Opinion: Deposing of Venezuela Part of Broader Move Toward U.S. Colonialism
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Today’s new should not be a surprise to those who have been paying attention to the White House’s international strategy. On Dec. 8, “The Trump Corollary” was passed sending a clear signal that colonialism, at least in this hemisphere is now the rule of law.
The Trump corollary is dangerous to other sovereign nations because it does not simply revive the Monroe Doctrine; it stretches it to fit an era of global capital, container ships and fiber‑optic cables, then hands the whole contraption to a president who openly distrusts constraint. It recasts the Western Hemisphere not as a region of equal republics but as an extension of the American nervous system, where distant ports and power plants become, by fiat, domestic vulnerabilities and thus fair game for pressure, punishment, or worse.
A Doctrine Swollen With Ambition
In the small print of a glossy national‑security document, the corollary announces itself as an heir to Monroe, but its ambitions are less about warding off European gunboats than about policing Chinese investment and any other foreign presence that offends Washington’s sense of prerogative. The Americas are elevated to a kind of strategic sanctum, a zone in which the United States claims the right not only to keep others out but to decide who may build a port, lay a railway, or buy a telecom firm, and on what terms.
The Quiet Sidelining of Sovereignty
For the governments that live inside this imagined hemispheric dome, sovereignty begins to look conditional, a license that can be suspended when they choose the wrong dam builder or sign the wrong loan agreement. The language is careful—there is talk of partnership, of shared prosperity—but threaded through it is a promise to override, to “reassert and enforce” American primacy whenever local decisions conflict with the preferences of a distant capital.
Coercion As Ordinary Policy
What once would have been acknowledged as extraordinary measures—sanctions that throttle an economy, threats of force against an unfriendly regime, financial sieges dressed up as anticorruption crusades—are treated as standard instruments in the policy toolkit. Almost any disagreement can be redescribed as a security problem, and security problems, in this lexicon, are to be solved not with patient diplomacy but with leverage, the more visible the better.
A hemisphere turned inside out
The effect is to blur the line between abroad and at home until the map itself seems to buckle: the southern border migrates southward; the Caribbean becomes a moat; cities along the Orinoco or the Paraná are spoken of in the same breath as Houston or Miami. In such a world, borders are less protective walls than technicalities, easily brushed aside when migration spikes, markets wobble, or a foreign flag appears on the side of a shipping container in the wrong harbor.
A Contagious Example
Other powers are watching, and they can read a precedent when they see one: if the United States may declare a sphere of influence and dilute the meaning of sovereignty within it, why not Russia, why not China, why not anyone with the means and the appetite. The Trump corollary, presented as a safeguard of order in the Americas, thus threatens to become something larger and more unruly—a permission slip for twenty‑first‑century empires that dare not speak their name.
