How the Monroe Doctrine came back to haunt the West

Things were already going very badly for Keir Starmer as the New Year dawned. He was embattled on multiple fronts including taxation, immigration, economic stagnation and rumoured leadership bids from within and beyond the cabinet. Then on 3 January it worsened, when Donald Trump launched his spectacular raid on Caracas, kidnapping the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in order to bring him to trial in New York on charges of drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism”. Trump also announced his plan to “run” Venezuela for the foreseeable future and to extract its oil for the benefit of its people and that of the United States. This constituted a serious violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and, thus, of international law.

The move presents an enormous challenge to Keir Starmer. It is an affront to his whole world view, of which international law forms the ethical and intellectual bedrock. This is a man who not only opposed the Iraq War, but who also surrendered control of the vital Chagos Islands to comply with a United Nations resolution. Moreover, the US president’s increasing preoccupation with Latin America, which some fear might suck US forces into a quagmire in Venezuela, bodes ill for the UK government’s hopes to keep Washington focused on Russian aggression in Ukraine.

To make matters worse, Trump’s actions have already been likened to those of Vladimir Putin’s in his own neighbourhood – that is, demanding control of one’s own region, refusal to tolerate a “non-aligned” country operating in that region, and claims to the natural resources of that country. This undermines the narrative at the heart of the UK government’s containment policy against Russia, not only in the so-called Global South but among Western publics as well. 

Lastly, the Venezuelan crisis – or at least the Prime Minister’s silence over it in the days after – is a nightmare in terms of party management. It increases the alienation of the anti-American Labour left and drives them further towards the Greens or the Liberal Democrats, both of whose leaders have already strongly condemned the raid. Some of these critics do not seem to care that Maduro was a dictator who had stolen the last election, driven millions into exile, suppressed the remaining opposition and menaced Guyana, a member of the Commonwealth; many see only “Uncle Sam” behaving badly and another stick with which to beat the Prime Minister.

This is not the first time the UK and the US have been confronted with a crisis over Venezuela. Around the turn of the last century, in 1895 and then again in 1902-03, London and Washington grappled with how to deal with Venezuela’s endemic domestic instability, failure to honour international debts (many of them to British creditors), and threatening behaviour towards neighbouring territories, such as the British colony of Guyana. The main American preoccupation throughout was to uphold the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which forbade the establishment of any new European colonies in the western hemisphere. 

These crises resulted in President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which claimed a US “international police power” to intervene if debts incurred by failing states threatened to allow European states to gain a foothold in America’s backyard.

The Monroe Doctrine was also initially an Anglo-American co-creation, defended for decades not by the militarily weak US but by the Royal Navy, because London was as concerned as Washington to keep foreign powers out of the region. It was only when the Americans developed their own ocean-going fleet that Latin America – south of Mexico – passed from being a US-British condominium to a preserve of the United States.

To be sure, there was a brief moment of tension in 1983 when Margaret Thatcher was outraged by President Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, a Commonwealth country. But few were interested when his successor, George HW Bush charged into Panama in December 1989.

Delta Force, the same special forces unit that seized Maduro, then captured the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who was later tried in Miami on charges similar to those of his Venezuelan analogue. I remember watching the assault on television in the graduate common room at Peterhouse, Cambridge, alone save for a forlorn leftist PhD student shouting “bastards” at each American helicopter as it moved across the screen. Another critic was the writer John le Carré, author of the superb Tailor of Panama (1996). Its hero Harry Pendel had little choice but to “drucken” himself – Le Carré’s cod-Yiddish for “lying low” – in the face of such overwhelming firepower

Trump’s action in Venezuela is thus not so much a radical breach of the international order as a return to traditional American geopolitics in the region. He said the US cannot let anyone else “run” Venezuela, and it is symbolic that the last footage of Maduro before the raid showed him welcoming the Chinese special envoy to the region. Likewise, Trump’s focus on restoring the expropriated American oil companies is of a piece with Washington’s prior interventions on behalf of US corporations. The rhetorical framing of the operation as an exercise of law enforcement rather than the invasion of sovereign state hearkens back, as we have seen, to Teddy Roosevelt’s determination to act as “police power” in the region.

The administration repeatedly signalled its intentions in Latin America throughout last year, culminating in December 2025 with the release of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy. This announced that the “United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere”. It also vowed, in what it christened the “Trump corollary” to the doctrine, to deny “non-hemispheric competitors” – by which it meant primarily China, but also Russia – “the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere”. It also undertook to “expand” the American footprint the region.

In some quarters, all this has given rise to an alarmist vision, in which Trump is at worst a Russian agent, and at best determined to carve up the world with Putin, and perhaps with Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi as well. In this scenario, the attack on Venezuela is merely the harbinger for an all-out American assault on the international order in the western hemisphere involving the annexation of Greenland, the Anschluss of Canada, the “recovery” of the Panama Canal and perhaps attacks on Mexico, all measures which Trump has frequently threatened. This would go hand in hand with an American retreat from responsibilities in Europe, and perhaps also in Asia.

If this were the case, there would be a strong argument to pursue a balancing pan-European “neo-Gaullist” alliance to uphold the law of nations against all. In reality, despite the US president’s rhetoric, there is virtually no chance that Trump will occupy either Canada or Greenland, and seize their natural resources, at least as matters stand. It would be different, of course, if either territory became – like Venezuela – a haven for drug traffickers, began to expropriate American corporations, welcomed Cuban operatives, imported Russians arms, and generally turned itself into an eyesore.

Far from being a stooge of Moscow, Trump hammered Iran, a Russian ally, and helped bring the regime to potential collapse. He has humiliated Russia again by destroying the vaunted air-defence systems it delivered to Venezuela. The photos of wrecked Buk missiles at Venezuelan airbases tell their own story. It also seems unlikely that Trump will commit to a full-scale occupation of Venezuela. He is more likely to force the regime to its knees through air strikes, special operations, and the slow strangulation of its oil trade.

Nor should we assume that the renewed American engagement in Latin America means that he has abandoned Europe. The current version of the Monroe Doctrine does not mean that the US will stick to the western hemisphere, but rather that the rest of the world should stay out of it. There are important people in Washington who want to withdraw from Europe, but others – such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the moving spirit behind the Latin American policy – who do not.

We should therefore think of the reassertion of US power in its “backyard” as a first step towards its re-establishment more generally. Indeed, challenger powers – from Nazi Germany through Imperial Japan to Putin’s Russia – have criticised not the Monroe Doctrine as such, but America’s refusal to acknowledge their own reciprocal claimed spheres of influence in Europe, Asia or Eurasia. If this is American hypocrisy, then we – the Democratic West – need more of it.

As for the idea of a European neo-Gaullist front, even French president Emmanuel Macron at first enthusiastically welcomed the operation, though he has rowed back since. Whatever one thinks of the Trump administration’s policy towards Venezuela, the US is still a friend upon whose help we more than ever depend. So far, neither the UK nor the rest of Europe has invested the resources necessary to contain Russia. International law, sadly, will not stop Putin; Western strength, which means continued American support, might.

It would thus be not only pointless but counterproductive to join in the chorus shouting “bastards” at our closest allies. Trump could well react to criticism by reducing American commitments to Nato, or even intelligence support to Ukraine. There is no need for the Prime Minister to endorse the American operation, but we must accept that we have no cards to play in this game. Starmer is therefore right to take a leaf from Harry Pendel’s book and “drucken” himself by keeping his reservations out of sight. Otherwise, the price for playing to the gallery by “standing up to Trump” will be paid in Ukrainian blood.

Instead, London and Brussels would be better advised to proclaim a European Monroe Doctrine, which would declare the democratic parts of our continent off-limits to outside powers such as the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. If the original Monroe Doctrine was upheld by the British until the Americans were ready, the new one could be defended by the US (or at least by Trump’s successors if they were willing) until the UK and the EU have completed their rearmament. One way or the other, we Europeans will need to regain control of our own continent before we start lecturing the Americans on how to run theirs.

[Further reading: America kidnapped a president. Keir Starmer said  By Brendan Simms, The New Stateman