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President Donald Trump ordered a mission to capture and extradite de facto Venezuelan ruler Nicolás Maduro from a military installation outside Caracas last week. The mission was successful, but controversial and kicked off a debate over presidential war powers. The president should return to the non-interventionism of his 2016 platform.
Maduro’s capture has reignited the long-standing argument about the United States’ relationship with other countries in the Western Hemisphere. The president has articulated what is being called the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, an aggressive reassertion of the United States’ military and political preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, predicated on military assertiveness and aggressive unilateral diplomatic posturing.
There is promise and peril in the Trump Corollary. Journalists and historians painting Trump’s actions as uniquely aggressive or invasive have to reckon with the history of the United States since the 1840s. The Mexican War saw American soldiers invade Mexico and annex territory from that republic. In 1853, American expansionist Democratic diplomats tried to strongarm Cuba away from the Kingdom of Spain.
Republicans in the 1860s picked up right where Democrats left off. President Ulysses S. Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic in 1868, but was defeated by the Senate. The 1898 Spanish-American War placed U.S. soldiers in Cuba and Puerto Rico; the former became an independent republic. The latter turned into a U.S. commonwealth. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. soldiers and Marines participated in a series of “Banana Wars” to stabilize the region, which oscillated between democratic governance and military dictatorships. The pattern continued during the Cold War.
Trump’s interventionism is not unusual with regard to his predecessors. Most American presidents get involved in Latin America somehow, and Venezuela has often played an outsized role in those interventions. Jay Sexton, the leading historian of the Monroe Doctrine, noted that “historically, Venezuela has been the pretext or the trigger for a lot of corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine.” Going back to the 19th century, according to Sexton, Venezuela has “been a divided, fractious country that’s had difficult relations with foreign powers and has also courted relationships with rivals of the United States.” In some ways, Trump’s raid to nab Maduro is nothing new under the sun.
But in another sense, Trump’s policy breaks with his predecessors. His coalition was built on a rejection of neoconservative interventionism, wherein the United States set out on supposedly ill-fated adventures to bring liberal democracy to unwilling populations. Trump rejects neoconservatism, but seems willing to flirt with extractive neo-mercantilist empire; American arms guarantee American extractive access to Venezuelan raw material, particularly petroleum. While there is nothing wrong with American companies wanting to trade in Latin America, doing so at the point of a gun, with a Marxist dictatorship still largely in place, presents as many potential difficulties as would neoconservative interventions in support of regime change.
In 2016, the then-candidate Trump indicted his predecessors for interventionism and laid out his own independent foreign policy course.
“We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” Trump said in a 2016 speech near Fort Bragg.
Trump said policies of “intervention and chaos” would come to an end. During his first term, he kept his promise. American interventions were few and measured. The 45th president rightly earned the goodwill of Americans for this approach to foreign policy. It is in his interests, and that of the United States, to re-adopt it for the duration of his presidency.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history.
