The previous article in this series – Venezuela — From Colonial Rule to the Bolivarian Republic – traced Venezuela’s political history from Spanish colonial rule through independence, the republican periods, the caudillo era, the Punto Fijodemocratic experiment and its collapse, and the rise of the Bolivarian Fifth Republic under Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro. By the end of that story, Venezuela had become an authoritarian state deeply aligned with Russian and Chinese interests and in open confrontation with the United States. To understand how that confrontation developed — and why it culminated in the events of January 2026 — we need to examine the other half of the equation: the history of American foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, its foundational doctrines, and its long pattern of intervention in Latin America.
X. The Monroe Doctrine: America Defines Its Hemisphere (1823)
The Venezuelan independence movement, and the broader collapse of Spanish colonial rule across Latin America in the early nineteenth century, provided the immediate context for what became the defining statement of US foreign policy for the next two centuries. On 2 December 1823, President James Monroe addressed Congress and laid out what would later become known as the Monroe Doctrine: that the Western Hemisphere was closed to further European colonisation, that the United States would not interfere in existing European colonies or in European affairs, and that any attempt by a European power to extend its influence over any nation in the Americas would be treated as a hostile act against the United States.
The doctrine’s origins are revealing. It was not a purely American initiative. British Foreign Minister George Canning had proposed a joint declaration, and President Monroe was initially favourable, with former presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concurring. It was Secretary of State John Quincy Adams who argued successfully for a unilateral American declaration. Adams reasoned that the United States would otherwise be cast as the junior partner of Britain — and that a joint declaration could constrain American freedom of action in the hemisphere. This distinction matters: from the very outset, the Monroe Doctrine was conceived not merely as a defensive statement against European interference, but as an assertion of independent American primacy in the region.
At the time of its proclamation, the United States lacked the military strength to enforce it. For much of the nineteenth century, it was largely the British Navy that gave the doctrine its practical force. The US did succeed in applying the doctrine against France in Mexico, where it provided military and diplomatic support to Benito Juárez, enabling the overthrow of the French-installed Emperor Maximilian in 1867. But it was the aftermath of the American Civil War, and the rapid industrialisation that followed, that transformed the United States into a power capable of enforcing its hemispheric claims on its own terms.
XI. From Doctrine to Empire: The Roosevelt Corollary and US Intervention
The doctrine’s most significant expansion came in 1904 with President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary — and Venezuela was its direct catalyst. In 1902, British and German warships had blockaded Venezuela’s ports and bombarded a coastal town in response to the Venezuelan government’s failure to repay foreign debts. Roosevelt’s response, articulated in his annual message to Congress in December 1904, asserted that because the Monroe Doctrine forbade European use of force in the Americas, the United States would itself intervene whenever a Latin American state’s instability or financial failure invited such European action. This effectively transformed the Monroe Doctrine from a defensive posture into an active licence for US intervention — and the interventions followed. This period is defined by multiple US-led occupations in the Caribbean and across Central and South America — from leading the separation of Panama from Colombia (1903), the occupation of Cuba (1906), Nicaragua (1912), Haiti (1915) and the Dominican Republic (1916). The Monroe Doctrine had become the legal and rhetorical framework for American imperial practice in the region.
This pattern of intervention was eventually curtailed under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of 1933, which formally renounced the right of unilateral intervention. But the underlying logic — that the Americas constituted a US sphere of influence, and that external powers challenging that sphere would be confronted — never disappeared. It was reinvoked throughout the Cold War to justify intervention against Soviet-aligned governments, and it frames the US posture toward Venezuela to this day.
XII. History Repeating: Venezuela and the Twenty-First Century
The historical context laid out in this article tends to be overlooked in contemporary European commentary on Venezuela — yet it is essential for understanding what is actually at stake.On 3 January 2026, the United States launched a military operation in Caracas, codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve, in which US special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduroand his wife Cilia Flores and transported them to New York to face federal charges including narcoterrorism and drug trafficking. President Trump declared that the United States was going to run the country until a transition of power could be arranged. To many observers this appeared sudden and unprecedented. Viewed against the two centuries of history traced in this article, it was neither. It was the latest expression of a strategic logic that has remained consistent since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 — that the Western Hemisphere is an American sphere of influence, and that external powers establishing a foothold there will eventually be confronted. What changed was not the logic but the challenger: there is always an external challenge to one superpower’s interests on the global stage — from the British Empire in the nineteenth century, to the Soviet Union through most of the twentieth, to China emerging as the global powerhouse of the twenty-first. China and Russia had spent the better part of two decades deepening their political, economic and military presence in Venezuela. The capture of Maduro was, in that sense, less a law enforcement action than a geopolitical one — a reassertion of a fairly forgotten doctrine, aiming to revive American driven foreign interests in a part of the world that is quickly becoming part of a new geopolitical chessboard in the language of the twenty-first century.
