The ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ Trump’s alarming plan for imperialism, won’t stop with Venezuela

After a months-long buildup of U.S. forces in the Caribbean and a series of extrajudicial killings of alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers, President Donald Trump on Saturday declared on social media that the United States had “successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.” 

Maduro is a brutal dictator whose control of Venezuela has been catastrophic. When he lost an election in 2024, he simply threw out the results. Venezuelan GDP collapsed by 72% during his first decade in power. Nearly eight million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014, the largest exodus in Latin America.

When he lost an election in 2024, he simply threw out the results.

But none of the above is why Trump overthrew Maduro. During a Saturday news conference after the operation, he declared that his administration has adopted its own version of the Monroe Doctrine. “They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’” he said. This is consistent with the administration’s recently published National Security Strategy, which declared that the United States will “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” 

“Under our new National Security Strategy,” Trump said Saturday, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” During that news conference, Trump repeatedly said, “We’re going to run” Venezuela. He said American oil companies will be setting up shop. Trump has always wondered why the United States didn’t just “take the oil” from Iraq, and he now believes he’s in a position to take the oil from Venezuela. 

The regime change operation in Venezuela is a distraction from the main theaters of great power conflict today. Major naval assets — including the United States’ largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford — have been deployed to the Caribbean. Instead of focusing on East Asia at a time when China is threatening to invade or blockade Taiwan, the administration is fixated on a region that poses no military threat to the United States or its allies.

In 2024, Vice President JD Vance said China is the “biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it.” He was referring to the war in Ukraine, a conflict with far greater strategic implications for the United States than the existence of a kleptocratic dictatorship in South America. Trump said he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours, but it has only intensified over the past year.

Trump has a fickle attention span. He’s interested in quick wins like the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites last summer. But he has committed the United States to “running” Venezuela, and running a country after invading it is nothing like sending American aircraft on a single mission. 

What if the Venezuelan security forces don’t cooperate? What if paramilitary groups try to exploit the power vacuum? The Venezuelan government called upon “all social and political forces in the country to activate mobilization plans and repudiate this imperialist attack.” Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has demanded Maduro’s return. This may not be the tidy and quick operation Trump is hoping for. We now know Trump is willing to risk regime change — but does he have the stomach for nation-building?

Trump: "The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust…We're going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure, and start making money."

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While Russia and China have condemned the attack on Venezuela,  their domination of less powerful countries in their own spheres of influence suggests they share Trump’s values on how great powers should behave. When Trump threatened to annex Greenland, Putin said he understood that the United States would pursue its “geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic.” Trump recently said “we have to have” Greenland, despite the diplomatic crisis his threats are creating with Denmark, a NATO ally. 

Trump is serious about the “Donroe Doctrine,” and he will continue to prioritize hegemony, imperialism and unilateralism over the liberal international order the United States has maintained for the past 80 years. 

The Trump administration has spent far more energy attacking the United States’ democratic allies and institutions like NATO than Russia and China. The National Security Strategy claims that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” due to immigration, and it questions whether European countries can remain “reliable allies.” The administration has repeatedly stated its intention to withdraw from Europe and focus on dominating the Western Hemisphere.

Trump will continue to prioritize hegemony, imperialism and unilateralism over the liberal international order.

But the United States faces no serious strategic threats in its own backyard. Trump ludicrously claimed that each Venezuelan drug boat would cause 25,000 American deaths. The assault on Venezuela has nothing to do with the well-being of the people who live there. Nor is it an act of self-defense against a decaying petro-dictatorship that poses a threat to its own people but none whatsoever to the United States. 

We just got our first look at the “Donroe Doctrine.” Trump is waging war on Venezuela for one reason: to exert “American dominance” with old-fashioned shock and awe, even if doing so is a potential strategic calamity.