Venezuela: The Beginning of the Hunting Season
Venezuela has become Ground Zero for Trump’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Who comes next? The Panama Canal? Greenland? Canada itself? The only certainty is that the hunting season has begun.
Protectorate
On January 3, while referring to the events surrounding Nicolas Maduro and his wife’s capture in Caracas, Donald Trump stated that the U.S. planned to “run” Venezuela for an unspecified period. When asked about who specifically would be in charge of doing so, he signaled to the men behind him: America’s Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They would be
“issuing orders to its government [the Venezuelan one] and exploiting its vast oil reserves…Delcy Rodríguez, would hold power in Venezuela as long as she ‘does what we want’…Mr. Trump said it was well within the rights of the United States to wrest from Venezuelan resources” (David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager, 2026).
The following day, on January 4, Trump told The Atlantic that if now President Rodríguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”. According to Edward Wong, this “amounts to an explicit declaration of gunboat diplomacy and an embrace of the kind of 19th-century U.S. imperialist policy in the Western Hemisphere” (Wong, 2026).
Donald Trump, indeed, was unapologetically establishing a U.S. Protectorate over a sovereign country and claiming to have a right over its resources, something not seen in Latin America for over a century. That meant jumping back to imperial times. However, even then empires sought to present some kind of conceptual justification for their dominion. The French called it their “civilizing mission” while Japan referred to the “Greater Asia Co-prosperity sphere”. France even coined the concept of “Latin America” (referring to historical and cultural links) to account for its conquest of Mexico, during Napoleon III’s reign. Trump, though, simply asserted raw, brute force.
A kind of raw force that dates back to two celebrated Greek dialogues: Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue and Plato’s Georgian Dialogue has been on display. While the first states “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”, the second, through the words of Callicles, expresses, “might is right, and justice belongs to the stronger” (Durant, 2023). In other words, might is all that matters.
Trump´s crude assertion of power is utterly shocking for three fundamental reasons. First, because of crudeness itself. Second, because the world had grown accustomed to a civilized liberal international order. Third, because the United States was supposed to be the natural guarantor against geopolitical predators.
Sheer crudeness
In the first place we find the Trumpian dog-eat-dog vision of international relations, under which the top dog is bound to reap all the benefits of the international system. It could be argued that this is in line with a realist worldview. However, this rough-hewn approach to foreign affairs has nothing to do with the intellectual sophistication of contemporary classical realists and neo-realists, such as E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Raymond Aron, George Kennan, John Mearsheimer or Keneth Waltz.
Although for the latter power is the main consideration in international affairs, and the world must be taken as it is and not as it ought to be, differences with the Trump vision are fundamental. The common denominators within realist thinking are the following: First, states are assumed to behave rationally in pursuit of their national interests, carefully calculating the costs and benefits of their actions. Second, states seek to form alliances and counter-alliances, aiming at a balance of power able to preserve international stability. Rationality, prudence, restraint, cost-benefit political calculations, strategic alliances’ value enhancing, international stability: This is the vocabulary of international realism.
Trump’s transactional and disruptive approach to foreign policy, aimed at obtaining “good deals”, is based on arm-twisting abrasiveness and frivolous arrogance. This is not realism by any measure. If anything, the American President could be defined as a mercantilist-populist, a zero-sum oriented egotistical international actor, for whom the United States does what it wants to do within the only limit of what it can do.
Liberal internationalism
Second, Trump’s assertion of power shocks because for the last eight decades the world had grown accustomed to a now defunct liberal international order. One in which a rules-based international system and a wide web of cooperative international institutions and alliances coexisted with the legacy of Wilsonian idealism. The key to this system’s longevity was pursuing a shared agenda and incorporating, to varying degrees, the interests of the different actors within it.
This order was closely linked to America’s hegemony, and its essence was described in the following terms:
“The exercise of power entails the use of both coercion and consent, but the most stable policies are those where consent is prominent. The focus is on the way in which power is accepted as legitimate…The emphasis is on how a particular conception of the world is created and sustained through a myriad of international agencies and organizations, and the incorporation of many different interests into an overreaching political project” (Gamble, 2002, p. 130).
It could be argued that during the Cold War ideological demons tinted America’s worldview and that coercion became a frequent tool in the handling of its allies. Fact is, though, that a dichotomy existed between the U.S.’ disposition to seek the consent of its top allies and its readiness to coerce its subsidiary ones, especially when the risk of Soviet penetration seemed plausible.
Beneath the benign face of this liberal international order lay, indeed, an overtly realist foundation represented by the U.S.’ containment policy. This led to the toppling of unreliable governments, while emphasizing the formula that any enemy of my enemy is my friend, independently (or perhaps because) of its domestic repressive nature. Mostly with discretion as to its involvement, and essentially within Third World grounds, the CIA took care of that job. But even those excesses were miles away from Trump’s naked imperialism. With the end of the Cold War, though, the liberal international order associated with America’s hegemony entered a more distinctively soft power era.
Top predator
Third, the United States, which was supposed to be the natural guarantor against geopolitical predators, has become a top predator itself. It could of course be argued that the relatively recent precedent of George W. Bush and its neoconservatives showed otherwise. Their foreign policy worldview was diplomacy if possible, force if necessary; U.N. if possible, ad hoc coalitions, unilateral actions and preemptive action if necessary. However, although downplaying the role of allies, international institutions and even international law, Bush’s foreign policy had the somewhat redeeming virtue of its idealism.
Indeed, it responded to the missionary impulse of spreading American democratic values abroad. Francis Fukuyama defined this policy as Wilsonianism minus international institutions, whereas John Mearsheimer labelled it as Wilsonianism with teeth. Although taking Woodrow Wilson’s democratic projection notions to the extreme, Bush remained in track with a longstanding idealist tradition within America’s foreign policy. Moreover, the damage inflicted upon the U.S.’ brand by his excesses, was subsequently corrected to a large extent thanks to the alliances’ enhancement and prudence of Obama’s foreign policy.
What happens now is totally different in nature. It has been argued that striking similarities exist between the emergence, interlinked relations and solidarity of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s, and today’s so called revisionist block (Brand, 2024). As Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine argue: “The four powers of this block [China, Russia, North Korea and Iran] increasingly identify common interests, match up their rhetoric, and coordinate their military and diplomatic activities. Their convergence is creating a new axis of upheaval – a development that is fundamentally altering the geopolitical landscape” (Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine, 2024). Indeed, this revisionist axis has followed an agenda of maritime, territorial and geopolitical expansion.
Only the United States and its allies could counter the predatory trend therein involved. However, Trump’s old-fashioned gunboat and imperialist foreign policy just adds to and justifies such predation. Moreover, Trump’s U.S. has defined a hunting ground for itself. As Brookings states: “The Trump’s administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy reorients the United States towards the Western Hemisphere and reiterates the Monroe Doctrine and a ‘Trump Corollary’ to it, essentially asserting a neo-imperialist presence in the region…there is only limited recognition that Latin American countries have a say” (Felbab-Brown, 2025).
Trump’s 2025 Corollary closely follows the 1895’s Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: “Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which confines its interposition” (Loveman, 2016). By natural implication, China and Russia are now given free reign in their own hunting grounds, with the only implicit caveat that their predation has to take place before Trump departs the White House. The next three years, as a result, should produce momentous upheavals in the world’s geopolitical landscape, with Taiwan playing a leading role in this regard.
Venezuela has become Ground Zero for Trump’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Who comes next? Colombia? The Panama Canal? Greenland? Canada itself? The only certainty is that the hunting season has begun.
Alfredo Toro Hardy, PhD, is a retired Venezuelan career diplomat, scholar and author. Former Ambassador to the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Ireland, Chile and Singapore. Author or co-author of thirty-six books on international affairs. Former Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Princeton and Brasilia universities. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and a member of the Review Panel of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
Photo by RDNE Stock project
References
Brands, Hal (2024). “The Next Global War”, Foreign Affairs, January 26.
Durant, Will (2023). The Story of Philosophy. New Delhi: Grapevine India Publishers.
Felbab-Brown, Vanda (2025). “A ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, Brookings, December, 8.
Gamble, Andrew (2002). “Hegemony and Decline: Britain and the United States” in Karl Patrick O’Brien and Armand Clesse, Editors, Two Hegemonies. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.
Kendall-Taylor, Andrea and Fontaine, Richard (2024). “The Axis of Upheaval”, Foreign Affairs, April 23.
Loveman, Brian (2016). “U.S. Foreign Policy towards Latin America in the 19th Century, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History
Sanger, David E. (2026). “Trump Plunges the U.S. Into a New Era of Risk in Venezuela”, The New York Times, January 4.
Wong, Edward (2026). “Trump Says U.S. Is ‘In Charge’ of Venezuela, While Rubio Stresses Coercing It”, The New York Times, January 4.
