From Americas Quarterly, January 15:
AQ’s editor-in-chief dives into the archive of U.S.-Latin America relations, and emerges with four takeaways.
This article is adapted from AQ’s special report on the Trump Doctrine | Leer en español | Ler em português
The year was 1902, and the world’s eyes were on Venezuela. European powers, furious over Caracas’ unpaid debts, menacingly deployed gunboats to the southern Caribbean. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt believed that, in this instance, the Monroe Doctrine did not apply.
“If any South American state misbehaves toward any European country,” Roosevelt declared, “let the European country spank it.”
Spank it they did. Germany, acting with support from Great Britain and Italy, declared a blockade of Venezuela’s ports, seized or disabled most of its small navy and shelled targets on the coast. Roosevelt quickly came to regret his acquiescence: The episode bolstered Germany’s reputation as a rising global power, European creditors began receiving preferential treatment over their U.S. counterparts, and a defiant President Cipriano Castro remained in power.
And so, thanks largely to Venezuela, America’s famous “big stick” was born.
“The attitude of men like myself toward the weak and chaotic governments and people south of us is conditioned … on the theory that it is our duty, when it becomes absolutely inevitable, to police these countries in the interest of order and civilization,” wrote the president in what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary, the basis for countless U.S. invasions and other interventions in Latin America in the 20th century. In 1908, Roosevelt’s last full year in office, Castro finally departed in a bloodless coup with Washington’s backing, giving rise to a new and more authoritarian leader who was friendlier to U.S. interests.
As the old adage goes: History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it does sometimes rhyme. Today, President Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela, Mexico and elsewhere have prompted comparisons to the more interventionist era of the 19th and 20th centuries, raising questions about what—if anything—history can teach us about what might happen next.
In recent months, as Trump built up his own flotilla off Venezuela’s coast and then ordered the capture of Nicolás Maduro, I read or re-read classic works about the U.S.’s long history in Latin America such as Beneath the United States (1998, by Lars Schoultz) and Inevitable Revolutions (1983, by Walter LaFeber), plus more modern entries including “Our Hemisphere”? (2021, by Britta Crandall and Russell Crandall) and America, América (2025, by Greg Grandin).
The purpose is not to try to dazzle the reader with a long litany of clever parallels, but to better understand why the U.S. has so often plunged headfirst into Latin American affairs; how such interventions often end; and how Trump’s motivations and tactics may differ from those of his predecessors, either because times have changed or he is truly sui generis.
Here then are four lessons that history might be able to teach us about the Trump Doctrine:
1. Trump isn’t the exception—he’s the norm.Listening to Trump speak while reading all this history often felt like watching a split screen.
The president’s declaration in the hours after Maduro’s capture that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again” recalls not only Roosevelt but James Polk, who in the 1840s led the Mexican-American War and the incorporation of Texas, adding over 1 million square miles to U.S. territory; or William McKinley, who wrested control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain (and raised tariffs) at the turn of the 20th century, and received a prominent mention from Trump in his second inaugural address.
Meanwhile, the president’s emphasis on the interests and grievances of U.S. energy companies in Venezuela echoes the so-called “Dollar Diplomacy” of William Taft. Trump’s ultimately successful attempts to help his allies in 2025 elections in Honduras and Argentina were reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson’s stated desire in the 1910s to “teach the South American republics to elect good men.”
If the rhetoric is familiar, it’s because many of the underlying ideas are older than the republic itself. As Grandin reminds us in America, América, U.S. merchants of the 18th century were able to sail down the Mississippi, across the Caribbean and up the Magdalena River into Colombia to sell their wares with almost total ease—a small example of how Americans came to think of the Caribbean basin in particular as part of their “near abroad.”
Trump’s talk of renewed expansionism, expressed in his stated desire to “take back” the Panama Canal, and also acquire Greenland, is also unmistakably American—a trait that Alexis de Tocqueville saw as inseparable from the national character, as much about profit as “the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pursuit.”
For much of U.S. history, “manifest destiny” seemed set to lead the country’s borders not just west but south, an idea that inspired figures like William Walker, an American lawyer who in the 1850s declared himself president of Nicaragua, briefly winning recognition from Washington. Francis P. Loomis, number two at the State Department under Theodore Roosevelt, reflected the thinking of his era when he said, “I think it is our destiny to control more or less directly most all of the Latin American countries”—not just through annexation but by “administering their revenues,” a concept Trump has embraced for post-Maduro Venezuela.
A few U.S. presidents, such as John Quincy Adams in the 19th century or Warren Harding and Jimmy Carter in the 20th, showed little interest in exercising such power. But most did—until relatively recently. Lyndon Johnson deployed more than 20,000 troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965. As Joan Didion reminds us in her 1987 memoir Miami, Ronald Reagan was widely ridiculed by Cuban exiles for his inability to topple Fidel Castro, reflecting an enduring, much broader belief that Washington could accomplish anything in Latin America if it just tried hard enough.
In retrospect, the exceptional period may prove to be the 30 years or so that followed the end of the Cold War. Those years saw a relative emphasis on sovereignty and trade – and a drift of U.S. focus toward other regions like the Middle East, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that many in Latin America saw as “benign neglect.”
Those days seem over, at least for now.
2. … but there are important differences....
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