Donald Trump carries on in TR’s tradition.
Donald Trump carries on in TR’s tradition.
I t’s not difficult to find analogues for Donald Trump’s incursion into Venezuela — because they are littered throughout 20th-century American history.
Trump’s operation was as American as Henry Cabot Lodge saying that, however unformed it might be in other respects, U.S. foreign policy was “very definite” in our hemisphere, namely to be “supreme.”
It was anticipated by, to pick one year, the U.S. interventions in Nicaragua in 1912, in the Dominican Republic in 1912, or in Cuba in 1912.
It would feel familiar to such disparate figures as Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. Granted they were all early 20th-century figures, but there’s also Ronald Reagan in Grenada, George H. W. Bush in Panama, and Bill Clinton in Haiti.
If Trump is particularly unadorned and openly bullying in how he’s handling Venezuela, the U.S. approach to Latin America has often had a large element of coercion and selfishness, especially in Teddy Roosevelt’s grabby maneuvering to secure the territory for the Panama Canal, which created an enormous strategic boon for the United States.
As has been widely noted, the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine bears resemblance to the Roosevelt Corollary setting out a U.S. obligation to intervene when Latin American countries were failing (Trump’s version also draws on the Lodge Corollary). In 1904, TR told Congress that countries that exhibited “chronic wrongdoing,” or misgovernance that produced a “general loosening of the ties of civilized society,” could require intervention “by some civilized nation,” i.e., the United States.
TR sent troops into Latin America only twice, but Presidents Taft and especially Wilson followed up with many interventions of their own.
Roosevelt acted first in the Dominican Republic. Bolstered by a couple of warships to provide “a powerful moral effect on the rash and ignorant elements,” the U.S. secured an agreement to take control of the custom house, toward the goal of stabilizing the DR’s finances. (In Trump-like fashion, when the U.S. Senate initially balked at giving consent to a treaty spelling out these arrangements, TR went ahead on the basis of an executive agreement.) There would be more military interventions there in 1912, 1914, 1916, and 1965.
TR reoccupied Cuba beginning in 1906 (we’d first occupied it after the Spanish-American War), and then there were subsequent military interventions in 1912 and 1917–21, while FDR sent warships to Cuba amid political turmoil in 1933.
President Taft came up with “dollar diplomacy” as an alternative to military interventions, but still sent the Marines to Nicaragua.
Wilson promised “sympathy and understanding” for the rest of the hemisphere, yet, as Robert Kagan writes in his history of early 20th-century U.S. foreign policy, intervened “more frequently and with greater force than either of his two Republican predecessors.” Most notably, he entangled U.S. forces in Mexican politics to such an extent that he got himself to the brink of a major war with Mexico.
For all their high-handedness, these early 20th-century interventions were often quite sincerely motivated by idealism. As the Republican statesman Elihu Root stated of our goals regarding the Latin American republics: “First. We do not want to take them for ourselves. Second. We do not want any foreign nations to take them for themselves. Third. We want to help them.”
Trump’s gambit in Venezuela feels different in that it seems more blatantly self-interested, especially in the emphasis on oil, but he, too, talks of bettering the lot of Venezuelans. And there’s plenty of precedent for self-interested interventions in Latin America, with TR’s exertions on the canal perhaps topping the list.
We offered Colombia a deal to give us control of territory in Panama (then part of Colombia) to build the canal. Then, a Panamanian revolt broke out with an eye to securing a deal with the U.S. After helping Colombia suppress prior Panamanian revolts, we used warships to keep Colombia from suppressing this one. TR poured scorn on the Colombians as “jack rabbits” and “contemptible little creatures” (fortunately, he didn’t have a Truth Social account). Panama got its independence, and we got a sweetheart deal for the canal.
As historian George C. Herring notes, Elihu Root commented after hearing TR try to defend his actions on the merits, “You have shown that you’ve been accused of seduction, and you have conclusively proven that you were guilty of rape.“
As for “dollar diplomacy,” Trump surely would have liked the ring of it. At worst, as Democratic critics at the time had it, dollar diplomacy used “diplomatic influence to advance the interests of American investors”; at best, as its defenders believed, it tapped “Wall Street to serve our national interest and to benefit other countries.”
Either way, Trump’s vision of U.S. companies revitalizing the Venezuelan oil industry and everyone getting rich, including the Venezuelans, is very much in the American tradition.
In the context of the vindications of the Monroe Doctrine in the past, it must be said that the Maduro regime was a provocation that never would have been tolerated this long. A communist government that spread this much disorder in the region and in the U.S. via mass migration, that relied on frank criminality, that allied with our enemies, and that wrecked a once-thriving country would have been given the boot years ago.
And it isn’t new that we’ve focused on Venezuela. Grover Cleveland made an implicit threat of war when he told Congress in 1895 that the U.S. would “resist by every means in its power” British encroachments against Venezuelan territory as part of a border dispute.
TR was similarly bellicose during another crisis in 1902 when Britain and Germany came knocking on Venezuela’s door over unpaid debts.
That Donald Trump, in this respect as in others, feels so unusual is not because he’s completely new, but because he represents submerged American traditions finding new life in the 21st century.