Drugs, oil, and the Monroe Doctrine

On Jan. 3, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife by United States forces reminded us of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, even as it brought the Monroe Doctrine to the forefront of discussions on global geopolitics.

First articulated by former US President James Monroe in 1823, the doctrine banned European powers from interfering in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere (North, Central, and South America), including further colonization and exerting political influence over other American nations.

But it was former US President Theodore Roosevelt who employed the doctrine to legitimize the concept of global policing by US forces, which included sending troops to other countries. “As a result, US Marines were sent into Santo Domingo in 1904, Nicaragua in 1911, and Haiti in 1915, ostensibly to keep the Europeans out,” according to the US National Archives and Records Administration (Nara). (see tinyurl.com/yzdrft8j.)

Cuban missile crisis. The Cuban missile crisis nearly brought the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of a full-scale nuclear war.

That 13-day crisis was triggered by the Soviet Union’s decision to begin building missile launch sites in Cuba, then ruled by Fidel Castro. “With the support of the Organization of American States, President John F. Kennedy threw a naval and air quarantine around the island. After several tense days, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw the missiles and dismantle the sites. Subsequently, the United States dismantled several of its obsolete air and missile bases in Turkey,” says Nara.

But this time, there’s another major player in Latin America, China. The US, Russia (the successor to the Soviet Union), and China are all nuclear powers. China’s special envoy for Latin American affairs met with Maduro five hours before the Venezuelan dictator was taken by US forces in the wee hours of the morning of Jan. 3. China is Venezuela’s biggest oil customer, according to the New York Times (NYT), with the former having “extended tens of billions of dollars in loans to Venezuela, largely through oil-for-loan arrangements.” (see “In China, a Debate About Political Power Ignites After Maduro’s Capture,” 01/06/25, www.nytimes.com.)

“Big deal.” Led by the elite Army Delta Force commandos, the joint military and law enforcement mission was “the riskiest US military operation of its kind since members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house in Pakistan in 2011,” says NYT (see “Inside ‘Operation Absolute Resolve,’ the U.S. Effort to Capture Maduro,” www.nytimes.com)

The ousted president and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been brought to a Manhattan federal court in New York, where they pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges. US President Donald Trump celebrated the operation, in which no American lives were lost, despite “larger questions about the legality and rationale for the US actions in Venezuela,” the NYT story points out.

But Trump asserted during a press conference announcing the Venezuela attack that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal,” said Trump. But what does this mean for a modern world whose global order is no longer defined by the bipolarity between the US and Russia?

NYT’s White House chief correspondent David Sanger wrote an interesting piece that analyzed Trump’s statement in the context of the Trump administration’s thinking behind the military seizure of Maduro. Besides accusing Maduro of being the leader of a ”narco-terrorist” organization, the US has national and energy security in mind. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves (303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves)—17 percent of the global crude reserves—are bigger than Saudi Arabia’s.

Sanger said Trump was asserting “a US right to ‘restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere’ and to deny ‘non-Hemispheric competitors’—namely, China—‘the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets.’” (see www.nytimes.com.)

Two things are clear from Trump’s pronouncements. Besides defending national security and cutting the supply of illegal drugs, oil is at the heart of the issue, as Trump has made clear. Secondly, it’s never about regime change. Trump has chosen to work with Maduro’s protégé, Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez, over exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. This decision is a major departure from the usual playbook of the US when dealing with Latin America and the Middle East, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

More on Venezuela’s oil in my next column.

—————-

lim.mike04@gmail.com