Key takeaways

The Trump administration may be more focused on Latin America than any other White House since the 1960s. But the goals of all that focus are not quite as clear. 

In the sweep of US history in Latin America, interventions like the capture of Maduro aren’t particularly unusual. It was the last 35 years since the end of the Cold War, when the US mostly refrained from these kinds of actions, that were the anomaly.

Countries including Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico now have to take seriously whether America’s new interventionism will target them next. For now, there’s not much they can do to push back–but the long-term consequences are less clear.

The Trump administration is taking a shockingly interventionist approach to the Western Hemisphere, as shown by last weekend’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his threats of military intervention against several other countries in the region. But we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Donald Trump came into office a second time pledging to retake the Panama Canal and annex Greenland and possibly Canada. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Less than a month into his term, he was slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and Colombia for their perceived defiance of his agenda. His choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had such longstanding interests in Latin American affairs that many observers saw him as effectively running US policy toward the region from his Senate office during Trump’s first term.

Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, Mike Waltz (now ambassador to the UN), had dubbed the White House’s regional approach “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.” Trump lately appears to prefer the New York Post-coined “Donroe Doctrine.”

In Trump’s view, his predecessors had let the doctrine, which originally stated that foreign powers should avoid meddling in the Western Hemisphere but evolved into a view that the US should be the preeminent power in the region,dangerously lapse. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot,” he said on Saturday.

Whatever you call it, it’s clear that the region is no longer the “lost continent” of US foreign policy. Whatever else the Maduro operation was, it made clear that all the language in Trump’s recently released national security strategy about restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” after “years of neglect” wasn’t just bluster.

What’s less clear is the purpose of the new attention focused on the region. What is the US actually trying to get out of Latin America, and are the region’s governments going to provide it?

US interventionism in Latin America is not new

For all the talk in the past few days about how a Rubicon has been crossed in the use of force and the violation of international norms, the use of military force or covert action to depose a government in Latin America or the Caribbean is far from unprecedented.

Between the US invasion of Cuba in 1998 during the Spanish-American war and Bill Clinton’s military intervention in Haiti in 1994, there were roughly 17 instances of successful direct US-backed regime change in the region — and far more cases where indirect US pressure may have played a role in bringing down a government.

“In the broad sweep of history, it’s amazing how unexceptional this is,” Brian Winter, Latin American politics analyst and editor of Americas Quarterly magazine, told Vox. “The exceptional period was the last 35 years” following the end of the Cold War.

Winter added that “this White House is more focused on Latin America than any other since probably the 1960s,” referring to the era that followed Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, and included a number of military........

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