President Trump’s new “Donroe principle”—the seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the president’s loudly proclaimed claim that Washington now “runs” the Latin American country—seek to establish U.S. hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere.
After this America’s opponents and allies are asking themselves this question caracas raid The question is whether adopting 19th century-style imperial thinking also means moving away from the rest of the world, giving China and Russia greater influence in their neighbourhood.
German lawmaker Norbert Röttgen said, “It is not world dominance that Trump is trying to achieve, but hemispheric dominance.” “Their worldview is thinking in categories of spheres of influence – and thinking in other hemispheres about the dominance of those who are most powerful there, regardless of rules, laws and alliances.”
excited by the success of January 3 operation in VenezuelaTrump has already hinted at possible US intervention in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, the Danish occupation of Greenland and, outside the US, Iran.
Russia and China, which have invested tens of billions of dollars and considerable diplomatic capital in the Maduro regime, have reacted with restraint. In part, this is because they expect Washington to now be more accommodating to their own aspirations in Europe and Asia, respectively, either by design or because of inherent limits on American resources.
“Beijing is charmed by Trump’s interest in the major powers’ spheres of influence,” said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at Carnegie China. If China shows more respect for the United States, “there is interest in finding out whether the United States is willing to make larger agreements in the Western Pacific, including on Taiwan and the South China Sea.”
The same calculation is underway in Moscow, as Washington pressures Ukraine to accept a peace deal that would meet some of Russia’s key demands, including the surrender of territory that Russian forces have not been able to capture in the four-year war.
Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, an organization that advises the Kremlin, told the Kommersant newspaper in an interview that President Vladimir Putin, despite his long-standing close relationship with Maduro, is focused on dealing with the “incomparably more important issue – Ukraine” with Trump and therefore is unlikely to disrupt that effort for “secondary topics” such as Venezuela. In fact, Putin has yet to comment on Maduro’s fate.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s chief negotiator on Ukraine, Kirill Dmitriev, looked positively giddy in a social-media post about Trump’s renewal. Aspirations to take over GreenlandDanish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in particular warned that any US military action to seize the island would mean end of nato allianceSuch a breakup, in turn, would create a huge boon for Russian ambitions to regain former satellites and possessions in Europe, starting with the Baltics – while also promoting an inevitable rapprochement between European countries and China,
“Trump is tough with the weak, but weak with the tough, and the only people he has respect for are Putin and Xi, which is why he is seeking a deal with them,” said Raphael Glucksman, a prominent French member of the European Parliament. “Even if the US does not intervene in Greenland, this whole talk of the town about Greenland already represents a very powerful message to Moscow,” he said. “The West’s suicide would be an invitation to Putin to act, letting him know that our doors and windows are open.”
Despite the scope of Trump’s ambitions, the demise of what he called the “rules-based international order” is no longer in doubt, even among its last defenders in Europe and elsewhere. Although the shape of the emerging international system is unclear, much of it resembles that of the distant past – with a different cast of major players.
“People are talking in words like imperialism, neocolonialism, viceroyalty, which they haven’t used in 80 years. There is a new world order and it has spheres of influence,” said Sumantra Maitra, founder of Virginia-based Clio Strategic Consulting and a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America think tank. “We’re not going to go to war with the other great nuclear powers in our neighborhood, and it’s quite understandable that nobody is going to come to the Western Hemisphere because we’ll mess them up.”
In this new order, raw power—military and economic—matters more than ever. And the main reason for Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere, his supporters say, is the current limits of American power, especially when compared with a rising China.
“The discussion about spheres of influence is a distraction from what it really is. This is about prioritizing the things most important to America in a world where we are dealing with a record national debt, recently depleted arms stockpiles being rebuilt, and the fact that America has pursued a foreign policy for the last 30 years that has not made us stronger or more prosperous. In this environment, we have to do things differently to avoid a major national-security catastrophe. Don’t take the risk,” Dan said. Caldwell, senior policy fellow at the American Moment conservative organization, who served as a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “If you have a U.S. ally or partner in a place like Europe or East Asia, you shouldn’t be surprised at all. That doesn’t mean the U.S. is abandoning them, but it does mean they should pick up the slack and do more, especially when they have the resources and capabilities to do so.”
The problem for many of these US allies is that they find themselves recipients of the Donero Doctrine. (Trump’s demands expand the original Monroe Doctrine, named for President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that the U.S. would not allow outside powers to intervene in the Western Hemisphere.) Trump has claimed Canada as the 51st state. The people of Greenland, whose autonomous government, elected last year, firmly rejected Washington’s pleas, keep full Danish and therefore EU citizenship.
The Donero Doctrine “leaves us with the question whether President Trump views Europe, the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland, and the NATO countries as allies and partners in security, or as adversaries and enemies,” said Jeppe Kofod, who previously served as Danish foreign minister during the Trump administration.
It is also not clear that the Donero Doctrine prohibits intervention outside the Western Hemisphere. In recent weeks, the US has taken military action in Syria and Nigeria in addition to Venezuela, said Polish strategist Sławomir Debski, a professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw’s Natolin. Political interference in Ukraine“I don’t see any possibility of America withdrawing from the world,” he said, “They are hyperactive, perhaps chaotic, with a lot of uncertainty about where they are going to land, but the overall result is absolutely clear: America is not retreating anywhere,”
Wang Dong, executive director of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Peking University, agreed. “I think there’s probably an opportunistic imperialism in Trump and that’s why the whole world should be concerned about that,” he said.
This is not always the case. Those disaffected by this shift in Washington include countries with their own hegemonic sphere-of-influence ambitions, such as India or Saudi Arabia. Unlike all EU countries except Hungary, New Delhi avoided even the most indirect criticism of the operation against Maduro.
“It’s not that we haven’t used power in the region, or are strangers to creating spheres of influence. And if we had a power like the US did, we would probably use it more than before,” said Indrani Bagchi, CEO of the Anant Aspen Centre, a New Delhi-based think tank. “Besides, no one here is unhappy that China has been outclassed in South America.”
Johns Hopkins University professor Sergei Radchenko recalled how senior Russian strategists often talked about using the security presence in Venezuela as a pressure point against the US ahead of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Now, the US has shown Russia what a ‘special military operation’ looks like,” he said. “Now, it is clear that Russia does not have the kind of powers it wanted the rest of the world to believe it had. This has been humiliating for Russia and China: they loudly proclaimed that they were establishing a new world order, and yet proved unable to exert influence even in countries that are important to them, such as Venezuela.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov yaroslov.trofimov@wsj.com
