In the immediate and uncertain aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the removal of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, writers such as Katrina Vanden Heuvel and John Nichols at The Nation have likened Trump to “a European king of old,” a figure concerned with accruing wealth and status more than in simply projecting the power of an imperial state.
However, when placed in historical context, Trump’s actions in Venezuela ironically seem less monarchical than downright presidential. For more than a century, US Presidents —Republicans and Democrats alike— have used military force to establish and maintain U.S. power in the Greater Caribbean. Since 1898, not a single decade has passed in which US military forces were not deployed in the Greater Caribbean region. This apparently hard-to-kick presidential habit has extended through world wars, decolonization, the Cold War, and various economic crises.
Here’s a partial list: Cuba (1898-1901; 1906, 1912, 1917, 1920); Panama (1904-1999), Honduras (1913, 1915, 1919); Mexico (1914); Dominican Republic (1916-1924; 1965); Haiti (1915-1933; 1994; 2010); Nicaragua (1917; 1922-35); Guatemala (1954); and Grenada (1983). Let alone Puerto Rico, under United States control since 1898; or the exigencies of the Platt Amendment which was imposed on Cuba (1901-1934) severely limiting its sovereignty; or the customs receivership imposed on the Dominican Republic (1904-1941). Let alone the Reagan Administration’s (illegal) funding and training of the Contras to fight the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s. In addition to those previously listed misadventures, during this very long century, the US has also leased numerous military bases throughout the region, including the now infamous Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
To be clear, the contexts in which these interventions took place varied tremendously, as did the justifications offered by US officials. The many presidents who authorized these interventions often possessed starkly different personalities, ideological commitments, and domestic policies. Despite those differences, however, their approaches to Latin America in general, and the Greater Caribbean in particular, share a troubling history of military deployments and American overreach. The fact that interventions link presidents including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump is perhaps the most damning evidence that the United States government has generally held an imperial view of the Greater Caribbean – seeing the region as its proverbial “backyard” where the “kids” sometimes get unruly.
In this sense, the trending phrase “Donroe Doctrine,” which has been promoted by many in the administration itself, reflects how the Trump Administration’s projection of power in the Americas is purposefully meant to invoke President James Monroe’s 1823 speech before the US Congress that articulated a vision in which U.S. interests extended over the hemisphere.
Despite the more recent history of American meddling in the region, the current situation between the US and Venezuela more closely resembles the late nineteenth century, when US economic and military power grew tremendously in the Greater Caribbean, stirring ambivalent feelings among Venezuelans and others who looked to the US with a mixture of admiration and concern. As that century came to a close, US investors played an important role in Venezuela’s economy, importing, among other things, copious quantities of asphalt that literally paved US economic expansion. Moreover, many Venezuela leaders saw in the Monroe Doctrine a bulwark against British power in an ongoing border dispute with neighboring British Guiana.
This was the context by which President Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of State Richard Olney penned a bluntly worded memorandum to the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in 1895: “Today, the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” Although I am not sure anyone in the Trump Administration is familiar with the “Olney Memorandum,” the expression of raw power, untethered to any explicit ideology, would surely resonate.
The ideas contained in Olney’s blunt message generated mixed feelings in the Greater Caribbean. In Caracas, Christmas celebrations in 1895 featured jubilant crowds saluting the U.S. minister who announced that President Grover Cleveland —invoking the Monroe Doctrine— had warned Britain that its boundary dispute with Venezuela should be resolved via arbitration, not force. People reportedly laid wreaths at the base of a statue of George Washington. By 1899, the celebratory mood in Caracas had evaporated following a US-led arbitration over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, “negotiations” that excluded Venezuela.
That same year, Cipriano Castro, a political outsider who had been living in exile in Colombia, seized power and became President, much to the dismay of the New York and Bermudez Company, an asphalt company that helped to fund an uprising against the new leader. The war was violent and costly. In the aftermath Castro, who remained in power, refused to make payments on foreign loans that his government inherited from earlier administrations. He instead called on creditors to use the Venezuelan court system to seek redress for unpaid loans. British and German officials responded by sending naval forces to the Caribbean that seized Venezuelan ships and set up a blockade in 1902 and into the following year.
Castro’s rule in Venezuela influenced President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 message to Congress in which he asserted that the US would “reluctantly” exercise international police power in the case of “chronic wrong-doing” throughout the Caribbean region. What became known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States would make multiple interventions— preemptive strikes— in the name of achieving political stability and preventing European incursions.
Historical perspectives also reveal the central and often complex roles played by US private interests (notably businesses and banks). For example, in the Dominican Republic, the US government worked with private banks to consolidate the island republic’s debts while also garnering a majority of the Dominican Republic’s custom receipts to pay off the debts. In addition, US businesses, including the powerful United Fruit Company, often called on the US government to intervene with military force in order to protect US citizens and property. Although US policy cannot be reduced to what early-twentieth-century critics called “dollar diplomacy,” the Trump Administration’s hasty effort to enlist the help of US oil companies such as Chevron , parallel past administrations that involved US banks in the restructuring of debts throughout the region in the early 20th century. Such meddling is thus neither new nor by any means likely to bring long-term prosperity to Venezuela or anywhere else.
Finally, it’s important to note that US interventions are almost always violent. While the administration has extolled its “surgical strike” that removed Maduro and his wife while “only” killing a few dozen security agents, we should not forget that the lead up to the taking of Maduro included the lethal bombing of civilian boats by US forces, orders that many observers believe to be illegal. The US official response, that those killed were violent criminals, harkens back to justifications used to kill Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Panamanians during US occupations of the past century.
The Trump administration is not making the US imperial again — the United States has never ceased to exercise hegemonic power in the Greater Caribbean. And while one can sympathize with Venezuelans (and Cubans) who have struggled in vain to forge dignified, democratic lives under years of authoritarian rule, they should take heed of the historical inability of US military interventions — however “surgical” — to bring long-term peace, democracy, or economic prosperity. Once again it appears that the harsh lesson to be learned is that pathways to democracy and dignified livelihoods in the Greater Caribbean are unlikely to run through Washington.
