador and Honduras, which wrecked those countries and created our immigration crisis. But overall, the direction was positive.
Now we seem to be pursuing some old-style European colonialism. The Venezuelan boat strikes were quickly dropped as an excuse. Regime change also had nothing whatever to do with the incursion: except for Maduro, the old regime, including the person responsible for torture and the organizers of drug networks remains in place. And Donald Trump has said he’s proud to do business with them, though he also claimed to be running Venezuela himself.
No, it was all about Venezuela’s oil. And, like the interactions between the United Fruit Company and the CIA, which led to the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, Trump consulted beforehand with oil executives but not Congress.
Cheerleaders hail the effort as if it were already completed successfully, but even Trump acknowledges that we might be there for the long term. U.S. oil companies showed little interest in investing in Venezuela’s antiquated oil infrastructure and if he did persuade them to invest, he would probably have to offer security to drilling sites, pipelines, terminals and ports, refineries, etc.
International leaders were quick to condemn the US actions, starting with the boat strikes, a clear, textbook example of murder. The invasion itself violated several principles of international law: countries are forbidden from invading other countries, which we did. Foreign leaders have a measure of insulation from arrest by other countries, which we ignored. Blockading is considered an act of war and seizing another country’s ship is an act of piracy.
And there is no articulated strategy underlying any of this. What’s our objective? When have we “won?” What are our plans for the oil revenues? When will there be elections? Are we providing redevelopment assistance?
Our acts of war against Venezuela are not the only examples of foreign adventures that Trump’s backers initially dismissed as “just a joke.” He has also threatened Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. He has also ratcheted up his threats about Greenland. “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
He appears to have drawn back in the face of universal pushback from Europe, but that pipe dream will return. Meanwhile, NATO countries deploy troops to Greenland to protect NATO territory from an erstwhile ally; the prime minister of our closest neighbor and ally says we are at a point of rupture; and the Danish parliament bursts into uproarious laughter when Trump’s desire for a Nobel Prize is mentioned.
The underlying philosophy of the “Donroe Doctrine” appears to be a return of mercantilism, the 16th-18th century political philosophy that stressed protecting domestic industries, granting state monopolies to trading companies, imposing strict tariffs on imported goods, exploiting the wealth of colonies, and ruling that colonial trade could occur only with the mother country. Mercantilism had its run until debunked by Adam Smith’s articulation of free trade and growth, for many years the economic Bible of conservatives. Mercantilism is at odds with the entire economic structure of the modern world, which acknowledges national sovereignty and seeks political stability and open trade relationships. The United States is moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the world and may soon learn the benefits of having trading partners and allies. As singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell observed, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got, till it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Leon Reed is a former US Senate staff member, defense consultant, and history teacher. He is a 10 year resident of Gettysburg, where he writes military history and explores the park and the Adams County countryside. He is the publisher at Little Falls Books, chaired the Adams County 2020 Census Complete Count Committee and is on the board of SCCAP. He and his wife, Lois, have 3 children, 3 cats, and 5 grandchildren.