A U.S. military operation in Venezuela over the weekend killed nearly 80 people and resulted in the capture of prime minister Nicholas Maduro, who is now on trial in New York facing charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.
In public statements, President Donald Trump is defending the controversial operation by citing a more than 200-year-old foreign policy position: the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine was introduced in 1823 by President James Monroe, ostensibly discouraging European intervention in the Western Hemisphere.
"But what he really meant was 'we want to have the right to intervene whenever we want, wherever we want in this hemisphere. We consider it ours,'" said Kevin Young, a UMass Amherst professor who specializes in Latin American history. "And so that's really the dominant understanding. It's certainly the dominant understanding today."
Young said the Monroe Doctrine has been used repeatedly over the years to justify military action in South America, under the pretense that the continent is in our so-called backyard. That includes a series of U.S. operations over the course of the 20th century in nations including Panama, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
In his current term, Trump has introduced the so-called "Trump Corollary" to the doctrine. That corollary claims that the U.S. should control key resources in the Western Hemisphere — such as Venezuela's oil — for the sake of U.S. national security. It marks a distinct escalation of what the U.S. considers under the purview of the doctrine, according to Young.
"It's been a long time since U.S. officials articulated their economic motivations with such clarity and candor, so openly, so publicly," Young said. "Usually you have to go into the classified records, the declassified documents, to see them speaking with such candor about the desire to control overseas resources and markets. Now they're just really saying it up front explicitly, unabashedly."
Young likened the direct military intervention in Venezuela to militant imperialism: expanding the United States' power and influence by force, regardless of legal constraints imposed by bodies like the United Nations.
"It's an open expression of the principle that might makes right," Young said. "International law is completely meaningless to us. It never meant a whole lot to any U.S. president, but the Trump administration now has open contempt for the very concept of international law."
In the aftermath of the Venezuela operation, Chief of Staff Stephen Miller revived debate over a proposed U.S. takeover of Greenland. That territory, under the control of Denmark, is rich in both natural gas and rare earth minerals that are crucial to modern electronics.
"By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?" Miller asked during a CNN interview in the days after the operation. "What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? "
In that same interview, Miller expressed his vision of America's role in global geopolitics:
"The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere," Miller said. "We're a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us."
Young described that shift in American foreign policy as existentially dangerous to a global governance structure that is already under the strain of multiple international conflicts like the Russian war in Ukraine and Israeli operations in Gaza.
"The sense [is] that the international legal order itself is unraveling," Young said. "And we're in an extremely dangerous moment. I think for all of us, it's important that we resist the temptation to become desensitized to the violence that we're seeing and hearing about so that we don't allow those standards to be diminished still further."