The US Cannot Govern the Western Hemisphere Like It’s 1823

How American pressure turned Venezuela into a strategic foothold for U.S. rivals

On December 10, 2025, Coast Guard personnel fast-roped from Navy helicopters onto the deck of an oil tanker in international waters near Venezuela, seizing what the Trump administration called the Skipper, a vessel allegedly involved in sanctions evasion. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared the operation targeted networks financing terrorism and rogue regimes, while President Trump casually remarked about the confiscated oil: “We keep it, I guess.”

The Venezuelan government responded by calling the seizure an act of international piracy, arguing that Washington’s true motives had finally been exposed—not restricting migration, not clamping down on drug trafficking, not promoting democracy, but making an attempt to acquire Venezuela’s vast petroleum reserves.

This brazen maritime interdiction represents merely the latest escalation in a pressure campaign that has already claimed dozens of lives. Reuters documented that the United States acknowledged at least five strikes on vessels near Venezuela, with several dozen people killed in these operations.

The administration and geopolitical strategists sympathetic to Trump invoke the Monroe Doctrine to justify this escalation. Yet this appeal obscures a fundamental reality: Venezuela’s current alignment with extra-hemispheric adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran represents not unprovoked aggression but a predictable response to decades of American economic warfare and destabilization efforts.

The irony is stark. Washington officials warn about foreign powers gaining influence in America’s backyard, seemingly oblivious to how their own interventionist policies pushed Caracas into precisely these arrangements. The more aggressively the United States confronts Russia, China, and Iran globally, the more these powers deepen cooperation with Venezuela. What American policymakers fear as a new Cuban Missile Crisis is rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, manufactured not by adversaries’ ambitions but by Washington’s own imperial overstretch.

The Anatomy of American Intervention

To understand Venezuela’s current strategic partnerships, one must first grasp the systematic campaign that preceded them. Since 2005, Washington has imposed 12 distinct rounds of sanctions, creating one of the most comprehensive economic warfare campaigns in the Western Hemisphere. The United States currently maintains 431 sanction designations on Venezuelan individuals and entities, having sanctioned 81 individuals and 46 entities.

The humanitarian toll has been catastrophic. The 2017 financial sanctions and 2019-2020 oil bans strangled Venezuela’s export capacity, worsening the humanitarian crisis and triggering a mass migration exodus from the country. John Bolton candidly admitted these sanctions aimed at driving PDVSA’s production as low as possible to crash Maduro’s regime. When Western capital markets vanished under threat of secondary sanctions, Venezuela turned to nations willing to defy American financial hegemony—creating a de facto balancing coalition against Washington.

The Architecture of Counter-Alignment

The strategic partnerships Venezuela has forged tell the story of a nation increasingly cut off from Western commerce and forced to build alternative networks. Most significantly, Russia signed a comprehensive 10-year strategic partnership with Venezuela in May 2025, ratified in October 2025, covering more than 350 bilateral agreements on security, defense, and technology. Russian cargo aircraft have recently been landing in Caracas with additional military supplies. In October 2025, Maduro requested Russian assistance enhancing air defenses, restoring Su-30 aircraft, and acquiring missiles.

Iranian cooperation has had an underrated impact. Tehran has provided assistance in drone technology development and sanctions evasion assistance that has helped Venezuela maintain some petroleum exports despite American interdiction efforts. Perhaps most consequential is China’s economic engagement through the oil-for-loans program, through which Beijing has extended approximately $68 billion in financing since 2007. Venezuela commits to supply China National Petroleum Corporation with minimum daily shipments ranging from 230,000 to 800,000 barrels depending on price fluctuations to service debt obligations.

These arrangements represent far more than economic convenience. They constitute a deliberate strategy by Russia, China, and Iran to establish positions within the Western Hemisphere that complicate American military planning and force Washington to divert resources from Eurasian theaters.

The Self-Inflicting Spiral

The dynamic at work possesses a terrible logic. As the United States escalates pressure on Russia over Ukraine, Beijing over Taiwan, and Tehran over its nuclear program, these powers find common cause supporting governments that challenge American hegemony. Venezuela serves as an ideal candidate—geographically positioned to concern Washington, possessing valuable energy resources, and already alienated by American sanctions.

The more aggressively Washington pursues “maximum pressure“ campaigns globally, the more incentive adversarial powers have to create pressure points within America’s traditional sphere of influence. Russian strategic planners understand that military cooperation with Venezuela forces the Pentagon to consider Caribbean scenarios alongside European contingencies. Chinese economists recognize Venezuelan oil sales provide energy security and opportunities to expand yuan-denominated trade. Iranian officials appreciate that technological cooperation with Caracas creates additional complexity for already-stretched American intelligence services.

This creates precisely the nightmare scenario that Monroe Doctrine invocations supposedly prevent: hostile powers establishing military and intelligence presence near American territory. Yet this outcome stems not from Venezuelan aggression but from Washington’s economic warfare that left Caracas no choice but to seek alternative partnerships. The Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0 that officials fear is materializing because American policy created conditions making such development rational from Venezuela’s perspective.

Understanding the Monroe Doctrine

President James Monroe articulated the doctrine in his December 2, 1823 State of the Union Address, declaring the Western Hemisphere closed off to future European colonization. Yet from inception, the doctrine represented more aspiration than capability. The United States lacked military strength to enforce it—Britain effectively enforced the doctrine through Royal Navy supremacy throughout the 19th century.

British Foreign Minister George Canning proposed a joint Anglo-American declaration, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams objected, arguing it would be undignified for America to come in “as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.” Monroe issued a unilateral declaration while Britain provided actual enforcement. Britain had compelling reasons: its industrializing economy needed markets in Latin America, and the doctrine aligned with the British’s informal empire of maintaining economic dominance without shouldering the direct costs of colonialism in the New World.

When European powers violated the doctrine, America’s response revealed its impotence. In 1833, Britain seized the Falkland Islands—Andrew Jackson protested but did nothing. From 1838-1850, France and Britain blockaded Argentina but no American action followed. In 1861, Spain reannexed the Dominican Republic while America fought its Civil War. Most significantly, Napoleon III invaded Mexico in 1862, installing Maximilian as Emperor. Washington was unable to intervene until after the Civil War ended.

The doctrine transformed at the century’s turn. The Venezuela crisis of 1902-1903 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to announce the Roosevelt Corollary, transforming the Monroe Doctrine from defensive shield into offensive sword justifying American intervention throughout Latin America. During the Cold War, it justified opposing Soviet influence. In the 1980s, Reagan’s version committed America to aiding anti-Marxist insurgencies, with Nicaragua as a primary target.

The Contemporary Perversion

Indeed, the Monroe Doctrine’s explicit revival in policy toward Venezuela under Trump marks a return to great power politics. In March 2019, then.National Security Advisor John Bolton declared that in this administration, America was not afraid to use the word Monroe Doctrine. Bolton invoked the doctrine while discussing potential intervention to convince Maduro to resign, telling CNN that America had opposed external threats in the Western Hemisphere since Monroe’s time, and it was time to resurrect it.

Bolton framed the doctrine as justification for opposing foreign interference in Venezuela, particularly from Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran. He referenced the “Troika of Tyranny” of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, emphasizing that the heavy Cuban presence with thousands of security officials in Venezuela was the sort of thing the United States found unacceptable. In April 2019, Bolton told Bay of Pigs veterans that the Monroe Doctrine was alive and well.

This represents an inversion of the doctrine’s purported purpose. The original emerged when the United States was a relatively weak power with limited international ambitions. Today’s invocation comes from a nation maintaining nearly 800 military installations across more than 70 countries, waging wars across multiple continents simultaneously. The United States has transformed from a republic with restrained foreign policy ambitions into a global consumer imperium projecting military power into every corner of the planet.

Distinguishing Legitimate from Illegitimate Doctrine Applications

Here lies the crucial distinction that current policy utterly fails to make. The Monroe Doctrine retains legitimacy when establishing clear red lines against genuine security threats—specifically, preventing extra-hemispheric powers like Russia and China from establishing military bases in the Western Hemisphere. This represents a defensible national security interest aligned with the doctrine’s original defensive purpose. No American administration should tolerate Russian or Chinese military installations in Cuba, Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Americas that could threaten American territory or project power against the United States.

Such a baseline security policy differs fundamentally from the universalist foreign policy currently pursued. Establishing a red line against foreign military bases is one thing; pursuing comprehensive regime change, social engineering, and economic strangulation abroad is quite another. The former represents a legitimate security concern; the latter represents an unrealistic project of imperial domination that systematically undermines the very security interests it claims to defend.

The goal should be benign hegemony, wherein the United States maintain sufficient influence in the Western Hemisphere to prevent hostile military threats while respecting the sovereignty and agency of Latin American nations to develop their own political and economic systems. This means accepting that some governments in the region will not align with American preferences, will pursue economic relationships with China, or will maintain diplomatic ties with Russia and Iran. So long as these relationships do not extend to hosting foreign military bases or allowing power projection capabilities against the United States, they fall within the legitimate sphere of sovereign decision-making. More importantly, the United States would also reduce its military footprint abroad by closing its hundreds of foreign military bases and bringing back the over 170,000 active-duty troops stationed abroad. From there, the United States can build a national security strategy focused on protecting the border and protecting shipping lanes in the Western Hemisphere.

Current policy is still stuck on maintaining American primacy, consequences be damned. Washington pursues regime change and comprehensive sanctions against Venezuela not because Caracas hosts Russian military bases—though American policy is creating incentives for precisely that outcome—but because the country possesses vast oil reserves and Venezuela’s government challenges American preferences and maintains relationships with American adversaries. The result is a self-defeating spiral where economic warfare pushes Venezuela into the arms of Russia, China, and Iran, creating the very military threats that would legitimately trigger actions in line with the Monroe Doctrine.

If Washington continues down this path, it may soon face a geopolitical crisis of its own making, one born not in Caracas or Moscow but in the blind corners of its own imperial ambition.

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