JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – President Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and overthrow of the Venezuelan government is raising the question: Will it embolden him to execute other such radical acts?
Trump seems obsessed with Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland.
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And the move in Venezuela is sending shockwaves far beyond those areas.
When Trump announced that America would now “run Venezuela,” the move shattered more than a regime. It fractured a basic assumption of the post-Cold War order.
What’s that assumption? That even superpowers must pretend they follow the rules.
It leads to an unsettling question in Asia: Would China attempt the same type of move against Taiwan?
As one political analyst put it, what once sounded like an abstract legal debate has turned into a live geopolitical concern. From Washington to Beijing to Taipei, officials and analysts are reassessing how much international law still constrains great powers -- and who benefits if it doesn’t.
The U.S. posture long had been that the country was the chief defender of rules-based international order, especially when it comes to sovereignty and the use of force.
That is now directly challenged by the Venezuela invasion. It was launched without Congressional approval or UN authorization.
How do the critics internationally see it? If Washington asserts the right to invade a foreign country, seize its president and oversee its transition indefinitely, rivals could claim the same latitude in their own regions.
In the end, that could mean damage is not confined to the Western Hemisphere.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner has a blunt warning: “If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?”
Warner goes on to say that once the “threshold is crossed, “the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”
Look to our own history. This is not a first in U.S. foreign policy. Jonathan Katz wrote in The New Republic that Trump is reviving a disastrous, forgotten era in U.S. foreign policy.
Katz was addressing the U.S. global imperialism of the early 20th century, which led to global catastrophe. Katz worries the situation with Venezuela may end with similar consequences.
Here’s what Katz writes about that history in TNR:
Though largely forgotten today, in the decades before World War II the United States embarked on a spree of overseas territorial and resource conquests. From 1898 to roughly 1934, the U.S. military invaded, occupied, and in some cases outright colonized no fewer than 14 countries and territories in whole and in part, including Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. (In 1902, a crisis over Venezuela briefly raised the possibility of war with Britain, but cooler heads prevailed.) Some of those territories, including Puerto Rico and Hawaii, remain U.S. holdings to this day. Others, such as the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone, were later granted sovereignty or returned to their host nations, though only after the U.S. had taken what it wanted, usually land for military bases.
He goes on to discuss the approaches different presidents took to “empire building” and the subsequent stumbles they took.
Katz says:
Trump wants to claim Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle. In November’s revision of the National Security Strategy, his aides announced a “‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” to prevent “hostile foreign” ownership of “key assets” and to ensure the “Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.”
Katz goes on to write that Roosevelt was a ”pretty good imperialist” whose chief foreign policy aim was the growth of the United States into a globe-spanning empire whose reach and landholdings would rival those of the European powers.
But Katz maintains that Trump more resembles William McKinley’s actions.
Katz writes: A morally small man, personally indebted to businessmen who rescued him from bankruptcy after he’d made bad loans during an 1893 depression, McKinley stumbled into the 1898 war with Spain that resulted in the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay.
Katz, author of the book “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire” and writer of The Racket Newsletter (www.theracket.news), joins me this week for Politics & Power.
At the heart of our discussion is whether Trump is working to revive a lost era without any care or awareness, and what history shows are the catastrophes that followed that era.
Watch our latest episode at 10:30 a.m., 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Tuesday on News4JAX+. Or watch On Demand any time on News4JAX+, News4JAX.com and our News4JAX YouTube Channel.