The doomers who like to say that nothing ever happens in the Trump administration have some crow to eat this week. With the Trump administration’s capture of the Marxist narco-dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, in a midnight bombing raid on the country, something certainly did happen.
Wonks and scholars can debate the constitutionality of the administration’s actions. Maduro was a foreign head of state, after all, and a good-faith debate over the legality of such a move is warranted. Wherever the consensus falls, however, an empirical precedent has already been set, and what will matter most is the political narrative moving forward.
Toppling Maduro isn’t about Venezuela, per se. It isn’t about that country’s human rights, economy, sovereignty, or democratic institutions; that’s the old establishment way of framing such actions, a dated conception of regime change that puts American interests at risk. Instead, it’s about securing America’s great power dominance within our own hemisphere from any foe who dares to challenge it.
Trump calls it the “Donroe Doctrine,” an obvious play on the 19th century’s Monroe Doctrine, which held that the United States must oppose all European expansion in the Americas. Today, the threat to hemispheric control does not come from European colonialism, but from China—which is imposing a new sort of colonialism around the world—and from the rise of third-world communist ideologies, such as the “Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement” that Maduro represents.
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