Until recently, the terms were relegated mostly to the pages of dusty history books. But President Trump is leaning heavily on his own understanding of these concepts to justify his attack on Venezuela, his bullying tactics aimed at acquiring Greenland and his latest threats to strike Iran. At a news conference this month, Trump said U.S. troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro
The operation, illegal according to international law, marks the latest in a long history of US interventions in Latin America, often justified by Washington with claims of regional security. Many of these interventions can be traced back to the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy principle which despite its 19th century origins has continued to influence US foreign policy over the past 200 years.
In the early hours of 3 January 2026, US forces captured disputed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both were transferred to the US, where Maduro now deposed, faces charges of narco-terrorism.
W hen Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then divided Poland with Stalin in 1939, my parents' generation decided, coming home from the war, to place the sovereignty of nation states at the heart of the United Nations Charter. With the operation in Venezuela, our generation has to ask, and not for the first time, whether anything now survives of a legal doctrine designed to protect the weak from the strong.
MAGA is primarily a personality cult, the objectives of which evolve to suit Trump's capricious moods. Yet his pivot to new wars of conquest is not some shocking reversal. The "Donroe Doctrine," as he calls his assertion of regional supremacy-a Trumpian extension of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States' claim over the Americas in order to keep Europeans out-is in fact consistent with his deepest beliefs. In some ways, it represents the ultimate expression of the world order he hopes to engineer.
