Trump Is Reviving a Disastrous, Forgotten Era in U.S. Foreign Policy
Announcing on Saturday the U.S. military incursion in Venezuela and the capture of its leader, President Donald Trump was characteristically blunt. After rattling off pretextual justifications for the raid—allusions to President Nicolás Maduro’s democratic illegitimacy, his alleged drug trafficking ties, and the specter of ISIS, Iran, and “narco-terrorism”—Trump got to the point.
“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” he said. “They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could’ve taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure—the oil infrastructure—and start making money for the country.”
When I was cutting my teeth as a journalist covering the Pentagon during the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003, this would have been shocking. Back then, the suggestion that President George W. Bush had ordered the invasion and the capture of Saddam Hussein to seize the oil was considered radical; that a president might publicly admit it, the stuff of a Dave Chappelle sketch. But as a student of empire, I recognized something deeper in Trump’s words. He isn’t just embarking on a dangerous new adventure in South America, nor even merely adding to the string of U.S.-backed coup attempts in Venezuela. He is turning the clock back to a long-dormant era of U.S. and European imperialism—one that proved disastrous for those in its crosshairs, and ultimately for the entire world.
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.
This was not, however, a uniform process. Different presidents had different approaches to empire-building, often in hopes of correcting the costly mistakes of their predecessors. Woodrow Wilson, who was president from 1913 to 1921, saw his role as overseeing civilizing missions, somewhat in the style of the French empire. He paternalistically imparted his vision of morality and self-determination, albeit with U.S. interests paramount and at the barrel of a gun. Before him, William Howard Taft oversaw “dollar diplomacy,” a more British style of informal control through central-bank takeovers and subservience through U.S. loans. His predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, carried out the most muscular phase of American empire, brutally crushing an insurgency in the Philippines and ginning up a war to cleave the state of Panama from Colombia to build a transoceanic canal. He also declared the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the so-called Monroe Doctrine, inverting the 1823 principle’s toothless opposition to European colonialism into a permission structure for the U.S. to do whatever it wanted in the Americas.
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.” (In the press conference, he jokingly referred to it as the “Don-roe Doctrine.”)
But Roosevelt was, by his own reckoning, 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. Trump, on the other hand, has long claimed to disdain forever wars and nation-building, and as president has generally sought to keep the world out, not govern it. But now he has announced an open-ended managerial occupation of Venezuela—“until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition” to a friendlier government—and seemed to imply that it could be done without “boots on the ground.” Even more fancifully, he stated that the entire operation would pay for itself with “money coming out of the ground”—that is, with the profits generated by handing control over Venezuela’s vast oil fields to ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other U.S.-based energy companies.
In this, he more resembles Teddy Roosevelt’s predecessor, William McKinley. A morally small man, personally indebted to businessmen who rescued him from bankruptcy after making 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. (He was pushed in no small part by Teddy Roosevelt, his then assistant secretary of the Navy; reporting suggests Trump was similarly eased into the Venezuela operation by his far more ideological secretary of state, Marco Rubio.) McKinley did so on the promise that, as a pro-war senator said, war with Spain would be a boon to “every branch of industry and domestic commerce,” and that he would not have to directly administer Cuba’s nonwhite, Spanish-speaking, Catholic, and Santería-practicing masses.
When he found himself facing a revolt by Filipino nationalists, incensed by the betrayal of U.S. forces who had come in the guise of liberators from Spanish rule, McKinley could only throw more troops and money at the problem, betraying the lack of preparation and foresight. He was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist outraged in part by American atrocities in the Philippines.
Trump gave a shout-out to McKinley a year ago in his inaugural address, though it is unclear whether he knew anything about him beyond the 1890 tariff he sponsored as a congressman. (For one, he didn’t seem to know that the resulting price increases cost McKinley his seat and the Republicans the majority in the next midterm election, or that it helped trigger the economic crash of 1893.) Trump then transitioned seamlessly into praise for Roosevelt, and announced his intention to “take back” the Panama Canal—which, along with the threatened annexations of Greenland and Canada, and the threat of further regime change wars across the hemisphere, are at the heart of the “Don-roe Doctrine.”
In McKinleyite fashion, Trump seemingly put no thought into what he would do after launching his war of choice in Venezuela. He seems to have no idea who will “run” Venezuela, other than an unspecified “team.” He dismissed the idea of installing opposition leader María Corina Machado, who thanked him after receiving her suspiciously timed Nobel Peace Prize, but offered no alternatives. He claimed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” only to have her insist, in a pointed speech shortly thereafter, that Maduro remained president and denounce the “unprecedented military aggression” against her country. (“We will never go back to being slaves. We will never again be a colony of any empire, of any kind,” she added.)
The naked extraction and self-dealing at the heart of Trump’s policy harkens to other imperial tendencies as well: Belgian King Leopold II’s personal plunder of the Congo and the rule through corporations of British India or the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Trump, or his advisors, may have also taken to heart the Russian argument that the U.S. could be the master of its hemisphere and leave Eastern Europe to Putin. Whatever scheme Trump is following, the potential outcome here is clear. The last era of imperial fights over “spheres of influence,” scramble for resources, and control of the seas and colonies led directly to two world wars and the Great Depression. Now Trump is doing his part to revive that era without any awareness, or care, for the catastrophes that followed.