The ousting of Nicolás Maduro, the indicted Venezuelan dictator turned temporary Brooklynite, was not the “audacious” and “spectacular” assertion of American power that the Trump administration proclaims, no matter the skill and precision of the U.S. forces that executed the raid to capture him. In geopolitical terms, the move is not an advance for the United States, but a retreat.
The Trump administration is hunkering down around North and South America — and then beating its chest about regional supremacy. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned,” the president said in his initial news conference on the operation. Marco Rubio’s State Department followed up this week like a football coach psyching up his players for a home game. “This is OUR hemisphere,” it declared Monday in a social media post. The administration’s tough-guy talk about Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and even Greenland contains imperialist echoes — but also signals its preference to stay safely on the American side of the Risk board.
“In everything we do, we are putting America first,” the president affirmed in his recent National Security Strategy. Now, Trump is putting the Americas first.
At the end of the Cold War, when the United States seemed to stride over the planet unopposed, basking in its “unipolar moment,” it would have seemed odd to restrict U.S. influence to the Americas, let alone to take such pride in that limitation. How will foreign leaders, especially those in Moscow and Beijing, not to mention Kyiv and Taipei, react to a world in which Washington is now busy, and satisfied, with the duties of a merely regional hegemon, when it is no longer leader of the Western world, but only of the Western Hemisphere?
Trump likes to say that his Venezuela policy builds off the Monroe Doctrine, which President James Monroe articulated in an address to Congress in 1823. He is more right than he knows. In that speech, Monroe did not only claim pre-eminence over the Western Hemisphere and tell European powers to keep out; he also pledged to leave Europe alone in return. “With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected,” Monroe explained, whereas the United States policy toward Europe is “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.”
When Trump boasts of the “Donroe Doctrine,” it’s vital to remember that the original Monroe Doctrine affirmed Washington’s respect for international spheres of influence, of a global balance of interests and terrain among great powers. In his National Security Strategy, Trump does much the same, giving a wide berth to the most powerful nations.
He pays relatively little attention to Russia. He calls for a “cessation of hostilities” in Ukraine, but mainly with the goal of re-establishing “strategic stability” with Moscow, and he chastises Europe for considering Russia an “existential threat.” (They’re really on par militarily, he says, except for that pesky nuclear arsenal.)
On China, the Trump strategy focuses more on the economic relationship between the United States and China than on the threats Beijing poses to Taiwan or others. It maintains U.S. opposition to “any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” but it emphasizes the regional nature of the dispute over Taiwan, calling on Japan and South Korea to take more of the load.
The document is detailed in what it foresees for the Americas. The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, it states, includes redeploying U.S. forces from other parts of the world to focus on the Western Hemisphere to stop drug traffickers and send back immigrants. The National Security Strategy even places the Western Hemisphere first (ahead of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa) in its rundown of regional priorities.
The threat of North Korea goes unmentioned in the 33-page strategy document. Iran, which the United States bombed last year and which Trump still rails against, appears only in passing. The continued empowerment of Marco Rubio — secretary of state, national security adviser, Spanish-speaking son of Miami, ambivalent viceroy of Venezuela — also speaks to the preferred scope of the administration’s foreign-policy vision.
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When the Obama administration declared the end of the Monroe Doctrine in 2013, in a speech delivered by Secretary of State John Kerry, it did so because it had bigger ambitions, because it was focused on the challenges of climate change, Asia, and the still ongoing post-9/11 wars. In reviving the doctrine, the current administration shows that its assessment of the threats to American security, even compared to Trump’s first term, has shrunk in breadth.
The Trumpian focus on Latin America is not solely a matter of geographic primacy; there are clear interests the United States is pursuing here, too. The president has been forthright about his desire to exploit Venezuela’s natural resources and build the equivalent of an American oil empire. In a social-media post on Tuesday, Trump claimed that Venezuela will be turning over 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States, and that the proceeds of the sales will be “controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” He has also said that the United States may subsidize U.S. oil companies as they rebuild Venezuela’s energy infrastructure over the next 18 months.
Venezuela, welcome to Infrastructure Week. Hope it works out better for you.
Rebuilding Venezuela’s democracy does not appear to be among those perceived American interests. For the moment, the Trump administration seems ready to work with the corrupt regime that had kept Maduro in power. This is not “Neocon Don,” as some have nicknamed him. The neoconservative dreamers imagined that U.S. intervention could transform a country like Iraq into a beacon of democracy. Trump sees oil rigs, not beacons. He is into nation fleecing, not nation building.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, he complained that the United States “should have kept the oil” after invading Iraq. On this score, he is remarkably consistent.
While Trump’s National Security Strategy pays lip service to the threats posed by great powers, the payment is small and the services limited. “The United States cannot allow any nation to become so dominant that it could threaten our interests,” Trump’s strategy declares. But this imperative “does not mean wasting blood and treasure to curtail the influence of all the world’s great and middle powers.” The administration prefers to “maintain global and regional balances of power,” conceding that “the outsized influence of larger, richer and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.”
In other words, to each his own. Washington’s own is right here, in what American politicians often called, with casual condescension, our “backyard.” In a telling bit of bureaucratic symbolism, last June the Trump administration shifted military responsibility for Greenland from the Pentagon’s European Command to Northern Command. “Greenland has long played an important role in the defense of North America,” the brief news release stated. “Realigning Greenland within U.S. Northern Command’s area of responsibility strengthens our ability to protect the U.S. homeland.” Translation: Greenland is now part of our backyard.
As for what China and Russia do in their backyards — well, that’s up to them.
Regional retrenchment may be a realistic approach, especially if you accept that American power and influence is not what it used to be, and if the American president is more comfortable emulating the world’s most dangerous strongmen rather than challenging them. But it does not seem like the strategy, or the policy, of a confident superpower, or of a confident president.
“Our adversaries remain on notice,” Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, boasted after Maduro’s capture. “America can project our will, anywhere, anytime.” But by focusing so zealously on the Western Hemisphere, the administration is limiting the number of those adversaries and narrowing the range of its will. The Donroe Doctrine risks turning America into the personification of a tired and aging superpower, sitting on the front porch, shaking his fist at the misbehaving locals, and yelling at them to get off his lawn.
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