A Bully Abroad
“We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about,” claimed President-elect Donald Trump in 2016, after his anti-interventionism helped him defeat Hillary Clinton. Almost a decade later, regime change seems to be back on the menu. On November 11, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, joined an already heavy naval presence off the coast of Venezuela, threatening the regime of Nicolás Maduro. As of this writing, there are fifteen thousand U.S. troops massed in the Caribbean.
The buildup is part of an aggressive turn toward Latin America. Trump’s approach—which the New York Post dubbed “The Donroe Doctrine”—is guided not by a principled stand for or against foreign entanglements, nor by any reasoned or reasonable understanding of American interests. Instead, like much else in Trump’s thuggish second term, it is characterized by lies, the use of extortive and illegal force, corrupt personal and private influences, and know-nothing leadership.
The increased pressure on Venezuela follows the administration’s escalation of the ineffective “war on drugs” into a literal war—one unauthorized by Congress. Thus far, at least twenty-one targets have been attacked off the coasts of Central and South America, resulting in at least eighty-three deaths. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ridiculously argues that these killings are legitimate since Venezuela is a “narco-terrorist” state using drugs to attack American citizens. But Venezuela is not a significant source of drugs entering the United States, and the administration has provided no evidence that the people it has killed were drug smugglers or that Maduro controls the cartels. “Even if such allegations were substantiated,” UN experts stated, the strikes “[amount] to extrajudicial executions.”
There may be better reasons to want Maduro out. He stole re-election in the summer of 2024, and he has presided over a corrupt, violent, and failed petrostate since the death of his predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2013. Right-wing opposition leader María Corina Machado has backed the U.S. administration’s actions against Maduro, going so far as to dedicate her ill-considered Nobel Peace Prize to Trump. But there is no reason to think democracy promotion in Venezuela is on Trump’s mind. In February, on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, Machado hit on a more plausible motivation: “We’re going to kick [out] the government from the oil sector…. [U.S. companies] are going to make a lot of money.” Rubio, who is particularly eager to oust Maduro, scuttled an earlier deal that would have given U.S. companies access to Venezuela’s oil reserves—the largest in the world—in exchange for letting Maduro remain in power. Although U.S. oil interests were reportedly irked, Trump has expressed openness to further talks, and the industry still stands to benefit from Trump’s pressure campaign, whether or not it results in Maduro’s ouster.
While threatening to invade Venezuela, Trump has showered Argentina with cash. Argentinian president Javier Milei—who campaigned in 2023 with the slogan “Make Argentina Great Again”—was heading toward a difficult midterm election in October. His radical libertarian fiscal policy had reduced inflation, but only by slashing public investment, jobs, and growth; it also exposed the currency system to serious risks, as the central bank depleted foreign-currency reserves to artificially buoy the peso’s value. Add to that a serious bribery scandal involving his sister, and Milei needed help. In stepped Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with a $40 billion bailout package explicitly made dependent on Milei’s success in the midterms. “If he doesn’t win,” Trump said, “we’re gone.”
There’s no argument to be made that the bailout serves U.S. interests. Argentina is not a prominent trade partner, and its troubles pose little systemic risk to the U.S. economy. As Democrats pointed out, the bailout money could have been used to help the Americans suffering from Trump’s health-care cuts. Instead, Trump again used his position to help his friends. In addition to Milei, these include U.S. investors like hedge-fund manager Rob Citrone, a former colleague of Bessent’s who invested heavily in Argentina after Milei came to power. Citrone stood to lose a lot of money if Argentina defaulted; instead, just days before the rescue plan was announced, he piled more of his capital into Argentinian bonds.
Meanwhile, Trump has done his best to make an enemy of Brazil, a far more significant trading partner and economic power. Again, the reasons are personal. Trump sees former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted of an attempted coup in September and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, as a kindred spirit. He tried to force Brazilian officials to drop the charges over the summer by imposing sanctions and raising tariffs to a rate of 50 percent. This extortion effort, spurred on by Bolsonaro’s son, was plainly an illegal breach of the president’s trade authority. It also failed miserably, boosting defiant president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s popularity, pushing Brazil closer to China, and harming American consumers.
The Monroe Doctrine justified many ill-fated interventions in Latin America, but at least it was strategically coherent: it sought to counter European colonialism and advance U.S. economic and military interests. Trump has no doctrine; he is squandering what little is left of American international standing to no end except the aggrandizement and enrichment of himself and those around him. In doing so, he makes the United States more and more like one of the region’s infamous dictatorships.
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