Trump, Venezuela and the doctrine that wouldn’t die
Long seen as defunct, the Monroe Doctrine is being invoked once again as a blueprint for assertive US foreign policy. Historian Greg Grandin charts the rise, fall and rebirth of an ambiguous creed
Greg Grandin
We might call it the Monroe Creed, because, really, it is more an article of faith than a doctrine of international law.
“I believe strictly in the Monroe Doctrine, in our Constitution, and in the laws of God,” wrote the founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy in 1905.
And over the years, President James Monroe’s 1823 statement — made in response to Spanish American independence movements and warning Europe that the western hemisphere was off-limits for future conquests — has become sacramental, functioning as a revered sign or a channel through which the everlasting power of the United States becomes manifest.
Politicians have repeatedly pronounced the doctrine outdated, defunct or dead.
Only to see it, again and again, revived in ever more aggressive form.
Less than 13 years ago, Barack Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry announced that the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”.
Not for long.
The Trump administration has recently affirmed the Doctrine as the framework through which Washington will deal with its neighbours in the western hemisphere and justify its assault on Venezuela.
“The Monroe Doctrine is back and in full effect,” said Trump’s defence secretary Pete Hegseth.
When President Monroe issued his original statement, he did so hesitantly, aware of the limits of US power at the time.
His remarks were slight, a few non-consecutive paragraphs scattered throughout a more than 6,000-word State of the Union address.
Two of Monroe’s most important points — warning Europe against intervening in American affairs, and declaring it “obvious” that Spain had lost its hold on its colonies — were separated by a long discussion of the increase in postal roads.
Monroe made two additional points: that Washington reserved the right to judge events taking place anywhere in the Americas based on how they would bear on US “peace and happiness”; and that the New World shared certain interests and ideals distinct from the Old World, though he didn’t specify what these interests and ideals were.
“This sets our compass,” said Thomas Jefferson of Monroe’s remarks, “and points the course which we are to steer through the ocean of time opening on us.”
If so, it was a compass that would point any direction the holder desired, for Monroe’s magic, the source of his statement’s enduring influence, is ambiguity, an ability to reconcile contradictory policy impulses: its vision of a united hemisphere reflected Jefferson’s expansionist internationalism; its declaration of a rule without consultation reinforced the unilateral isolationism of Monroe’s go-it-alone secretary of state John Quincy Adams, who is considered the Doctrine’s primary author.
Spanish America’s independence leaders, then on the eve of their final victory against the Spanish empire, read Monroe’s pledge as an amicus brief supporting their own radical republican revision of international law.
Spanish Americans celebrated Monroe’s remarks because they seemed to confirm their own anti-colonial premises, that the old justifications of dominion no longer held.
They thought they heard Monroe saying that the doctrine of conquest was void, that there was no unclaimed land, no terra nullius left in the New World awaiting discovery by Europeans, that the western hemisphere, and the new nations comprising it, were sovereign.
The insurgents should have read Monroe’s entire State of the Union address more closely, for elsewhere in the text, the president gave a rousing defence of conquest.
Since its founding, he said, the US had grown rapidly, and its settlers were filling “new territory” of “vast extent”.
Land that once had been “uninhabited and a wilderness” was now teeming with people (elsewhere, Monroe admitted this land wasn’t empty, but that its Native American inhabitants would have to be removed or face “extinction”).
Monroe’s ode to expansion is not thought of as part of the Monroe Doctrine.
But it should be, since it makes clear that whatever else it was, the Doctrine was not a renunciation of conquest and that, for the founders of the US, the horizon was limitless.
“Our rapid multiplication,” Thomas Jefferson had earlier written to Monroe, will “cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms and by similar laws.”
The ambiguity embedded in Monroe’s words — between anti-colonial sympathies and conquering ambitions — continued to befuddle some observers.
Years later, Woodrow Wilson admitted that he had often tried to pin down the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, but to no avail.
“I will confide to you in confidence,” he said, “that when I tried to define it I found that it escaped analysis.”
Such quicksilver slipperiness served the US well, mirroring the nation’s own sense of being both born out of anti-imperial struggle and building a vast informal empire.
It took time for reality to catch up with rhetoric, and for decades the US had little power to enforce the Doctrine, which remained aspirational, ridiculed by the British as an example of American self-importance: the North American man “has made maps of his empire, including all the continent, and has preached the Monroe doctrine as though it had been decreed by the gods,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1862, in the middle of the civil war.
But after the Union’s victory, the ambiguity that Spanish American revolutionaries once mistook for solidarity was steadily resolved — the Doctrine was increasingly reinterpreted by US politicians less as a defence of republican self-determination than as a warrant for unilateral intervention.
By the end of the century, with the closing of the continental frontier and the emergence of the US as an industrial power, the Monroe Doctrine ideologically linked internal domestic consolidation and external management of foreign interests, especially within the nations closest: Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, and the Caribbean islands.
Nixon had his Doctrine, Reagan his, and the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’ began to sound like a relic, associated with gunboats, military occupations and land grabs
For example, in 1895, Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state Richard Olney — in a conflict with Great Britain over where the boundary lay between British Guiana and Venezuela — radically expanded the Monroe Doctrine, interpreting it to mean that within the western hemisphere the US’s “fiat is law”.
The US was unquestionably the western hemisphere’s hegemon, said Olney, because its “infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers”.
Power, not New World values or republican virtue, made the US sovereign not just over all the Americas.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt expanded Olney’s expansion, claiming for the US “international police power” to suppress “chronic wrongdoing”.
Monroe’s original defensive warning had been fleshed out into an affirmative licence for intervention, with political stability, not the projection of sovereignty, now the Doctrine’s operative value.
In the 19th century, politicians cited the Monroe Doctrine as a war cry, used to justify the annexation of Texas, the seizure of around half of Mexico, the removal of Native Americans from their homelands, the acquisition of Puerto Rico and the occupation of Cuba.
In 1898, the populist William Jennings Bryan proposed extending Monroe’s “shield” around the Philippines, to legitimate annexing that Asian archipelago.
Interventions continued throughout the 20th century — Washington carried out more than 40 successful regime changes in Latin America — yet the citation of the Monroe Doctrine to justify such activity fell out of favour.
Franklin D Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy provided a more co-operative, less conflictive framework for organising Latin America in the run-up to the second world war, and then even as tensions mounted during the cold war, US policymakers avoided invoking Monroe.
Politicians, like Kerry in 2013, more often invoked its name only to have a chance to pronounce it dead.
Then came Trump, who often seems like he’s just had a rummage through history’s dustbin, looking for something he might find rhetorically useful.
For a moment, he tried to revive the myth of the “frontier”, but soon dropped that imagery.
Now, it’s the Monroe Doctrine.
“We sort of forgot it,” Trump said, following the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, but “it was very important.”
Trump might have had to be reminded of the Monroe Doctrine, but there’s long been a close association between the Doctrine and the America First nationalism he represents.
America First is often misunderstood as isolationist.
But it’s never been that, for its most vocal advocates have celebrated the projection of US power within the western hemisphere.
It’s better described as anti-universalist, as a tribalist nationalism that rejects the burden of global stewardship while clinging fiercely to regional supremacy.
The Monroe Doctrine occupies a special place in this worldview since, in the form it has taken under Trump, it promises dominance without entanglement.
Citing Monroe, Trump officials have carved out an area of the globe where the US need not persuade, integrate or universalise — only command, by fiat.
The Doctrine is Edenic for those, like, say, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who presents the entire postwar liberal order — the “whole period that happened after World War II, where the west began apologising and grovelling and begging and engaging these mass reparations schemes” — as being cast out from the Anglo-Saxon garden.
Monroe predates liberal internationalism; predates the United Nations and the Organization of American States; predates decolonisation; predates universal suffrage, mass migration and civil rights; predates human rights law; and predates abolition.
It’s what America First nationalists might call heritage law — not voted on, not sanctioned by courts, much less by global bureaucrats, but simply announced.
The Doctrine hearkens back to a pre-normative world, where power is exercised, not apologised for.
It makes sense that Venezuela would be the first essay in Trump’s revived Monroe Doctrine, since for more than a century — long before Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro arrived on the scene — the country has been a conflict zone, a place where fights over debt, borders, sovereignty and resources helped give shape to what became international law.
Now Trump’s assault on Venezuela — not just the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, but the killings of the speedboat operatives, the unilateral sanctions placed on Venezuelan oil, the naval blockade — is but part of his larger campaign to render that law void.
Trump’s version of Monroe bears little resemblance to past usage, where hemispheric control was at least justified as a moral project, about protecting those unnamed yet nonetheless shared values Monroe referred to in his original remarks.
Now, it’s a blunt instrument of “dominance”.
For Miller, it is a tool to secure “the national interests of America”.
For Hegseth, it’s a warrant that the US “can project our will anywhere, anytime”. Bryan imagined the doctrine as a “shield” protecting a hemisphere of sovereign nations.
In Trump’s hands, it’s a property title to what he is now calling “our home region”, by which he means not just the bounded US but the entire hemisphere.
What worked in the Venezuela raid was the performance: the visible reaffirmation that the US could still act unilaterally, still punish defiance, still impose costs, including apparently the demand for tribute in the form of tankers laden with millions of gallons of crude valued at $2.8bn, and not be held accountable for liability.
The reduction of the Monroe Doctrine to coercion and plunder is, despite Trump’s and Hegseth’s assertions to the contrary, a sign of weakness, of a regional hegemon that can’t effectively organise its hinterlands, much less respond to challenges it lays out for itself, especially countering Chinese influence.
For a country with a near-trillion-dollar military budget, it’s easy enough to stage successful grab-and-go military raids.
More difficult is doing the diplomacy needed to rebuild co-operative relationships in the region.
Naturally, Mexico, a country that defends its sovereignty zealously, has come out strongly against Monroe’s legality.
“The Americas do not belong to any doctrine or any power,” said President Claudia Sheinbaum.
“The American continent belongs to the peoples of each of the countries that comprise it.”
But even Latin American politicians aligned with Trump will find themselves on their heels, forced to defend the Monroe Doctrine, which, according to a recent 12-country poll, is rejected by more than 80 per cent of those surveyed: “Latin America is not the United States’ backyard.”
US power has been reduced to spectacle, and for spectacle to remain powerful it needs to be repeated.
Trump, the showman, knows this.
“We have to do it again.
We can do it again, too.
Nobody can stop us,” he said on Fox News.
But spectacle doesn’t just need to be repeated, but repeated in ever more audacious ways, and for Trump — who knows that his base has a low tolerance for casualties — it will be hard to top what he pulled off in Venezuela and go back to the one-and-done strikes he likes so much, in Iran and Nigeria for example.
He’s threatened Colombia and Mexico, but attacks on those countries are unlikely. Cuba’s no doubt on the hit list.
And there’s still Greenland, which Jeff Landry, Trump’s special envoy to the island, says “fits inside the Monroe Doctrine”.
Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. His most recent book is ‘America, América: A New History of the New World’
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