WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has been tight-lipped about the larger message he is trying to send to the world with the U.S. military raid to capture Nicolás Maduro and prompt the Venezuelan leader and his wife to be extradited to the United States to face federal drug-trafficking charges.
“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump declared after Maduro’s capture, “will never be questioned again.”
In the days after the audacious raid, Trump and his team doubled down on the notion that the new focus on American preeminence in the hemisphere is here to stay. He also held up Maduro’s capture to make the case for neighbors to act or potentially face consequences.
Trump’s rhetoric harks back to the muscular talk of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when US presidents deployed the military for territorial and resource conquests, including in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“There were periods, Vietnam and Iraq, that raised questions about a return to American imperialism, but the messages of the leaders of the United States in those periods were covered with talk about democracy. The way Trump is talking about it is something we have not seen for a very long time.” said Edward Frantz, a historian at the University of Indianapolis.
After the operation, Trump’s tough talk was directed at titular allies in Greenland — where he renewed calls for the US to take over the Danish territory for national security reasons — and Mexico. Trump says America’s southern neighbor needs to “come together” in the fight against drug cartels.
Trump also warned that longtime adversary Cuba is “going down” now that Maduro, who supplied deeply discounted oil to the economically isolated government in Havana, has been ousted. And the president added to the anxiety with neighbor Venezuela, telling reporters that a military operation in Colombia – the epicenter of global cocaine production – “feels good to me.”
The Republican President also said that his administration will “lead” the politics of Venezuela and threatened the new leader of the country, interim President Delcy Rodríguez, with a worse result than that of Maduro if she does not “do what is right”. He made it clear that he expects Caracas to open up its vast oil reserves to US energy companies, further fueling speculation about excessive American reserves.
“We’re going to have our very large oil companies in the United States, the largest anywhere in the world, come in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure — the oil infrastructure — and start making money for the country,” Trump said over the weekend.
The incursion of Venezuela has divided Latin America, with Trump-aligned leaders from the far right praising the expulsion, and non-aligned leaders condemning it on sovereignty grounds. It is a bigger concern that Trump may actually be serious about his desire to annex Greenland as well.
Leaning on the Monroe Doctrine, Trump puts neighbors on edge
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned Monday that Trump would mark the demise of the transatlantic military alliance, NATO, if he tries to follow through on his assertion that the United States “absolutely” needs to take over Greenland for reasons of national security. The alliance, which includes the United States and Denmark, was the linchpin of post-World War II security.
“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops,” Frederiksen told Danish broadcaster TV2.
In the early part of the 20th century, American leaders repeatedly turned to the Monroe Doctrine, a fundamental document of US foreign policy written by the nation’s fifth president, which was aimed at opposing European interference in the Western Hemisphere.
Now, Trump too is relying on the doctrine to justify US intervention in Venezuela and threatens action across the hemisphere in the name of protecting the security and well-being of Americans.
“Trump’s rhetoric evokes images of Teddy Roosevelt and gunboat diplomacy. The rhetoric is a return to an era before the Great War,” said Frantz, referring to the intercessions of the 26th President in the unstable economies of the Caribbean and Central America as well as his support of the name of Panama of the secession of the national interest of the United States from Colombia.
A few weeks before Maduro’s ouster, Trump released a long-awaited National Security Strategy that had some different elements that seemed to be at odds with each other.
On the one hand, Trump, who has been avoiding America’s role in foreign wars, claimed that the administration has a “predisposition to non-interventionism.” But the strategy document also made it clear that the administration would push “to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
With the expulsion of Maduro, the administration has clearly doubled down on the latter.
“This is the Western Hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “This is where we live – and we will not allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operations for the adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.”
Anger at the UN Security Council
Maduro’s capture and Trump’s rhetoric could certainly be a watershed moment for global leaders as they consider what may lie ahead in the final three years of Trump’s second term.
During an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Monday, Colombian Ambassador Leonor Zalabata Torres said the raid in Venezuela was reminiscent of “the worst interference in our area in the past.”
“Democracy cannot be defended or promoted through violence and coercion, nor can it be replaced by economic interests,” said Zalabata Torres, whose country requested the meeting.
At the same time, Democrats are questioning whether Trump’s actions have created an enabling structure for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has designs on grabbing more territory from neighboring Ukraine, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has vowed to annex the self-ruled island of Taiwan.
“What the president did in this case essentially gave Putin and Xi Jinping a hall pass,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said in an appearance on CNN.
The Russians, for their part, condemned Trump’s action in Venezuela. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, the country’s UN envoy, said that the world body “cannot allow the United States to proclaim itself as some kind of supreme judge” for the world.
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AP writers Jennifer Peltz and Farnoush Amiri at the United Nations contributed to this report.