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It’s been nearly a month since Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured in the dead of the night by elite U.S. forces during a stunning raid in Caracas. The extraordinary, unilateral military operation sent shock waves across the globe and marked the first-ever direct attack on a South American country by the United States. Latin America is facing an unsettling new reality undergirded by rising fears that no country is considered off-limits to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The shifting justifications that the Trump administration has offered in recent months for its actions, which have ranged from a focus on taking the fight to so-called narcoterrorists to gaining control over Venezuela’s oil, are “really quite terrifying from a Latin American perspective,” Oliver Stuenkel, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy.

It’s been nearly a month since Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured in the dead of the night by elite U.S. forces during a stunning raid in Caracas. The extraordinary, unilateral military operation sent shock waves across the globe and marked the first-ever direct attack on a South American country by the United States. Latin America is facing an unsettling new reality undergirded by rising fears that no country is considered off-limits to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The shifting justifications that the Trump administration has offered in recent months for its actions, which have ranged from a focus on taking the fight to so-called narcoterrorists to gaining control over Venezuela’s oil, are “really quite terrifying from a Latin American perspective,” Oliver Stuenkel, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy.

“Military planners across the region have been having conversations that are quite unprecedented about their national security, about their vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the United States, about the need to diversify procurement processes, about technological independence,” Stuenkel said.

Much has happened in the United States and around the globe in the time since the Maduro raid, and Trump’s attention has drifted in many different directions—often due to crises of his own making. But the United States maintains a sizable military presence in the Caribbean, in one of many indications that the Trump administration is not moving on from the region. Meanwhile, Trump has made it clear that he believes the Western Hemisphere should be controlled by Washington, even if it means clashing with allies and flouting international law.

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said after Maduro’s capture. The White House has framed this new focus and aggressive posture in the Western Hemisphere as the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” The Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy, released last Friday, placed heavy emphasis on this as well. “We will actively and fearlessly defend America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere,” the document states, with the Pentagon vying to restore U.S. military dominance in the region.

In the months leading up to Maduro’s capture, there were numerous indications that the United States was preparing for a major intervention and that Caracas was in the White House’s crosshairs. The Jan. 3 attack on Venezuela was preceded by dozens of U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which coincided with a massive buildup of military assets in the region that was widely considered far too extensive for the sole purpose of counternarcotics operations.

And the United States still has roughly 15,000 troops and a dozen warships in........

© Foreign Policy