. It is not so much that it is through a military intervention, without any coverage of legality, that is, outside international law and the US Constitution, without the United Nations or the United States Congress. And even less so that it responds to the , which authorizes the current president to act in the entire American continent as if it were a territory under his sovereignty.
The dazzling and effective night operation of the US army and its special forces is a qualitative leap in the interventionism formulated by President Monroe in 1823, barely half a century after independence, when the young and distant republic sought to keep the European empires at bay. Reformulated in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt, it legitimized his recently inaugurated imperialist impulse, interference in Latin American countries and military interventions during the 20th century in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and even support for the military coup plotters in Chile and Argentina.
The true novelty of the Trump Doctrine is determined by the global context. Such a drastic and yet so easy action of regime change in the immediate neighborhood of the United States is a serious warning of universal value. Neutralizing in a few hours armed forces with no capacity for deterrence or response, accompanied by the arrest of the head of state, is a Latin American novelty that can be repeated with other regimes on the continent located in similar military inferiority, economic weakness and deterioration or non-existence of the social base that supports them.
by the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, from an exiled Cuban family, there is little doubt that the overthrow of the communist regime in Havana and perhaps then the Ortega dictatorship in Nicaragua, will be on the agenda of the White House. It is doubtful, however, that it will affect Iran, far from the Americas, where a repetition of an operation of the same nature would not be possible without falling into the disasters of Iraq or Afghanistan. The undoubted joy that the serial fall of several dictators can provide is clouded by the autocratic force that drives it, in this case that of Trump, the president who concentrates all powers in his hands, is deteriorating democracy in his country and promoting an illiberal international to bring the extreme right to the government of the main European countries.
If the application in Venezuela of the Trump Corollary contains a threat to any American government that is an adversary of Trump, it constitutes both an example and an implicit blessing for the ambitions of Russia and China, superpowers. It is also a simultaneous warning not to interfere in Latin American affairs, not in politics, but in investments or commercial exchanges. Taiwan and Ukraine, on the other hand, have cause for concern about the aggressive regionalized imperialism that results from the division of the world into areas of influence exhibited by Trumpism.
The same concern suggests the imperialist regionalization among Washington’s former allies in Asia – Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand – and in Europe – the NATO and EU partners -, condemned to alone contain the ambitions of expansionist neighbors encouraged by Trumpist military activism. The overthrow of Maduro is also a serious blow to the United Nations Charter, to the international organization itself and its Security Council, and to international criminal law, mocked and even persecuted by Trump through . Its universal multilateral jurisdiction will thus be replaced by the global reach of a Trumpist justice guided from the White House by unilateralist decisionism.
The culminating moment will be to answer for crimes linked to terrorism, arms trafficking and drug trafficking. It will be a grotesque sarcasm for someone to hand over to the same courts someone who is, ultimately, one of his equals. All the more so when their predatory purposes regarding the resources of the countries that are the object of their ambitions and their lack of appreciation for the human rights and freedoms of the citizens of any country, including their own, are explicit. The wolf is the leader and judge of this flock. Let no one be surprised when he devours whatever sheep he wants.
To read more:
‘The New York Times’ editorial, January 3, 2026.
Michael O’Hanlon, Yale University Press, 2026.
Robert Kagan, Atlantic Books, 2006.
