O Brave New World...

The contours of Donald Trump’s second term are now starkly clear. We are indeed seeing Trump Unleashed, but not for the democracy-threatening, dictatorial reasons Kamala Harris and the Democrats were trying to warn the American electorate about in last year’s presidential contest.

Trump is moving fast, breaking things if he has to and making aggressive moves because he is trying to outrun the constitutional clock. Under the provisions of the 22^nd Amendment he cannot run again and, despite his occasional bravura rhetoric the chances of him changing this are prohibitive. Repealing the 22nd Amendment is extremely difficult, requiring a rare, supermajority consensus: a constitutional amendment process that needs passage by two-thirds of both House and Senate and ratification by three-fourths (38) of the states, a level of political unity currently lacking due to hyper partisanship, making it practically near impossible without a major political realignment of FDR proportions.

The second constraint on his power is the immovable reality of the Congressional elections this coming November. While Republicans are likely to retain Senate control, at this stage it’s quite possible that the Democrats will flip the House, putting them in a position to stymie his legislation, open up possible investigations into his cabinet / administration and, most gallingly, raise the possibility of a third impeachment effort.

The final challenge Trump faces is that, almost as soon as the elections are over, as of January 1^st, 2027, the 2028 presidential race begins. While he will remain president until January 20^th, 2029, for all intents and purposes he will have to share top billing with the men and women who will seek to replace him. We know Trump does not like to give up even an iota of limelight. While he will doubtlessly continue to keep global attention on himself, he will no longer be the only story. That bugs him, for there is no such thing as good or bad publicity: there is only the attention either generates.

Thus, the sturm und drang of the moment. He is a man in a hurry to slap his name on monuments (the Trump Arch, the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump Class battleships) and to go down in history books as the president responsible for ensuring American supremacy in the Western hemisphere by reasserting the Monroe Doctrine and hegemony abroad by neutralizing old foes.

We see the former manifest itself in the singular fact that his administration may be more focused on Latin America than any other White House since the 1960s. But the goals of all that focus are not quite as clear as the president’s rush to get his name imprinted on posterity.

In the sweep of US history in Latin America, interventions like the recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro aren’t particularly unusual. While the 35 years since the end of the Cold War saw a period when the US largely refrained from these kinds of actions., countries including Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico now have to take seriously whether America’s new interventionist policy will target them next. For now, there’s not much they can do to push back.

Donald Trump came into office a second time pledging to retake the Panama Canal, annex Greenland and possibly Canada. He unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Less than a month into his term, he was slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and Colombia for their perceived defiance of American interests. Trump 2.0’s choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had such longstanding interests in Latin American affairs and record of antileft wing views (especially in Cuba and Venezuela) that his appointment basically telescoped future action in the region.

In Trump’s view, his predecessors had let the Monroe doctrine, which originally stated that foreign powers should avoid meddling in the Western Hemisphere but evolved into a view that the US should be the preeminent power in the region, dangerously lapse.  Whatever else the Maduro operation was, it made clear that all the language in Trump’s recently released national security strategy about restoring “American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere” after “years of neglect” wasn’t just bluster.

The Monroe/Donroe Doctrine

For all the talk in the past few days about how a proverbial Rubicon has been crossed in the use of force and the violation of international norms, the use of military force or covert action to depose a government in Latin America or the Caribbean is far from unprecedented.

Between the US invasion of Cuba in 1898 during the Spanish-American War and Bill Clinton’s military intervention in Haiti in 1994, there were roughly 17 instances of successful direct US-backed regime change in the region — and far more cases where indirect US pressure may have played a role in bringing down a government.  In the broad sweep of history, it’s amazing how unexceptional this is.

But US interventionism in the region was relatively common up through the 1980s and early 1990s. As many have noted, Maduro’s capture took place on the 36th anniversary of the arrest of Panama’s Manuel Noriega, another dictator indicted in US courts for drug trafficking.

In particular, Trump’s assertion of a “Trump corollary” to the doctrine links his policy to the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, which asserted that the US would use military force as a last resort in “flagrant cases of…wrongdoing or impotence” by regional governments — an approach that became known as “gunboat diplomacy.” 

If there’s a difference between the most recent case of US regime change and the previous era, it may be the lack of clarity in American motives. The US has intervened in the past to prevent foreign meddling (European imperialism in an earlier era, Communism later on), to protect US economic interests, or to remove a suspected drug trafficker.  On the other hand, the justification for the Venezuela operation was a shifting mix of the three. For months, starting in December, as the US targeted suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, the administration’s messaging focused on Maduro’s role as an alleged “narcoterrorist” and cartel boss.  It was only months into the campaign, Trump and his aides began focusing on Venezuela’s past nationalization of American oil interests and the president is now heavily focused on retaking Venezuela’s oil resources for American companies.

Since the operation, US officials have made much of the 32 Cuban security personnel guarding Maduro who were killed as well as dismantling Iranian and Hezbollah networks in the country. It’s also interesting that Maduro’s capture came just hours after a meeting with Chinese diplomats. Foreign meddling wasn’t a major feature of the administration’s rhetoric in the months leading up to the event, however. Trump doesn’t appear particularly interested in restoring democracy to Venezuela, though the country’s democratic opposition are nonetheless hopeful this will ultimately work out in their favor.

In the end, different high-ranking Trump officials may have been interested in Venezuela for different reasons —crime, migration, energy, foreign influence — and put together a strong enough case for Trump. Calling it emblematic of a “doctrine” is probably generous.

The Smashing Machine

Trump repeatedly stated the day after Maduro was captured that the US would be “running” Venezuela, though the reality appears to be that the country’s government will be left in place–minus Maduro–so long as it meets the administration’s as-yet unspecified demands. His successor, Delcy Rodriguez, the former VP, went through a 24-hour period of defiant anti-Yankee rhetoric before defaulting to making real of time-buying noises about “collaborating” with Washington. Words are one thing: guns are another and Trump, knows that bluster and firepower are what dictatorial regimes respect.

Given the US’s actions over the past year, citizens of other Latin American countries could be forgiven for wondering if this definition of “running” applies to their countries as well. Trump has endorsed favored candidates in elections in Argentina and Honduras this year and threatened to levy tariffs against Brazil in order to stop the prosecution of his ally, Jair Bolsonaro.

More is likely to come in 2026 with presidential elections being held in Brazil and Colombia. At this point, it would be surprising if we don’t see Truth Social messages endorsing a preferred candidate in either (or both) countries.

Colombia’s left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, has been a particular foil for Trump since the beginning of last year. In recent days, he has said that Petro — the leading regional critic of the Venezuela intervention — should “watch his ass” and called him a “sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.” (Colombia is a major producer of cocaine but there’s little evidence linking Petro to the trade.) Unlike Venezuela, which has been a thorn in the side of US administrations for years, Colombia is actually one of America’s closest security partners in the region.

There’s precedent for this kind of meddling as well. President Woodrow Wilson famously quipped that he would “teach the South American republics to elect good men” and his successors intervened in overt and covert ways dozens of times in the region’s elections in the subsequent decades.

In Trump’s case, the meddling often seems less motivated by ideology commitment (Trump has gotten along quite well with the Communist leaders of China and North Korea) than personal animus. In the case of Honduras, it appears to have been a concerted lobbying campaign by Trump allies on behalf of the country’s imprisoned ex-president rather than ideological affinity that prompted his interest in the country.

Likewise, Trump has pointedly chosen not to get behind Venezuela’s democratic opposition in the wake of Maduro’s ouster, but to work with vice president Rodriguez,, a committed if more pragmatic Chavista (one major outstanding question of the past week is the degree of support the US may have had from elements of the Venezuelan regime in arranging for Maduro’s extraction: her volte face from shrill defiance to sudden desire to “collaborate” – is suspiciously if fortuitously convenient).  As much as anything else, it was reportedly Maduro’s public displays of defiance and disrespect — notably his televised dancing mocking Trump’s own trademark Village People gyrations — that was a personal animus factor the administration to make the final decision to capture him. Maduro forgot, or was too arrogant to believe, that with Trump everything is personal.

The personal factor also seems to be paramount when it comes to Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, someone who on paper exactly the sort of lifelong committed leftist Trump should despise, who appears to have been able to keep him relatively satisfied over the past year with limited “wins” on fentanyl and border security and the two seem to have a friendly rapport. (Trump had a similarly friendly relationship with Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an out-and-out socialist who had literally written an entire book attacking the US president.) 

Whether that will continue now that Trump appears to be gaining a taste for military action is not clear. In the past week, Trump has resurrected an idea — discussed by him and allies in Congress since his first term — of taking military action against drug cartels on Mexican soil. The stakes of Sheinbaum’s ability to manage the Trump relationship couldn’t be higher heading into a pivotal year in the relationship which will include a renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.

Taking a pragmatic approach to managing Trump may be considerably more challenging for the other country currently in the US crosshairs: Cuba. Even at the worst of times, there was always a degree of pragmatism built into the US-Venezuela relationship: US firm Chevron continued to pump oil in the country, for instance. That gave at least an opening for negotiations between the two countries early in the Trump administration and may yet allow the relationship to get back on track now that the dancing bogeyman is gone. That king of accommodation is much harder to imagine from the far more ideological Cuban regime.

The hope in Washington is that the loss of its ally and the ongoing embargo on sanctioned oil shipments will cause the sclerotic and economically distressed Cuban regime to implode and collapse on its own. And yet this is a regime that has defied predictions of its imminent demise for more than 60 years. If it doesn’t fall, could it be the next target for military intervention?

You break it, you own it

There’s always a risk when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy of retroactively trying to map a coherent worldview onto a set of seemingly impulsive and often contradictory actions (the proverbial square peg in a round role metaphor). But in the case of Latin America, the foreign policy is tied to the Trump team’s much more consistent domestic priorities: crime and migration.

The view is that by neglecting the region, previous administrations have allowed crises to develop which have driven illegal drugs and migrants into the U.S. This is not necessarily a view unique to this administration. The Biden team also made a much-maligned effort to address the “root causes” of migration, albeit with much different methods. The administration is also interested in countering Chinese, Iranian and to a lesser extent Russian influence (that’s what the Trump corollary actually discusses) and combating leftism.  These are not historically unusual goals.

Whether the Trump strategy will actually accomplish any of this is another story. Maduro may have had a hand in the cocaine trade but deposing him isn’t going to stop the opioids that have devastated American communities. Migration numbers are down at the US-Mexico border now, but a full-scale collapse in Venezuela could lead to a new uptick, though perhaps into neighboring countries (hence Columbia moving 30000 troops to their border in a proactive effort to forestall any such mass exodus). Perhaps governments will be dissuaded from deepening their ties with China, perhaps faced with an unpredictable America, they will look to hedge with security and economic partnership elsewhere. (Even Trump’s closest South American ally, Javier Millei, is not above selling soybeans to the communists.)

Then there are the unintended consequences. The past year has already seen several European countries cut off the sharing of intelligence with the US that they believed could be used in illegal strikes against civilian boats.

The international response to Maduro’s ouster has been somewhat muted and divided so far — very few, even on the Latin American left, are sorry to see him gone as he did precious little to curry favour with them. Actions in Colombia, Mexico, or for that matter Greenland could have more profound consequences for US alliances, not the least of which is NATO.

As for the political consequences in Latin America itself, at the moment, the region appears in an overall rightward political drift after recent elections in countries like Ecuador, Argentina, and Bolivia, which Maduro’s disastrous rule can take at least some credit for. The current generation of regional leaders won’t necessarily always look to do Trump’s bidding, but they may not be eager to defy him either. The longer-term consequences are more unpredictable, but again, history can provide some guidance.

Future U.S presidents are likely to have to reckon with Trump’s tumultuous efforts to remake the world.