20 hours ago

Jeremy BowenInternational editor

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Only a few hours after the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was removed from his palace, his job and his country by US special forces, Donald Trump was still marvelling about how it felt to monitor a live feed of the raid from his Mar-a-Lago mansion.

He shared his feelings with Fox News.

"If you could see the speed, the violence, they call it that... It was amazing, amazing work by these people. No one else could do something like this."

The US president wants and needs quick victories. Before he took office for the second time, he boasted that ending the Russia-Ukraine war would be a single day's work.

Venezuela, as presented in Trump's statements, is the quick, decisive victory that he has craved.

Maduro is in a prison cell in Brooklyn, the US will "run" Venezuela - and he has announced that the Chavista regime, now with a new president, will turn over millions of barrels of oil and that he will control the way the profits are spent. All, so far anyway, without an American life lost and without the long occupation that had such catastrophic consequences after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

For now, at least, Trump and his advisers, publicly at least, are ignoring Venezuela's complexities. It is a country bigger than Germany, still run by the regime of factions that has embedded corruption and repression into Venezuelan politics.

Instead, Trump is enjoying a geopolitical sugar rush. Judging by their statements as they flanked him at Mar-a-Lago, so are US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Since then, they have repeated that Trump was a president who does what he says he is going to do.

He's made it clear to Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland – and Denmark – that they need to be nervous about where his appetite will take him next.

Trump likes nicknames. He still calls his predecessor Sleepy Joe Biden.

Now he's trying out a new name for the Monroe Doctrine, which has been a foundation of US policy in Latin America for two centuries.

Trump renamed it, naturally, after himself – the Donroe doctrine.

James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, unveiled the original in December 1823. It declared that the western hemisphere was America's sphere of interest – and warned European powers not to meddle or establish new colonies.

The Donroe Doctrine puts Monroe's 200-year-old message on steroids.

"The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot," Trump said at Mar-a-Lago as Maduro, blindfolded and shackled, was on this way to jail.

"Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again."

Reuters

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores are now being detained in New York

Any rival or potential threat, especially China, has to stay out of Latin America. It's not clear where that leaves the massive investments that China has already made in the region.

Donroe also extends the huge area the US calls its "backyard" north to Greenland.

The 2026 equivalent of Monroe's copperplate handwriting is a photo of a frowning, moody looking Trump posted by the US State Department on social media. The words with it say, "this is OUR hemisphere – and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened".

That means using US military and economic power to coerce countries and leaders that get out of line – and to take their resources if necessary. As Trump warned another possible target, the president of Colombia – they need to watch their ass.

Greenland is in America's sights, not just because of its strategic importance in the Arctic – but because it has rich mineral resources that are becoming accessible as climate change melts the ice sheets. Rare earths from Greenland and heavy crude oil from Venezuela are both seen as strategic US assets.

Unlike other interventionist US presidents, Trump does not cloak his actions with the legitimacy, however spurious, of international law or the pursuit of democracy. The only legitimacy he needs comes from his belief in the force of his own will, backed by raw US power.

From Monroe to Donroe, foreign policy doctrines matter to US presidents. They shape their actions and their legacies.

In July, the US will celebrate its 250th birthday. In 1796, its first president, George Washington, announced he wouldn't seek a third term with a farewell address that still resonates today.

Washington issued a series of warnings about the US and the world.

Temporary alliances in time of war might be necessary, but the US should otherwise avoid permanent alliances with foreign nations. That started the tradition of isolationism.

At home, he warned citizens to beware of extreme partisanship. Division, he said, was a danger to the young American republic.

The Senate does an annual public re-reading of Washington's farewell address, a ritual that does not cut through the hyper-partisan and polarised politics of the US.

Washington's warning about the dangers of entangling alliances was followed for 150 years. After World War One, the US left Europe and returned to isolationism.

But World War Two made the US into a global power. And that is where another doctrine comes in, much more significant for the way Europeans have lived – until Trump.

By 1947, the Cold War with the Soviet Union had turned frigid. The UK, left bankrupt by the war, told the US it could no longer fund the Greek government's fight with communists.

Then-President Harry Truman's response was to commit US to support, in his words, "free peoples resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures". He meant threats from the Soviet Union or homegrown communists.

That was the Truman Doctrine. It led to the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe, followed in 1949 by the creation of Nato. Atlanticists in the US, like Harry Truman and George Kennan - the diplomat who came up with the idea of containing the Soviet Union - believed those commitments were in America's interests.

Watch: How the US attack on Venezuela unfolded

There is a direct line from the Truman Doctrine to Joe Biden's decision to fund Ukraine's war effort.

In many ways, the Truman Doctrine created the relationship with Europe that Trump has been dismantling. It was a sharp break with the past. Truman ignored Washington's warning about permanent entangling alliances.

Now Trump is breaking with Truman's legacy. If he follows through with his threat to somehow take possession of Greenland, which is Danish sovereign territory, he could destroy what's left of the transatlantic alliance.

The Maga ideologue and powerful Trump adviser Stephen Miller summed it up earlier this week on CNN. The US, he said, was operating in the real world that "is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power… these are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time".

No US president would deny the need for strength and power. But from Franklin D Roosevelt, through Truman and all their successors until Trump, the men in the Oval Office believed the best way to be powerful was to lead an alliance, which meant give and take.

They supported the new United Nations and the drive to make rules to regulate the behaviour of states. The US, of course, has ignored and violated international law many times – doing much to hollow out the idea of a rules-based international order.

But Trump's predecessors did not try to sweep away the notion that the international system needed regulation, however flawed and incomplete.

That is because of the catastrophic consequences in the first half of the 20th Century of the rule of the strongest – two world wars and millions dead.

But the combination of Trump's "America First" ideology and his businessman's acquisitive, transactional instincts have led him to believe that America's allies need to pay for the privilege of his favour. Friendship seems too strong a word. America's interests, in the narrow definition laid out by the president, require it to stay top dog by acting alone.

Trump changes his mind often. But one constant appears to be his belief that the US can use its power with impunity. He says that it is the way to make America great again.

The risk is that, if Trump sticks to his course, he will push the world back to the way it was in the age of empires a century or more ago - a world where big powers, with spheres of influence, sought to impose their will, and where mighty authoritarian nationalists led their peoples to disaster.