New Delhi: US President Donald Trump has justified the attack on Venezuela and Washington’s harder line in Latin America by invoking a nearly two-century-old policy first set out by an American president in the early 1800s.
On January 3, he described the operation that led to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro being captured as a modern update of the Monroe Doctrine, the landmark 1823 declaration issued by the fifth US President James Monroe. He said the United States would “run the country” until “a safe, proper and judicious transition” could be completed.
“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we have superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe document,” he said, blending his own name into the historic doctrine.
“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he added.
To understand why Trump is invoking the Monroe Doctrine, it helps to look at where the policy came from and how it has been used over time.
The doctrine was based on the idea that the world should be divided into spheres of influence controlled by major powers. President James Monroe first laid out the principles on December 2, 1823, during his seventh annual State of the Union address to Congress, although the policy would not formally bear his name until many years later.
In that speech, Monroe had warned European nations against interfering in the political affairs of the Americas, making it clear that any such move would be seen as a direct threat to the United States.
He argued that the Western Hemisphere and Europe should operate in separate political worlds and avoid entangling themselves in each other’s affairs.
In return, Monroe promised that the United States would respect existing European colonies in the Americas and would not meddle in the internal affairs of European nations. At the same time, he declared that North and South America were no longer open to future colonisation by European powers.
The doctrine aimed to preserve the existing balance in the region while pushing Europe to step back from the Americas altogether.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the doctrine by introducing what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary. This addition claimed a US right to intervene in Latin American countries to prevent European involvement, particularly in cases of debt disputes or political instability and to safeguard American interests in the Western Hemisphere.
Roosevelt articulated this stance after European creditors threatened action against several Latin American nations. He argued that the United States had both the right and the responsibility to step in under the doctrine. The corollary followed closely on the Venezuelan crisis of 1902-1903, when Venezuela refused to repay foreign debts.
In the decades that followed, the expanded Monroe Doctrine was repeatedly cited to justify US interventions across the region, including in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua.
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan adopted a hardline approach to Latin America, a strategy critics described as imperialist. In Nicaragua, his administration backed the right-wing Contras against the left-wing Sandinista government that ultimately led to the Iran-Contra arms-trafficking scandal.
Reagan also supported right-wing governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, despite allegations of widespread human rights abuses.
Cuba has faced sustained pressure from Washington since Fidel Castro’s revolution through military threats and decades of sweeping economic sanctions that is in place today.
There have also been reports over the years of efforts to encourage coups against Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, before Chavez died in 2013.
With Trump now explicitly invoking the doctrine in relation to Venezuela, a policy born in 1823 has once again been placed at the centre of modern US foreign policy in the Americas.
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