Donald Trump is often not a reliable narrator of what he is doing or what it all means. That was definitely the case with his public remarks in the hours after Saturday’s strike on Venezuela. Trump’s initial press conference was full of audacious talk about the United States seizing control of Venezuela and its oil, but he only hinted at the underlying policy rationale for the attack, which he fumblingly referred to as the “Donroe Document”:

Trump: "All the way back it dated to the Monroe Doctrines. And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal. But we've superseded it by a lot. By a real lot. They now call it the Donroe Document. I don't know. It's Monroe Doctrine. We sort of forgot about it." pic.twitter.com/5YdM2iAS6W

A day later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio clarified on ABC’s This Week that the Trump administration really was asserting an unprecedented revival of the Monroe Doctrine.

“This is the Western Hemisphere,” Rubio said. “This is where we live — and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”

Later, on Air Force One, Trump echoed this interpretation, rebranding it as part of a new “Donroe Doctrine”:

Q: Back in 2016, you criticized the US being involved in regime change and nation building. You stance has changed on that

TRUMP: This isn't a country on the other side of the world. This is Venezuela. It's in our area. The Donroe Doctrine pic.twitter.com/MW4N61yRKv

While the implications for Venezuela, and perhaps other nations, became clear only over the weekend, the administration had formally previewed the Donroe Doctrine in a national security strategy document released in November:

We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and........

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