Nobody should be surprised by Trump’s attack on Venezuela – it’s a reversion to type – The Irish Times

The articulation in 1823 by US president James Monroe of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine was a little-noticed throwaway line in his state of the union address. It sought to warn European powers off adventures in the US’s back yard, Latin America and the Caribbean. In return, positioning the US as a protector of the newly independent nations in Latin America, the US promised not to meddle in European affairs.

For two centuries, however, its logic would be the imperialist, America-first rationale for US regional policy, sustaining brutal dictatorships, undermining democracies, and plundering resources on behalf of USA Inc.

The US was involved, by one historian’s estimate, in at least 41 successful interventions to change governments in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1898 and 1994. Nearly every state in the hemisphere would be affected.

The assertion of US hegemony over the region has undergone several iterations.

In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt made explicit that the US had the right to act as a regional policeman to defend what it saw as its political and economic interests. In his recent National Security Strategy, US president Donald Trump has given it a new twist, asserting that “after years of neglect, the US will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere”, its sphere of influence.

[ Trump’s disturbing National Security Strategy should be required readingOpens in new window ]

The document called it the “Trump Corollary” and, with his customary obsession with renaming all he touches, the president labelled it the “Donroe Doctrine”. He vowed “to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more US troops around the region”.

At a press conference after Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s capture, Trump boasted that “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again”. This is not, as many commentators with short memories have labelled it, a break with a notional peace and democracy-loving tradition of US foreign policy, but a reversion to type. While the incursion into Venezuela was “in line” with many past operations, it is only “shocking because nothing like this has happened since 1989”, says Alan McPherson, author of A Short History of US Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

What had been a means of warning off the Europeans in the 19th century was justified in the cold war period as a defence against the threat of communist encroachment. But, then and now, it was above all also a rationale for keeping the neighbours, prone as many were to leftist ideas, in their place. And protecting the interests of Big Oil.

And US methods have changed little. Greenland has every reason to be nervous. Trump says the US needs Greenland “very badly”, threatening military force. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has brazenly questioned Denmark’s right to assert control over Greenland. “What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?”

[ Why does Donald Trump want to take over Greenland?Opens in new window ]

There’s nothing new in Trump’s hankering after US territorial enlargement. In 1847, the US invaded Mexico after border disputes in Texas. That war ended with a treaty forcing Mexico to cede more than half its territory, an area encompassing what are now the states of California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming.

President William McKinley annexed Hawaii, acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines, pushed Spain out of Cuba, and set the stage for the US to build the Panama Canal before he was assassinated in 1901. Nor is gunboat diplomacy new: in Brazil a US naval taskforce was positioned off the coast to intervene in case there was resistance to the military coup that overthrew democratically elected leftwing president João Goulart in 1964.

In the early 20th century, US troops occupied various Central American and Caribbean nations in what were known as the Banana Wars to further the interests of US companies such as United Fruit (now Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (now Dole).

In 1954, the US staged a CIA-backed coup against Guatemala’s elected government. It invaded, among others, Haiti, Panama and Grenada. But full-blooded invasions were not always necessary, and indeed were rare. It sufficed to train and equip rebels, such as in the abortive Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, or to arm Contras in Nicaragua, or to use the CIA to prop up or install bloodthirsty dictators such as “Baby Doc” Duvalier in Haiti and Gen Pinochet in Chile. Or to train and back military regimes in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay that tortured and executed left-wing opponents.

The explicit revival of Monroe has also been reflected in the promised detachment of the US from European affairs – notably and shamefully from its obligations to Nato and Ukraine. But the sham pretence that the US is a protector of the independence of the nations of Latin America is again exposed as a lie.