By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Under President Trump, America is back

“Welcome to 2026,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on Saturday during the Mar-a-Lago press conference celebrating the U.S. military attack on Venezuela. “Under President Trump, America is back.” Back, that is, to the early 1900s era of gunboat and dollar diplomacy when the United States aspired to imperial hegemony over Latin America, engendering enmities that have never entirely dissipated.

For Donald Trump, who envisions a world divided into spheres of influence, U.S. domination in the region is a goal unto itself. “America’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he told reporters just hours after the predawn raid involving aerial attacks on multiple Venezuelan airports and the forcible rendition of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Asked what would be next for Venezuela, Trump answered, “We’re going to be running it.” So much for his promise of no more nation-building.

The U.S. bombing of Caracas, the abduction of Maduro, and Trump’s plan to take over Venezuela’s oil industry have dealt a profound blow to the inter-American system first envisioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy and codified in the 1950s by the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance and the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS).

Although Maduro has few friends in Latin America, the leaders of most major countries have condemned the U.S. attack. While regional leaders can do little to push back in the short term, the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America suggests that the diplomatic damage done to Washington’s standing in the hemisphere could prove to be more costly than Trump and his foreign-policy team imagine, even if they get their way in Caracas, which is by no means certain. Trump is notorious for blowing up the norms and institutions that have shaped the international order since the end of World War II. From NATO and the United Nations to the World Bank and World Trade Organization, “America First” has meant a U.S. foreign policy reliant on hard power and skeptical of multilateral engagements and commitments.

In the first few weeks of his second administration, Trump previewed how that attitude would apply in the Western Hemisphere. He demanded that Panama City give back the Panama Canal and Canada surrender its sovereignty to become the 51st U.S. state. Late last month, he repeated his demand that Denmark turn over Greenland or face possible U.S. military action to take it.

Venezuela has been the focus of Trump’s unilateral aggressiveness since last September, when the U.S. military began blowing up alleged drug smugglers’ boats in the Caribbean, and Trump has accused Maduro of being a narcoterrorist kingpin of the so-called Cartel de los Soles.

But Trump’s obsession with Venezuela, egged on by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has never been about drugs. Venezuela does not produce cocaine (let alone fentanyl). It is a secondary transit point for Colombian cocaine, mostly destined for Europe. The cocaine slated for the U.S. market travels north from Colombia and Ecuador by way of the Pacific Ocean or overland through Mexico. Moreover, if punishing drug traffickers were Trump’s main objective, he would not have pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of facilitating the trafficking of more than 400 tons of cocaine to the United States.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz speaks at a U.N. Security Council meeting concerning the situation in Venezuela in New York City on Jan. 5

Trump’s deployment of a massive naval flotilla in the Caribbean naturally evoked memories of gunboat diplomacy, when the United States routinely sent naval forces to the region as an instrument of coercive diplomacy or a prelude to intervention. A hundred years ago, gunboat diplomacy was closely associated with President Theodore Roosevelt and rationalized by the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in which Washington claimed the right to intervene in Latin American countries to maintain stability.

Two dozen U.S. interventions and half a dozen long-term occupations over the next two decades built enormous resentment among Latin Americans—so much so that many of them remained neutral during World War I, and Germany thought it might convince Mexico to declare war on the United States.

 

 

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