Trump, Venezuela and the Roosevelt Corollary

Theodore Roosevelt was one of our most interesting and progressive presidents.  Donald Trump is uninteresting and uninterested to the extreme and is a political obscurantist.  Nevertheless, Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela will ineluctably link him with Roosevelt and the Roosevelt Corollary from 1904.

U.S. citizens are generally familiar with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, particularly in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.  Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev underestimated President John F. Kennedy’s willingness to deny the deployment of strategic weaponry in the Western Hemisphere.

But the Roosevelt Corollary is far less familiar to Americans.  The Venezuelan affair in the winter of 1903-1904 marked a European intervention in the New World in order to collect enormous debts that a Venezuelan dictator, Cipriano Castro, had accumulated. President Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine established the United States as an international police power in the Western Hemisphere, entitled to permit military intervention in South America if its nations mismanaged its finances or internal affairs in a way that invited European intervention.

The Roosevelt Corollary led to greater U.S. intervention, including military action in Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and fostered resentment and anti-American sentiment throughout the region.  The corollary transformed the Monroe Doctrine from a stance of keeping European powers out to an active U.S. role in maintaining order and economic stability in the Americas.

Trump’s intervention in Venezuela last week will lead to greater anti-Americanism throughout the region, and provide greater justification to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for their own regional goals in Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific, respectively.

Trump’s imperial intervention is in step with the sordid U.S. and CIA history of regime change the world over.  Interventions in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile led to instability and violence as far more vicious leaders took over the reins of government.  Long-term intervention and occupations in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were losing ventures, marked by the loss of blood and treasure.  Libya has not recovered from the U.S. and NATO intervention fifteen years ago.  Numerous efforts by several U.S. presidents to conduct regime change in Cuba were marked by failure.

This history points to the likelihood of greater failure in Venezuela, particularly in view of Trump’s threat to assume long-term control of Venezuela, placing control in the hands of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.  The inability of Rubio and Hegseth to manage the national security agenda of the United States doesn’t inspire confidence in the future management of Venezuela’s complex domestic environment.

Nevertheless, the mainstream media seem to have no problems with Trump’s jingoism to advance America’s national security.  Several days before the invasion, the New York Times dropped a long lead editorial titled “This May Be Our Last Chance to Get It Right in Venezuela,” which endorsed roles for the “authorities of the intelligence community and the Treasury and Justice Department” to “take charge of security in Venezuela.”  And before the dust has settled in Venezuela, a Washington Post editorial has termed the invasion a “major victory for American interests.”  The Post praised the fact that Nicolas Maduro will now spend the “rest of his life in a humane American prison.”

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