Painting by Polish artist Tadé Styka circa 1909 – Public Domain

Theodore Roosevelt was one of our most interesting and progressive presidents. Donald Trump is uninteresting and uninterested to the extreme and is a political obscurantist. Nevertheless, Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela will ineluctably link him with Roosevelt and the Roosevelt Corollary from 1904.

U.S. citizens are generally familiar with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, particularly in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev underestimated President John F. Kennedy’s willingness to deny the deployment of strategic weaponry in the Western Hemisphere.

But the Roosevelt Corollary is far less familiar to Americans. The Venezuelan affair in the winter of 1903-1904 marked a European intervention in the New World in order to collect enormous debts that a Venezuelan dictator, Cipriano Castro, had........

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