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By Tom O'Connor
Deputy Editor, National Security and Foreign Policy
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When Saddam Hussein found himself in U.S. custody months after a shock and awe invasion swiftly toppled his government, one FBI agent—as later recalled by former President George W. Bush—famously cited the Iraqi leader as saying: “I just didn’t believe Bush.”
It’s hard not to attribute a similar mentality to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, now detained along with his wife, Cilia Flores, at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York City, to face charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. It follows a daring, roughly two-hour-long Delta Force raid that seized the couple out of their home on in the early hours of January 3. Just days earlier, the Venezuelan leader was seen dancing in the streets of Caracas, lauding the mobilization of millions of militia fighters and even reportedly attempting to negotiate a deal with President Donald Trump as the White House’s threats intensified.
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“Nicolás Maduro had his chance,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a press conference with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, from where they, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe watched the raid unfold via a livestream.
“He f’ed around and he found out,” Hegseth added, echoing a popular refrain from Trump’s MAGA movement.
Today, it’s not just U.S. foes that find themselves scrambling to reinterpret Trump’s grandiose ultimatums in the wake of the stunning Venezuela operation. Partners and allies as well are now viewing Trump’s open vow to pursue a more assertive policy across the Western Hemisphere in a far more serious light, one bound to have repercussions across the globe.
“There’s no doubt that the message is larger than Caracas,” Thomas Shannon, who served as under secretary of state for political affairs during the first Trump administration, tells Newsweek, “that the primary recipients of the message should be Colombia and Mexico, and not that he’s coming after their elected leaders, but he’s basically saying, ‘Listen, militarily, we can do anything we want to, whenever we want to, and you can’t stop us.’”
The message also extends to neighboring Canada and goes beyond the Americas as well, including NATO ally Denmark, from which Trump demands the takeover of Greenland. Once a matter of ridicule during his first administration, Trump’s desire to take control of the world’s largest island under the pretext of shoring up security against China and Russia is now “sending a very clear message” that NATO allies will “have to focus across the northern Atlantic into North America, and they have to be in a position to help us by helping us themselves,” argues Shannon.
“People laugh at the president, but they also laughed at [former Secretary of State William] Seward when he bought Alaska,” Shannon, now senior international policy adviser at the Arnold & Porter law firm, says. “There is a method to this madness.”
When probed on whether the U.S. would launch operations against the strategic Arctic territory recently, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said “nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”
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A MAGA Monroe Doctrine
The 1867 purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire offers lessons for the present. Coming just two years after Union victory in the Civil War, the deal was widely derided at the time as “Seward’s Folly.” Yet it proved strategically valuable—first with the discovery of gold, then oil, and later as a crucial military position during World War II and the Cold War. Today, Alaska remains a central U.S. foothold in the Arctic and a front line with Russia.
It was no accident that Alaska was chosen as the venue for the historic meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin last August. It is also notable that Moscow has responded quietly—if not at times approvingly—to Trump’s Greenland ambitions, while offering little more than rhetorical criticism following the capture of Maduro, one of the Kremlin’s closest allies in the hemisphere.
Beyond the real limits of Russia’s power projection both soft and hard, the inaction speaks to a certain alignment between Washington and Moscow on the realities of the current global order, one deputy chief of staff Miller explicitly described as a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
This outlook channels another 19th century concept revitalized by the current White House, the Monroe Doctrine. Devised two centuries ago by then-President James Monroe as a strategy of expelling European powers from the Western Hemisphere, the approach has been officially co-opted by the Trump administration in the form of a new “corollary” outlined in the latest National Security Strategy, with the president dubbing it the “Donroe Doctrine.”
“The United States is resurrecting the Monroe Doctrine first enunciated in 1823—and with the same two justifications the United States has periodically invoked over the past two centuries,” Stewart Patrick, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Global Order and Institutions Program who served at the State Department’s policy planning staff, tells Newsweek.
These are “to declare the hemisphere off-limits to the meddling of foreign powers” and “to address perceived lawlessness and misgovernance in countries that are in the U.S. backyard.”
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It’s not the first update to the Monroe Doctrine. Former Secretary of State Richard Olney (under President Grover Cleveland) and President Theodore Roosevelt put forth their own corollaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, responding to crises in Venezuela, then subject to clashes among rival European colonial powers even prior to the discovery of the world’s largest oil reserves. The doctrine was also weaponized during the Cold War to combat communism across the hemisphere.
Since the rise to power of Maduro’s predecessor, late President Hugo Chávez, in 1999, Venezuela has positioned itself in the crosshairs as an opponent of U.S. influence in the region, fostering political, economic and security inroads with China, Russia, Iran and other like-minded critics of Washington. Maduro, who succeeded Chávez upon his death in 2013, continued down this path, surviving a 2019 coup by U.S.-backed opposition under the first Trump administration only to become the first geopolitical casualty of the latest Monroe Doctrine—as well as a cautionary tale for others—under the second.
“Trump is clearly motivated to prevent China, as well as Russia, in particular, from gaining more of a political and economic foothold in the Americas, particularly in countries of the Caribbean basin,” Patrick says.
“At the same time, he is putting governments in the hemisphere on notice that if they are unable to control what he perceives as spillovers from their nations that affect the U.S., including flows of drugs and undocumented migrants, that the United States is prepared to use force against them.”
Trump’s ambitions go further still. He has made clear, including in his inaugural speech, that he views territorial acquisition as key to revitalizing American greatness, recalling the “Manifest Destiny” that channeled divine ambitions of the nation’s original westward expansion. “For the first time in more than a century,” Patrick says, “the U.S. pursuit of imperial acquisition is a real prospect.”
Winner Takes All
The shift has unsurprisingly unnerved both friends and foes. Perhaps most daunting of all is the prospect that little can be done to effectively push back against the White House’s designs, and the risks of doing so may ultimately outweigh the rewards.
“There are few avenues for allies and adversaries alike to restrain Trump from his worst impulses,” Patrick says.
Permanent member status grants Washington a veto against any attempts to challenge the U.S. at the United Nations Security Council. Neither the International Court of Justice nor the International Criminal Court, to which the U.S. is not a party, offer much leverage. For European leaders clinging to fading interpretations of the application of rule of law, the stakes are particularly high. Many welcomed Maduro’s ouster, sharing the White House’s view of him as an illegitimate leader due to his alleged drug cartel connections and electoral fraud, even as they came to understand how the swift, unilateral and extraterritorial circumstances of his fall may ultimately manifest in less welcome areas.
“For all the talk of international law in general they made no secret of the fact that they shed no tears for Maduro’s fall,” Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali and former adviser to the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, tells Newsweek. “Is this wise or ethical? Of course not—is what I think—but it is what it is.”
“The capacity question becomes more relevant when it comes to opposing moves that European leaders really are against, such as Greenland,” she says. “Here I think that in the short term the means available are limited, with statements like the one of the coalition of the willing that came out [on January 6] being an example.”
But “while Europeans would not be able to confront the U.S. militarily on Greenland or elsewhere,” she argues that “they could clearly signal the consequences, including regarding the gradual decoupling of defense industries, that would ensue.”
“In the immediate term it would harm Europeans more than Americans but clearly in the medium to long term the U.S.’s hegemonic role in Europe would be lost,” Tocci says. “Is this a problem for the Trump admin? They probably don’t care, I’d say.”
Few anticipate that, even with the newfound brazenness of the Trump administration, any U.S. military operations as witnessed against oil-rich Venezuela will imminently target U.S. allies. And yet the steady hardening of rhetoric continues to illicit real concerns, including from neighboring NATO ally Canada, which also has plentiful natural resources and not long ago was a subject of Trump’s calls for annexation.
Jean Charest, former premier of Quebec and member of the Canadian Parliament, recalls being “shocked” upon reading the latest National Security Strategy, particularly its references to the Monroe Doctrine and “a period of colonization in the Americas.”
“There’s no imminent fear that the Americans are going to come into Canada with the military,” Charest tells Newsweek. “In fact, President Trump has already said that that is not what he would do. But he did talk about the 51st state, he did at one point say the borders were not the right borders, he did say that he could break us economically.”
“And what we also know from having observed in negotiations, trade agreements, it’s all very one-sided,” Charest says. “It’s about American interest, or what they perceive as being American interest. It’s all transactional. It’s all short term. It doesn’t have a long view of history and what our common interests are.”
But while Charest is critical of Trump’s reading of history and how it relates to present regional and international realities, he does acknowledge that the White House may be fundamentally correct on its central assertion of revamping national security attention on the continent. Throughout his decades of government experience, Charest says he’s consistently raised alarms regarding “our lack of investment in our own defense,” something only now Canada is “working rapidly to fix.”
“I’m among those who think that we may thank Donald Trump 20 years from now for having shaken us out of our lethargy,” Charest says. “We are very dependent on the American economy. We’ve been complacent on how we have run our own economy.
“For example, we have not developed the infrastructure to be able to explore the natural resources, even to development within our own country, as opposed to just sending raw materials,” he adds. “The Trump administration is a massive wake-up call.”
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The Americas First
Somewhat lost amid the bluster is a tale of tough pragmatism that speaks to the heart of Trump’s highly transactional nature. While Maduro’s abduction marks a high point of escalation in the U.S.-Venezuela saga, neither a sustained war nor a concerted effort at regime change have manifested in the wake of the Special Ops caper in Caracas.
Rather, the Trump administration, after having failed to strike a deal with Maduro over the past year, now appears to be willing to give his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, a chance at complying with U.S. demands, albeit under open threats of further hostile action. Here, too, is a lesson for others. “The Western Hemisphere writ large is Trump’s intended focus for this term and one of the hallmarks of the Trump administrations is that it seeks to get things done, not to just talk about getting things done,” Kimberly Breier, who served as assistant secretary in State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs during the first Trump administration, tells Newsweek. “Trump does not see U.S. diplomacy as a debate society.”
Already, she says there appear to be results, including with Mexico, who she argues “is doing more now than I have seen in many years to address fentanyl and the cartels,” though “the key question is whether those efforts will produce sufficient results.”
“Governments in the region largely understand the bottom line—if they take sufficient action to address U.S. concerns, concerns the countries themselves share, the U.S. will not need to take action itself,” Breier says. “Trade deals are on the table, tariffs can be lifted as quickly as they were imposed.”
As for other partners and allies across the globe, Breier says “Trump is also urging them to take more responsibility for their own spheres of influence outside the Western Hemisphere—it’s an invitation to lead.”
“Fully fund NATO. Shoulder more cost in Ukraine. It doesn’t mean the U.S. is walking away from the rest of the world, as some European allies claim,” Breier says. “To the contrary, it’s an entreaty to our allies and friends to take more responsibility and not expect the United States to do everything, for everyone, everywhere, all the time. The transatlantic alliance remains vital to U.S. national security—Trump is asking its members to make it more robust and to make burden-sharing a more even proposition.”
When it comes to adversaries, she says the message is, “as we have now seen in both Iran and Venezuela, that President Trump is not afraid to use surgical military force to achieve U.S. goals when diplomacy falls short.” Simply put: “Trump has restored U.S. deterrence.”
Alexander Gray, who served as White House National Security Council chief of staff during the first Trump administration and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, echoed this sentiment, arguing how “U.S. deterrence globally was substantially weakened by the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, which contributed significantly to the Ukraine invasion of 2022 and dealt a major blow to U.S. deterrent credibility.”
“The Maduro operation shows that the Trump Corollary and the traditional American concept of ‘hemispheric defense’ are fully in effect,” Gray tells Newsweek. “In practice, this means continuing to prioritize U.S. resources and senior leader attention to the hemisphere, which has too often been neglected when crises erupt elsewhere.”
No Turning Back
Still, the effort is not without substantial challenges, many of them internal. Congress, for example, has thus far offered little resistance to Trump’s unprecedented moves, though a poor midterm showing later this year could serve to temper even the expanded definition of executive power wielded by this administration.
Pressing forward effectively may mean further institutionalizing some of the gains made in the reshaping of U.S. policy. Gray, for his part, proposes “creating a Hemispheric Defense Command that combines Northern and Southern Command as part of the War Department’s reorganization of combatant commands and looking for additional opportunities for rotational or permanent U.S. presence in the Caribbean, Central, and South America.”
Some question the White House’s capacity to maintain its attention in the long term. Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute who previously served at the State Department, National Security Council and Pentagon, argues that “the hard part is just beginning.”
The coming phases, she says, would involve “things the Trump administration has demonstrated no facility at: clear political objectives, a strategy to achieve them, adequate resources, consistent attention and coherent public messaging.”
“The administration clearly wants to project intimidation to countries in the hemisphere,” Schake tells Newsweek, “but whether that results in improved security, access to resources, or deterrence of great powers, it’s too soon to say.”
Others, such as Shannon, Trump’s former under secretary of state for political affairs, feel the U.S. leader is well on his way to achieving a long-term restructuring of national institutions to favor his vision.
“The president is reshaping the purpose of American foreign policy, and he is doing so in a way that he believes is consistent with a world that is emerging and that it’s no longer going to be up to the United States to impose global order and try to maintain a degree of stability for other people’s benefit, that we’re going to operate for ourselves and people who want to associate themselves with us, they are welcome,” Shannon says.
“They will benefit from what benefits us,” he adds, “but...our primary purpose is not going to be about them.”
While actions such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and abducting Maduro may constitute the more visible fronts on which Trump is wrestling with institutions long devoted to fighting wars abroad rather than at home, perhaps even more significant is the comprehensive rearrangement of internal structures that grant the quest a sense of permanence.
“In many ways, what the president is doing is he’s restructuring aspects of the American government to prevent us from easily returning to where we came from and this is dramatic,” Shannon says. “It’s kind of like [Spanish conquistador Hernán] Cortés burning his ships after he after he lands on the beaches of Mexico,” he adds, “because he’s not going to give his soldiers any option about going backwards.”
Photography by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
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