On Saturday, the fourteenth of November, US President Donald Trump announced that he had made a decision regarding military intervention in Venezuela, without disclosing the nature of this decision, after receiving the relevant military plan from the US Department of War.
Trump’s recent statements come as a continuation of the United States’ long-standing desire to reinforce its dominance over South America and prevent the emergence of any regime it considers rogue and threatening to its national security.
The roots of this American policy go back to the early nineteenth century, when the United States, then a young state, was still finding its way through the rugged paths of international relations.
The Monroe Doctrine in US Foreign Policy
The foreign policy doctrine of the fifth US president, James Monroe, known as the Monroe Doctrine, and regarded as one of the most important pillars of US policy toward South American states since that time until today, still shapes the American approach to the region.
The Monroe Doctrine is based on viewing South America as a backyard of the United States, one in which Washington does not permit any global external power to establish a foothold, given the region’s strategic importance to American national security.
The doctrine emerged in the wake of the independence of many South American states from Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule, which increased the United States’ desire to keep European powers away from the continent, while imposing American influence over it, despite Washington’s traditional focus on transatlantic relations with European states.
One of the clearest manifestations of the Monroe Doctrine appeared during the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union, when the administration of President John Kennedy discovered the Soviet plan to install nuclear missile platforms in Cuba, located not far from the US state of Florida. The United States then imposed a naval blockade on Cuba to prevent the missiles from arriving.
Had the Soviet Union not backed down at the last moment from delivering the nuclear missiles to Cuba, known later as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world would have stood on the brink of a third world war between the two global powers.
The Cuban Missile Crisis ended with the Soviet withdrawal of its plan in exchange for a US commitment not to attack Cuba or overthrow the socialist government of President Castro.
Beyond the Monroe Doctrine itself, American political sensitivities toward South America are also shaped by the belief of much of the American right, which forms Trump’s broad electoral base, that the United States must remain purely white, dominated by Protestant Christian values.
This is why some American thinkers, such as the controversial political scientist Samuel Huntington, claim that Hispanic presence in the United States poses a major threat to American white national identity and its moral values.
Accordingly, Trump’s current immigration policies aim to curb the growth of ethnic minorities from South America by closing the southern border, preventing illegal immigration, and attempting to deport undocumented migrants either through government action or by pressuring them to leave voluntarily to avoid official harassment. These measures have contributed to the removal of more than two million undocumented migrants in this year alone.
Why Venezuela Now?
Venezuela may have fallen victim to the “resource curse”, like other Third World states such as Iraq, Congo, Sudan, and Libya, where the discovery of oil and natural resources becomes a central cause of foreign intervention, political conflicts, and wars.
Venezuela was one of the founding members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960, alongside a group of Arab states. It benefited greatly from the Arab oil boycott during the October 1973 war, which doubled national income and raised annual per capita income to the highest in South America.
However, relations deteriorated significantly between Venezuela and the United States after the election of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in 1998, when he adopted socialist policies to distribute oil wealth among poor Venezuelans and reduce the influence of foreign companies.
Chávez also confronted US foreign policy after the failed 2002 coup attempt to overthrow him, and following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
He strengthened strong bilateral relations with the traditional enemies of the United States, such as Iran and Cuba, even providing Cuba with Venezuelan oil supplies, intensifying US resentment against him and increasing Washington’s desire to remove him.
US hostility toward Venezuela did not disappear after Chávez’s death and the rise of his successor Nicolás Maduro to the presidency in 2013. Instead, tensions continued to worsen.
Notably, the United States repeatedly failed to remove Maduro through coups or attempts to kidnap him, including an effort to bribe his private pilot, who refused the offers according to recent reports.
The US accuses Maduro’s administration of financial corruption, political authoritarianism, suppressing political opponents, and facilitating the trafficking of drugs into the United States, which President Trump regards as a serious threat to national security.
Accordingly, recent weeks saw an escalation in US military attacks on boats suspected of carrying drugs toward the United States, resulting in the killing of dozens of people, amid human rights criticism describing the actions as extrajudicial killings.
What Will US Military Strikes Look Like?
A US military intervention in Venezuela appears inevitable when analysing Trump’s approach to foreign crises and his management of limited military interventions, whether in his first presidential term or in the first year of his second term.
The question remains: Does Trump seek limited, targeted strikes against Venezuela similar to those he launched against Iran and the Houthis in Yemen? Or does he intend a stronger intervention aimed at overthrowing Nicolás Maduro’s government entirely?
Trump’s military operations against the Houthis in Yemen aimed to pressure them to halt attacks on American maritime interests in the Red Sea, without including any agreement to protect Israel from Houthi strikes. This explains the relative ease of reaching an agreement with the Houthis after the strikes.
Trump did not seek to widen the scope of the conflict or remove the Houthis from the scene, nor did he seek to assassinate their leader. The same applied to US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, intended to disrupt Iran’s nuclear capabilities without targeting the head of the regime, which Trump suggested would not have been impossible given deep Israeli intelligence penetration into Iranian state institutions and its targeting of Iranian military leaders.
However, the political objectives behind the expected strikes on Venezuela appear broader than those behind the earlier operations against Iranian and Houthi targets.
This time, Trump may seek to eliminate Nicolás Maduro entirely, possibly through direct military strikes aimed at killing him, followed by assisting in changing a regime that has long been a chronic headache for the United States.
These potential strikes would be the most forceful since the Cuban Missile Crisis in asserting the relevance of the Monroe Doctrine. They would also demonstrate Trump’s seriousness in combating drug trafficking and help divert American media attention away from rising prices and the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein case.
The coming days appear filled with potential surprises in the Venezuelan crisis. Trump may succeed this time in overthrowing Nicolás Maduro once and for all, despite the serious consequences of such a military intervention, including the possible outbreak of a civil war in Venezuela that would worsen the humanitarian situation in South America.
At the same time, Trump will face another challenge: convincing his right-wing electoral base of the necessity and justification of this military intervention.
