The US intervention in Venezuela and the reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine have been viewed in light of a crucial present-day question: Is this the final crisis of the Liberal International Order and, therefore, the end of international law? The Liberal International Order that emerged around 1945, with the UN and the OAS as its pillar organizations and a solid set of security, economic and human rights arrangements, is currently undergoing a long-term crisis.[i] The Trump Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, based on a policy of military power, only deepens this skepticism and puts this legendary doctrine in sharp tension with international law. In fact, several analysts have rightly interpreted the intervention as essentially illegal under international law.[ii] Trump’s direct and explicit invocation of the Monroe Doctrine from his first Presidential term to the announcement of his second National Security Strategy reinstate this principle of US foreign policy traditionally associated with US hemispheric hegemony on the continent under the banner of a new 21st century policy of hard military power and intervention as a core strategy to address the challenges posed by China’s economic ascendancy and the European Union’s loss of global economic and political prominence.[iii] The situation has brought the resurgence of the Monroe Doctrine into tension with the crisis of international law, prompting everyone to interpret the former as a central cause of the latter.

Although it was never codified as a proper principle of international law, the Monroe Doctrine had a lasting impact on the international order of the 20th century and on international law, especially in Latin America. In this sense, it shaped the myth of US exceptionalism, providing a framework for projecting this nation as an institutional model and hegemonic architect in the configuration of the 20th-century Liberal International Order. The idea of US exceptionalism was a powerful belief among the political and legal elite of that country and inspired ideologically a reordering of the international order from a monistic perspective, projecting US legal and political institutions as a global model of international governance and global justice since the early 20th century.[iv] On the eve of the construction of the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson famously proposed by 1917 “that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world,” bringing the myth of US exceptionalism to the central stage of the new emerging US-led international order.[v]

To analyze the intervention in Venezuela and the debate over the crisis of international law, it is worth reviewing the uses of the doctrine in order to understand how they reinforced the myth of US exceptionalism and how they also influenced the construction of international law in the Americas. Trump revived the myth of US exceptionalism, but his MAGA (Make America Great Again) Monroe Doctrine is not an expression of military force and international anarchy strictu sensu, nor is it the end of international law, but rather the restoration of a diplomatic principle of US exceptionalism as a crude and minimal but credible normative basis for this current international order in profound crisis.[vi]

The Monroe Doctrine, in most of its US variants from Monroe to Trump’s current version, was fundamentally linked to the myth of US exceptionalism and gave a major impulse to the consolidation and institutionalization of international law in Latin America.[vii] In its original formulation of 1823, following the formula of William Appleman Williams, the Monroe Doctrine was an anti-colonial and imperial principle, unilaterally proclaimed by the US.[viii] It was anti-colonial because it condemned European interventions in the Americas. It was imperial because it proclaimed that any European intervention on the continent was a threat to US interests, placing this nation as guardians of the continent. Although the Monroe Doctrine had no concrete effect on the codification of international law in the Americas, the continental debate over the meaning and scope of the doctrine provided the foundations for the practice of self-determination in Latin America and the construction of the Inter-American System and had a central influence on the US-led international order of the 20th century.[ix] This trajectory of the doctrine is essential for understanding its current return and rebirth.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Latin American jurists deployed the original version of the Monroe Doctrine to condemn European interventions in the region and build a distinctive continental international law that contrasted with that of Europe. The Drago Doctrine, formulated by Argentine Foreign Minister Luis María Drago in 1902 in the context of the intervention of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy in Venezuela, directly invoked the Monroe Doctrine to condemn the intervention of European powers to collect public debts and their intrusion into the continent.[x] A few years later, Chilean jurist Alejandro Álvarez drew on the Monroe Doctrine to formulate his theory about the existence of an American international law distinct from that of Europe, arguing that the Monroe Doctrine was a founding principle of American international law. If the European tradition of international law was based on monarchy, the balance of power, and intervention, American international law was founded on republicanism, solidarity, and non-intervention.[xi] According to Álvarez, the international law of the future was not in Europe, but in the Americas.[xii]

The Doctrine gave a........

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