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On Jan. 3, U.S. forces struck Venezuela and seized President Nicolás Maduro, flying him and his wife to New York for prosecution on drug-trafficking allegations and other charges. U.S. President Donald Trump quipped that the operation felt lifted from a blockbuster. Its aftermath, however, is more likely to deliver a painful history lesson than a Hollywood ending.
The raid shattered international law and steamrolled the United Nations Charter, which bars the use of force against other states unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Yet it fits squarely within a long U.S. tradition of coercive diplomacy and intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean. Trump’s flirtation with a self-styled “Donroe Doctrine” signals that his administration is eager to turn back the clock to the turn of the 20th century.
Maduro’s abduction revived memories of past U.S. interventions. Observers were quick to point to Cold War parallels—such as the CIA backing for the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973—as well as the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, when the United States invaded the much smaller nation; captured its ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega; and later tried him on drug charges.
But despite some similarities, Trump’s underlying vision more closely resembles the early-20th-century policies of then-U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. As such, Trump’s policies will face the same dilemmas—leaders who resist U.S. demands, public opposition in the United States and Latin America, and costly cycles of intervention and retrenchment. The architects of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine will soon confront frustrations that echo those that Washington faced a century ago.
A black and white political cartoon with Roosevelt in military garb and bare-footed carrying a big stick and a rope leading warships as he steps through the waters of the Caribbean. Warships arranged in a half circle are labeled Debt collector, the Sheriff, and the Receiver. The coastline of parts of Latin America are labeled with countries including: Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela.
An undated political cartoon depicts Roosevelt walking through the Caribbean Sea, carrying a big stick, and leading a fleet of war ships.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Republican officials had already begun to invoke the Monroe Doctrine during the first Trump administration and 2024 presidential primaries.
Former President James Monroe first articulated the doctrine in 1823, framing the Western Hemisphere as a distinct, U.S.-dominated political sphere that was closed to European machinations at a moment when the United States was still consolidating and much of Latin America stood on the cusp of shaking off European colonial rule. In the decades that followed, Monroe’s words gained new meanings through corollaries and interpretations added by successive administrations.
Roosevelt’s own corollary to the doctrine emerged from disputes over Venezuela. U.S. involvement there had deepened in the 1890s. Seeking to limit the influence of European powers, in 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney proclaimed a U.S. right to mediate a border dispute between Venezuela and the British colony of Guyana. Olney’s famous claim that the United States was “practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law” prefigure Trump’s proclamations in sentiment, if not in vocabulary.
Emboldened by its swift victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War, which left the United States in control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as well as dominant in Cuba, Washington’s approach grew more coercive. When Venezuela defaulted on its debt and European powers imposed a naval blockade in 1902-03, Roosevelt stepped in. Aided by Secretary of State Elihu Root—who, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio today, had a personal interest in the region—Roosevelt insisted in the years after the crisis that the United States would exercise an “international police power” in the Western Hemisphere.
1912 painting by Clyde O. DeLand titled “Birth of the Monroe Doctrine.” From left to right: John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, William Wirt, President James Monroe, John Caldwell Calhoun, Daniel D. Tompkins, and John McLean.
1912 painting by Clyde O. DeLand titled “Birth of the Monroe Doctrine.” From left to right: John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, William Wirt, President James Monroe, John Caldwell Calhoun, Daniel D. Tompkins, and John McLean.
Trump’s New Corollary
The president’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is rhetorically satisfying but carries real risks. 
An illustration shows Donald Trump from the nose down with a red oil rig as a tie.
An illustration shows Donald Trump from the nose down with a red oil rig as a tie.
The ‘Donroe Doctrine’ Makes No Sense
Even a generous reading results in a heap of contradictions.
Roosevelt’s successors figured that interventions would be good business, too. U.S. banks could manage these countries’ finances. Protected by Washington, U.S. investors poured capital into Cuban sugar; Panamanian infrastructure; and soon enough, Venezuelan oil, often marginalizing European businesses in the process.
Now, Trump insists that U.S. oil companies be given priority access to Venezuelan reserves and that U.S. firms should manage Panamanian ports. The subtext is that China will be excluded, and the tide of Latin American resource nationalism will be reversed. To ensure this, regional leaders must operate within narrow parameters set by the United States.
Just as Trump now insists that the United States will “run” Venezuela through its favored intermediaries, U.S. presidents in the early 20th century expected governments in Central America and the Caribbean to take direction from the State Department. To the recurring surprise of the United States, many Latin American leaders and publics came to resent being treated as Washington’s wards rather than as sovereign actors—especially when their opponents labeled them as puppets of U.S. interests. Washington’s interventions and diplomatic pressure throughout the 20th century helped seed long-standing distrust of U.S. motives across the region.
In the region’s capitals, politicians pursued their own visions of the national interest. Even leaders close to Washington had to balance U.S. demands against pressures at home. The era’s most durable dictators, including Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala, the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, and later Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, were political survivors. They willfully calibrated their rhetoric and did just enough to placate Washington while using U.S. backing to coerce and co-opt opponents at home. Early indications suggest that interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez is attempting to thread that same needle.
Still, the region’s half-hearted obeisance frustrated Washington. Latin American leaders’ refusal or inability to meet U.S. demands pulled the United States deeper into local disputes. As Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has done in recent days, some figures have welcomed U.S. attacks on their foes.
Teddy Roosevelt, waring a brimmed white hat, stands among men dressed in typical suits and hats of the period. A plant with palm leaves frames the picture at right. A cane-backed chair is in the foreground.
Roosevelt stands in Rio de Janeiro before an expedition to the Amazon River, which began in 1913.Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images
In the early 20th century, intervention exacerbated internal divisions and perpetuated the instability that then justified further involvement to quell unrest and shield U.S. economic interests. Washington’s logic was expansive: Disorder anywhere became a threat requiring action. In 1904, Cuban rebels threatened to overthrow the U.S.-backed president almost as soon as the U.S. military ended an occupation that had started with the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt responded by installing a U.S. citizen as governor-general, backed by nine U.S. warships anchored in Havana harbor. U.S. forces returned to occupy Cuba in 1912 and again from 1917 to 1922.
The Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua saw similar protected occupations, spurred by U.S. perceptions that Latin Americans were not competently running their own countries. The echoes are clear in Trump’s threats to move against the cartels said to “run” Mexico and Colombia, and in his calls to “take back” the Panama Canal and assert control over Greenland to blunt alleged Chinese encroachment.
Unable to satisfy U.S. demands, recalcitrant politicians were removed or replaced, sometimes by fiat and sometimes in elections organized by U.S. Marines. The United States wrote Nicaragua’s election laws and sponsored and supervised the country’s votes throughout the 1910s and 1920s. U.S. officials also helped orchestrate the election of an allied general to power in Cuba in 1924. Domestic opposition to U.S.-backed rulers fueled partisan competition, whether driven by anti-imperialist principle or the scramble for patronage. Resistance spilled into the streets and the countryside alike.
In Cuba, strikes and protests toppled presidents, prompting recurring U.S. political and military intervention. In Nicaragua, Gen. Augusto Sandino led a protracted guerrilla war against a U.S. occupation that stretched on for more than two decades. What began as limited interventions hardened into occupations. And when those occupations met resistance, as in Nicaragua or Haiti, they slid into bloody counterinsurgencies.
Donald Trump is seen out of focus in the foreground as he speaks into a microphone. In focus behind him is a painting of Teddy Roosevelt wearing safari gear astride a rearing horse.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in front of a painting of Roosevelt in Washington on Jan. 9, 2020. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
U.S. banks, businesses, and investors may have profited, but for U.S. taxpayers, the Roosevelt corollary and its companion policy of “dollar diplomacy” were money pits. Interventions grew deeply unpopular at home, denounced as forever wars waged without serious public debate or congressional authorization.
In 1922, Sen. William H. King argued for ending expensive and futile U.S. occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic: “We have kept in those two countries for a number of years several thousand marines at a cost of millions and tens of millions of dollars to the taxpayers of the United States,” he said
The interventions soon became widely despised across Latin America, too. Much as Argentine President Javier Milei has cheered Trump’s arrest of Maduro, some South Americans in the early 20th century initially welcomed heavy-handed U.S. presence in small Central American and Caribbean states as a force for good. But as U.S. campaigns dragged on, Latin American opposition stiffened.
Writing “To Roosevelt” in 1903, Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío recognized that the United States was “potent and great” but warned the president—a big-game hunter—that he would unleash “a thousand cubs of the Spanish lion” onto invading powers. Drawing on the region’s tradition of “republican internationalism,” Latin American diplomats and lawyers coordinated their pushback to Washington, imposing foreign-policy costs on U.S. unilateralism. They isolated the United States in regional and global institutions and issued escalating denunciations of bloody U.S. occupations in Haiti and Nicaragua.
Only after nearly three decades did a shift take hold. Republican President Herbert Hoover and Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that there were better ways to advance U.S. aims. Chief among them was heeding Latin American demands for self-determination, which were forcefully proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Wilson himself, however, notoriously failed to apply the principle in Central America and the Caribbean, lamenting that it fell to the United States to teach Latin Americans “to elect good men.”
The United States’ eventual, if temporary, turn to nonintervention was driven less by altruism than by calculation. Hoover, an engineer and fiscal conservative, saw intervention as inefficient and politically corrosive at home and abroad. He also listened, touring Latin America before taking office and popularizing the idea that the United States should be a “good neighbor,” not a bully.
It fell to Franklin D. Roosevelt to finish what Hoover began, earning credit as the architect of the Good Neighbor policy. With the Great Depression deepening and fascism rising in Europe, the younger Roosevelt sought to cut costs, avoid new entanglements, and rebuild relations with the region.
Yet unrest in Cuba early in his term nearly pulled him back into the interventionist cycle launched by his distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. Despite pressure from his friend and intervention-minded ambassador in Havana, Sumner Welles, Franklin D. Roosevelt narrowly resisted military action. Soon after, both men embraced Latin American calls for a hemispheric pledge of nonintervention. Franklin D. Roosevelt later credited his own experience in the Wilson administration with teaching him the futility of U.S. interventionism in Latin America.
It seems that the United States will have to relearn these historical lessons. The unilateral U.S. interventionism of a century ago created a vicious cycle. Then as now, revived through the Donroe Doctrine, the United States sought to “run” countries through threats and proxies.
Trump warned that if Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Over and over, the United States’ insistence on narrow interests has clashed with Latin America countries’ domestic politics and desires for self-determination. Washington has sought to coerce leaders into doing what it thought was right, and one intervention has so often led to another. For ignoring those historical lessons, the United States may also end up paying a big price.
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