When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then divided Poland with Stalin in 1939, my parents’ generation decided, coming home from the war, to place the sovereignty of nation states at the heart of the United Nations Charter. With the operation in Venezuela, our generation has to ask, and not for the first time, whether anything now survives of a legal doctrine designed to protect the weak from the strong.

Let’s not make the mistake of believing that it was United States president Donald Trump who dealt sovereignty its coup de grâce. We are not in a new and shocking narrative but the culmination of a very old one. The Monroe Doctrine dates back to 1823, and when Monroe claimed Latin America as America’s exclusive sphere of influence, the doctrine made the sovereignty of any nation inside that sphere subject to Washington’s discretion.

America’s subsequent indifference to the sovereignty of Latin America is a matter of record. When the Americans decided to build the Panama Canal in 1902, and former President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked what the legal basis was for their intrusion on Panamanian sovereignty, his attorney general replied, so writer George Will reminded us, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

Every Latin American can recite the twentieth century litany of American violations of Latin American territorial integrity. When, in 1954, the democratically elected president of Guatemala launched a land reform program that damaged the interests of the United Fruit Company, the Central Intelligence Agency, on........

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