With Nicolas Maduro in U.S. custody after a pre-dawn raid and President Donald J. Trump touting a “Donroe Doctrine,” Washington has put a modern stamp on one of its oldest ideas: uncontested dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The operation in Venezuela, framed by the White House as a corrective to autocracy and a bid to unlock oil wealth, also signals an unapologetic return to sphere-of-influence politics—this time with China and Russia cast as the intruders to be pushed out.
The White House’s case mixes moral clarity with blunt realpolitik. Few will mourn the downfall of a strongman accused of jailing opponents and violating human rights. Yet the administration has been just as explicit about the material stakes. “We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken … oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said, underscoring that Venezuelan crude remains central to Washington’s calculus.
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The deeper logic, however, is strategic. “They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’” Trump told reporters, invoking the 19th-century principle that warned European powers off Latin America and established U.S. primacy in its neighborhood. “We don’t forget about it anymore. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.” The message is as old as the Monroe Doctrine and as current as great-power rivalry: the hemisphere is America’s to secure, supply and shape.
That frame is not merely rhetorical. The administration’s National Security Strategy, published in early December, codifies a “Trump Corollary” in black and white: a hemisphere “free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets” and supportive of “critical supply chains,” with continued U.S. “access to key strategic locations.” Read alongside the Venezuela raid, the blueprint functions less as vision statement than as operating manual.
The echoes of history are unmistakable. James Monroe’s 1823 warning morphed across two centuries into periodic interventions and Cold War-era coups that toppled leftist governments in favor of pro-Washington—and often autocratic—allies. Today’s version is less about Europe than about Moscow and Beijing. The strategic geography is unchanged; the competitors are not.
In Caracas, the post-raid ledger of winners and losers extends well beyond Maduro’s circle. Russia and China offered his government a survival kit—oil purchases that softened the bite of Western sanctions, a steady pipeline of Russian arms and reliable diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Hours before U.S. forces moved, China’s special representative for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, met with Maduro in a show of solidarity that Beijing quickly followed with condemnation of Washington’s “hegemonic acts” that “seriously violate international law and Venezuela’s sovereignty.” The optics underscored the contest at the heart of the “Donroe Doctrine”: who sets the rules in the Americas, and who gets to stay.
Inside the administration, the intellectual scaffolding for this approach is well established. Several senior officials, notably Secretary of State Marco Rubio, view the region through the prism of Cold War-era containment and Cuban influence. Rubio has long sought to sever Havana’s levers across the hemisphere; after Maduro’s fall, he suggested Cuban leaders should be “at least a little bit” concerned. The president, in less diplomatic terms, told Colombian President Gustavo Petro to “watch his ass.” Such rhetoric is not merely warning; it is a signal that Washington now considers proximity a security principle again.
That recalibration is consequential because it sidelines traditional nods to sovereignty in favor of leverage, supply chains and denial of “hostile” footholds. The practical definition of “hostile” will matter. Chinese investment in ports, power grids and telecommunication networks across Latin America—once pitched as development opportunity—can be recast as strategic encroachment. Russian security cooperation—once dismissed as nuisance—becomes a red line. The doctrine’s clarity, in other words, is matched by its elasticity.
It also raises hard questions about ends and means. The fall of a widely reviled strongman is one outcome; the precedent of a cross-border raid to remove him is another. Washington’s critics will argue that substituting one form of lawlessness for another corrodes the very norms the U.S. claims to defend. Beijing’s charge of “serious” violations of international law will find a ready audience among governments wary of becoming next in line for regime-change logic masked as a security imperative.
For Latin American leaders, the signal is double-edged. Some will welcome a decisive blow against a failed petro-state that exported instability; others will see a return to a paternalism that kept the region in Washington’s shadow for decades. The administration’s own rhetoric—openly pairing resource extraction and strategic denial—will fuel both interpretations. In democracies already polarized by corruption and inequality, the question of alignment with Washington, Beijing or neither will sharpen.
The doctrine’s reach, moreover, is not strictly regional. The National Security Strategy’s reference to “key strategic locations” echoes Trump’s earlier fixation on Greenland’s value, an Arctic outpost tied to missile defense, rare minerals and shipping routes. The connective tissue is the same: critical assets, secured supply lines, denied rivals. If Venezuela is the field test, other geographies—Caribbean ports, Panama’s canal-adjacent infrastructure, the Arctic—are potential theaters.
None of this ensures stability. Russia and China are unlikely to cede the field. Beijing’s shock at the raid signals an intent to raise the diplomatic costs and to deepen nonmilitary influence where it can. Moscow’s weapons pipeline to Caracas has proved resilient before. If Washington’s strategy is to force choices—between Chinese capital and American favor, Russian hardware and U.S. security partnerships—it must also prepare to offer credible alternatives: capital that arrives without strings and governance support that delivers legitimacy, not just power.
For now, the administration has established momentum and a message. Maduro’s detention removes a spoiler in a country whose oil riches have long been squandered and whose citizens have borne the brunt. It also anchors a doctrine that prizes dominance over deference, assets over abstractions and near-term leverage over long-term consent. Whether that posture yields a more secure hemisphere—or simply hardens fault lines with rival powers—will depend on what follows the show of force in Caracas: reconstruction that benefits Venezuelans, diplomacy that brings neighbors along and a strategic steadiness that does not mistake surprise for strategy.
What is clear is that the “Donroe Doctrine,” once a provocation on a podium, is now policy in motion. The raid in Venezuela is the opening chapter, not the epilogue. The consequences will reach far beyond Caracas, and the bill for the new order—paid in alliances, investments and legitimacy—will come due sooner than the rhetoric suggests.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
