Monroe Doctrine: Why Trump Dusts Off A 200-Year-Old Policy To Justify US Actions In Venezuela | World News

New Delhi: U.S. President Donald Trump justified the attack on Venezuela and Washington’s harder line in Latin America by invoking a nearly two-century-old policy first put forward by an American president in the early 1800s.

On January 3, he described the operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a modern update of the landmark 1823 Monroe Doctrine issued by the fifth US President, James Monroe. He said the United States would “rule the country” until a “safe, appropriate and reasonable transition” was completed.

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve gone way, way beyond that. They call it the Donroe document now,” he said, inserting his name into the historic doctrine.

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” he added.

To understand why Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine, it’s helpful 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 the great powers. President James Monroe first laid out the principles in his seventh annual State of the Union address to Congress on December 2, 1823; however, the policy would not officially bear his name until years later.

In this speech, Monroe warned European nations not to intervene in the political affairs of the American continent and made it clear that such a 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 interfering in each other’s affairs.

In return, Monroe promised that the United States would respect existing European colonies in the Americas and not interfere in the internal affairs of European nations. At the same time, he declared that North and South America were no longer open to future colonization by European powers.

The doctrine aimed to preserve the existing balance in the region while pushing Europe to step back completely from America.

In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the doctrine by introducing what became known as the Roosevelt Corollaries. This addition asserted the United States’ right to intervene in Latin American countries to prevent European intervention and protect American interests in the Western Hemisphere, especially in cases of debt disputes or political instability.

Roosevelt expressed this stance after European creditors threatened action against several Latin American countries. He argued that the United States had the right and responsibility to intervene under the doctrine. The corollary of this closely followed the Venezuelan crisis of 1902-1903, when Venezuela refused to pay its foreign debts.

In the years that followed, the expanded Monroe Doctrine was repeatedly cited to justify US interventions in the region, including in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan took a hardline approach to Latin America that critics of the strategy described as imperialist. In Nicaragua, his administration supported the right-wing Contras against the left-wing Sandinista government, which ultimately led to the Iran-Contra arms smuggling scandal.

Reagan also supported right-wing governments in El Salvador and Guatemala despite allegations of widespread human rights abuses.

Since Fidel Castro’s revolution, Cuba has faced constant pressure from Washington through military threats and decades-old sweeping economic sanctions that remain in place today.

There have also been reports of years of efforts to encourage coups against Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, before Chavez died in 2013.

With Trump’s open invocation of the doctrine regarding Venezuela, the policy born in 1823 has once again been placed at the center of modern US foreign policy in the Americas.