President James Monroe’s December 2, 1823 address to Congress contained the following sentence: “The American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” President Monroe sought to establish U.S. dominion over the Western Hemisphere, with a promise that the U.S. would not interfere in the affairs of other regions of the world. It was the speech that ushered in the Monroe Doctrine.
In an August 2024 article, I wrote that “Even by those early nineteenth-century standards, President Monroe’s speech was extremely arrogant.” I further said that “No U.S. president today, even if they harbored that sense of entitlement, would dare speak such words aloud.” I thought President Monroe had been at liberty to express those views two centuries ago because he was operating in a universe that was entirely different from the one we live in now. Looking back, I realize how false my sense of the world had been when I wrote those words sixteen months ago.
Although I am well aware that President Trump has long been a fan of the Monroe Doctrine, I was still taken aback by the recently published U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS). It contained the type of language about the Western Hemisphere that I had previously thought would never be spoken again by an American president. I was digesting some of the other contents of the NSS document when news broke last Saturday that U.S. forces had descended into Caracas and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. It dawned on me that going forward, the world is likely going to look and feel quite a bit different from what I had been used to for much of my adult life.
I find dictators like Maduro and deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad abhorrent. They arrest, imprison, torture and kill their citizens with impunity. I have always wished that there were easy ways of getting rid of such despots to allow the people they suffocate to breathe. Sadly, there aren’t.
Given how Maduro blatantly stole the last presidential election in Venezuela and continued the brutal repression of his people, I shed no tears for him. However, I am extremely uncomfortable with the manner of his capture. To my mind, national sovereignty is a sacred principle. Every country, whether it is powerful or not, should have the freedom to choose its destiny.
Ideally, the citizens of countries like Venezuela and Syria should be the ones who decide whether their leaders stay in power or leave. Things rarely work that way in practice, unfortunately. The helpless populations in such places often need some external help to liberate them. I think about the poor women and girls of Afghanistan frequently. Their education was abruptly halted when the Taliban retook power more than four years ago. That abomination has persisted all this time while the UN and the rest of the world have pretended as if they are unaware of it.
The bad memories of recent U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have been resurrected since Saturday’s military action in Venezuela. They constitute one of my personal concerns. I pray for a return to the days when America’s voice alone was sufficient to effect the changes hoped for by the tyrannized.