The Trumpian Version of the Monroe Doctrine is Simply Might Makes Right
When President James Monroe articulated what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, the United States lacked the kind of naval power that would have been necessary to give it teeth. Thus, unsurprisingly, at no point during Monroe's presidency did the United States engage in substantial military action outside the territory of the United States. Perhaps more fundamentally, in the pre-Civil War era, the Monroe Doctrine was not intended or understood as a ground for the U.S. intervening in the domestic governance of foreign sovereigns in the Western hemisphere. Rather, it was a warning to European powers--especially Spain and France--that they ought not so intervene.
Why not? Monroe and the U.S. had multiple concerns. There was some fear that a buildup of Spanish power could eventually threaten U.S. sovereign territory. There were also economic interests. Independent countries in the western hemisphere would trade more freely with the United States than would colonial holdings of European nations. And ideology played some role, insofar as many of the newly independent countries of Latin America were or were becoming republics. In that sense, the Monroe Doctrine can be understood as carrying out the same linkage between anti-colonialism and anti-monarchialism that characterized the American Revolution.
Notably, none of the features of the Monroe Doctrine under Monroe implied that the U.S. would act as an imperial power in the western hemisphere. That conception did not emerge until the latter portion of the 19th century. That newer posture, often most closely associated with Teddy Roosevelt and the emergence of the United States as a full imperial power by the conclusion of the Spanish-American war, looks very different from the original Monroe Doctrine in many respects but one crucial one: its targets.
President Monroe was most concerned about preventing European countries from playing too prominent a role in the affairs of other western hemisphere countries and thus threatening U.S. interests in our "backyard." That sort of concern is still present in American foreign policy. It partly explains the Kennedy administration's special worry that the Soviets were using Cuba as a military base. Much more recently, President Trump's worries about Chinese influence over the Panama Canal sound in this register.
Where the modern conception goes much further than in Monroe's time is in the assertion--sometimes overtly, sometimes clandestinely--of a U.S. prerogative to use military force in the western hemisphere against other western hemisphere sovereigns. The 1954 U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala to serve the interests of the United Fruit Company is among the most prominent such ventures. Pundits and scholars have been pointing to the 1989 invasion of Panama for the purpose of deposing and apprehending Manuel Noriega because of the similarity in its immediate aim--bringing the head of state to the U.S. to face criminal charges--but if one widens the lens even a little bit, one sees the Trump administration attack on Venezuela as fitting within a longstanding pattern.
In that sense, whatever else one might say about the attack, one cannot fairly call it "unprecedented." But here's the thing. To say that an action is backed by precedent is not to say it is backed by legal precedent or otherwise lawful.
Consider the statement of Michael Waltz, the U.S. representative to the U.N., yesterday. He began by describing the U.S. attack as a law enforcement operation, not a military intervention. Waltz's claim--which echoes statements made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio--is either deliberately misleading or a reflection of confusion. The U.S. used military force for the purpose of carrying out what we might concede was a law enforcement operation, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also a military operation or that the use of military force was legal. The U.N. Charter sets out limited circumstances in which military force may be legitimately employed. The arrest of a foreign head of state is not among them.
So the Rubio/Waltz line that the attack was justified on law enforcement grounds fails. Notably, however, Waltz did not stop with that purported justification. He went on to say this:
This is the western hemisphere. This is where we live, and we're not going to allow the western hemisphere to be used as a base of operation for our nation's adversaries and competitors and rivals of the United States. You can't turn Venezuela into the operating hub for Iran, for Hezbollah, for gangs, for human intelligence agents, and other malign actors that control that country. You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States . . . .
That is an absolutely stunning assertion in its conflation of U.S. motivation--to deny advantages to perceived adversaries and obtain preferential access to oil--with a justification. In neither its original form nor after it was transformed once the U.S. became an imperial power was the Monroe doctrine ever a justification, either as a matter of law or logic.
To be sure, U.S. citizens live in the western hemisphere. So do citizens of all other western hemisphere countries. Some of those countries are "adversaries" of one another or at least "rivals." El Salvador and Honduras fought a war (the "Football War") against one another in 1969. Peru and Ecuador went to war with one another in 1995. Argentina and Brazil are surely rivals for South American leadership. Under what theory does the United States have the right to use military force to suppress its "adversaries and competitors and rivals" without thereby licensing all western hemisphere sovereigns to do the same? And why should this principle be confined to the western hemisphere? Every part of the globe is in a region where some number of countries "live."
There are only two possible reasons why the U.S. but not other countries would be authorized to use military force to pursue its perceived national interests at the expense of its perceived adversaries and other sovereigns cooperating with those perceived adversaries. One is that the U.S. is possessed of some greater virtue. I'll grant that even under Trump, there are worse regimes than the United States, but the Trumpian version of the Monroe Doctrine doesn't limit its assertion of power to those worse regimes. Surely, the U.S. is possessed of no greater virtue than Canada and Denmark, two of Trump's occasional targets.
Thus, we come to the second reason why one might assert that the U.S. is uniquely permitted to use force in the western hemisphere: superior military might. And indeed, Trump used roughly half of the time during his initial remarks on Saturday to boast about the awesome and unique power of the U.S. military.
The notion that might makes right has been justly criticized since the Fifth Century B.C.E., when Thucydides, in the Melian Dialogue, showed it to be nothing more than bullying. Trump, Rubio, Waltz, and their apologists are less well-spoken than the Athenian conquerers of Melos as portrayed by Thucydides. They are no less bullies.
Postscript: Readers may have come across the claim that a 1989 Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion written by Bill Barr provided legal justification for the Panama invasion and thus also provides a legal justification for the Venezuela invasion. However, as Ryan Goodman shows, Barr's legal reasoning was terrible and not approved by the courts. Moreover, as Goodman himself notes at the top of his analysis, even if Barr were correct as a matter of U.S. domestic law (which he was not), that would not justify military force as a matter of international law.
-- Michael C. Dorf