The Donroe Doctrine: Trump's Quiet Conquest of the Americas
And the Country That Exposed the Flaw in His Formula
Here is a sentence that should stop you cold: the Trump administration has put an old doctrine of American dominance back into official U.S. strategy.
It is written into a federal strategy document. Analysts—and Trump himself—call the updated version the “Donroe Doctrine,” a mashup of his name and the 1823 Monroe Doctrine[1.
You may have caught pieces of this story. A tariff fight with Brazil here. A blackout in Cuba there. A U.S. raid in Venezuela. A financial rescue in Argentina. An American president openly taking sides in Colombia’s election.
They look like separate headlines from separate countries.
They are not all the same thing, and they are not being carried out in the same way. But they fit the same strategy, applied at different levels of force: restore American dominance in the Western Hemisphere and keep China and other outside powers from gaining control of its governments, markets and strategic resources.
And this is not a theory assembled after the fact. The administration has put it in writing.
Let’s walk through it, country by country, and then look at the document that ties it all together.
Venezuela: the template
In January 2026, U.S. special forces raided Caracas and captured President Nicolás Maduro. It was the boldest move of the bunch, and the one against which everything else has been measured.
Here is the part that should bother you most.
Venezuela’s actual opposition, the side America claims to support, did not get the country.
María Corina Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her decade of pro-democracy organizing. Weeks after Maduro’s capture, she flew to Washington and gave Trump her Nobel medal, thanking him for toppling the dictator she’d spent years fighting.2
Trump kept the medal.
He did not hand her the country.
Instead, he said Machado “lacks the respect” to govern.
That is worth sitting with. Machado herself had been barred from running in Venezuela’s 2024 election, but the candidate she backed, Edmundo González, won according to published vote-count sheets, independent observers and the assessment of the U.S. government.3 Maduro claimed victory anyway.
Trump removed the man who stole the election—and then chose to work with the regime he left behind instead of the opposition that had won it.
Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, assumed the interim presidency through Venezuela’s Supreme Court, with the backing of the military. She had previously been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for helping Maduro “maintain power and solidify his authoritarian rule.”
Trump quickly made clear that Washington would work with her. He also said flatly, “It means we’re in charge.” 4
No election date was set.
And the prize for cooperating wasn’t democracy.
It was oil.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, standing beside Rodríguez at a Venezuelan oil facility, said it out loud: “The leverage we have is we control the flow of the dominant industry of Venezuela. We control the flow of funds from oil.” 5
Trump said the same thing more bluntly.
Days after the raid, he posted that Venezuela’s oil “will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America.” 6
By late July, estimates put the total collected from Venezuelan oil sales at more than $13 billion. When a reporter asked Trump directly where the money had gone, he wouldn’t say, pivoting instead to boasts about how many times over the operation had “paid for itself.” 7
At least some of the early proceeds were reportedly held in U.S.-controlled accounts in Qatar rather than moving through normal Treasury channels, prompting Senator Elizabeth Warren to say there was “no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls.” 8
The point is not that Trump personally pocketed the money. There is no evidence of that. The point is that the president of the United States publicly declared that he controlled another country’s oil revenue, and billions of dollars were then managed under an arrangement whose accounting remains remarkably opaque.
Not implied.
Said out loud by the people running it.
Cuba: the same recipe, slower
Cuba doesn’t have a captured leader yet, because Washington is trying to starve the government into collapse first, not overthrow it directly.
Since January 2026, the administration has squeezed Cuba’s oil supply, first by choking Venezuela’s exports to the island, then by threatening tariffs against countries that continued supplying fuel to Havana.
The result has been a rolling humanitarian crisis.
The UN’s human rights chief said plainly that “children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies.”9
As of this month, Cubans are planning entire days around brief, unpredictable bursts of electricity, sometimes twenty minutes at 3 a.m., after blackouts that now stretch past 48 hours.10
Trump has openly mused about “taking” Cuba and said the government is “ready to fall.”
So, call the mechanism what it is: economic strangulation intended to force political collapse.
The civilian cost is blackouts, hunger, and medicine shortages.
The stated goal is regime change.
Colombia: buying an election
In June 2026, Colombia elected Abelardo de la Espriella, a hard-right former defense lawyer for paramilitary figures, in a race decided by less than one percentage point. Trump had endorsed him weeks earlier, before the runoff. After the win, Trump posted to reporters, “He was in tenth place, I endorsed him, and he won the election.” 11
That is Trump’s version of events, not quite reality. De la Espriella had already finished first in the opening round before Trump endorsed him.
But the reality is extraordinary enough.
A sitting American president openly chose a side in an extremely close election in another democracy, and afterward claimed personal credit for the winner.
Iván Cepeda, the leftist senator who narrowly lost, alleged “US interference and dirty tactics,” including “sophisticated methods of manipulation through AI” on social media. 12
Those allegations have not been established, and they should not be treated as proof.
What is established is what came afterward.
De la Espriella has moved quickly to align Colombia with Washington, including joining the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas security initiative and rebuilding security ties with Israel.
That does not prove Washington “bought” Colombia’s election.
It shows something subtler and, in its own way, just as troubling: Trump treats other countries’ elections as arenas in which an American president is entitled to campaign, endorse, pressure and then claim the result as his own.
Argentina: rewarding loyalty, out loud
Argentina got the reward version of the same playbook.
Argentina got the reward version of the playbook.
In 2025, the Trump administration worked to assemble a financial support package worth as much as $40 billion—beginning with a $20 billion currency swap—to prop up Javier Milei’s government and stabilize the peso just before Argentina’s midterm elections. 13
And Washington did not pretend the support was politically neutral.
Trump explicitly tied continued U.S. assistance to Milei’s party doing well in the election.
Congressional Democrats called it “an inappropriate use of U.S. taxpayer funds to influence Argentina’s upcoming election in favor of President Trump’s political ally.” They also pointed out that American soybean farmers were left competing against a foreign government Washington had just bailed out. 14
Milei’s party won.
Weeks later, Milei headlined CPAC at Mar-a-Lago.
Sometimes influence comes with threats.
Sometimes it comes with a check.
Brazil: the multi-front war
Brazil is getting nearly every tool at once, short of military force.
It began in July 2025, when Trump threatened Brazil with tariffs as high as 50%, specifically while Brazil was prosecuting former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup after his 2022 election loss. A plot prosecutors said included plans to poison President Lula da Silva and kill a Supreme Court justice.
Trump called the prosecution a “Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY.”
The United States was actually running a trade surplus with Brazil at the time, undercutting Trump’s usual claim that the tariffs were necessary to correct an unfair trade deficit. 15
The Supreme Court later struck down the legal authority Trump had used for those tariffs. So the administration came back through another legal door, using Section 301 of U.S. trade law to impose new tariffs on Brazilian goods.
Then came the election fight.
This summer, Brazil learned that the State Department planned to send U.S. officials to Brasília to meet with election skeptics just as Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio was emerging as Lula’s chief rival in the October presidential election.
Brazil denied the officials visas, saying the proposed visit appeared designed “to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity” of the coming vote.16
The State Department called that accusation a “baseless lie.”
The dispute has since escalated into revoked visas, withdrawn diplomats and open accusations of election interference.
And beneath the political fight lies something more tangible.
In April 2026, USA Rare Earth agreed to acquire Brazil’s Serra Verde rare-earth operation for about $2.8 billion.17 The U.S. government had financially backed the company and arranged to take a direct equity stake in it.
The deal gives a Washington-backed American company control over a major source of heavy rare-earth minerals used in products ranging from smartphones to advanced weapons systems.
The political fight and the mineral deal are not proof of the same thing.
But they fit the same strategic objective laid out by the administration itself: limiting rival powers’ access to strategically important assets in the Western Hemisphere.
The politics get the headlines.
The minerals get the money.
The document that admits it
None of this is really hidden.
The December 2025 National Security Strategy states the goal directly:
“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
It goes on to say that the United States will seek to prevent non-Hemispheric competitors from owning or controlling strategically vital assets in the region.
That is the policy.
Trump has embraced the nickname himself: “The Donroe Doctrine.”
After the Venezuela operation, he declared that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
He has since warned Colombia that it could face “a similar fate as Venezuela.” 18
This is not a pattern you have to squint to see. It is a policy with a name, sitting in a federal document, being carried out one country at a time.
The country that didn’t follow the script
Iran is not part of the Donroe Doctrine. It belongs in this story for another reason: Trump himself treated Venezuela as a model for what could work somewhere else.
He told the New York Times, “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” and explicitly drew the comparison to Iran. 19
He wasn’t the only one.
Within hours of Maduro’s capture, Israeli politician Yair Lapid warned Tehran to “pay close attention to what is happening in Venezuela,” while analysts said the operation was giving “momentum for those pushing for renewed war with Iran.” 20
But Venezuela had something Iran did not.
Delcy Rodríguez.
Whatever one thinks of her politics or motives, Venezuela had an intact governing apparatus and a regime insider who could remain in place, make accommodations with Washington and keep the state functioning after Maduro was removed.
Iran had no equivalent.
And still doesn’t.
Even after U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in February, the Iranian state has not collapsed. The war has dragged on for months. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed or severely disrupted. Tankers have been attacked. American service members have been killed. There has been no neat handoff of power and no Venezuelan-style outcome.
The basic error was mistaking favorable conditions in one country for a repeatable formula.
Venezuela did not prove that removing a leader from the top would cause the government underneath him to fall into line everywhere else.
Iran proved the opposite.
Trump mistook a particular set of circumstances for a strategy.
Both Iran and the United States have been paying for that mistake ever since.
Why this should matter to you
Five countries in the Western Hemisphere.
One doctrine.
A military intervention followed by American control over another country’s most important industry.
A humanitarian crisis used as pressure against a government.
A foreign election into which an American president openly inserted himself.
A financial rescue explicitly tied to the electoral fortunes of a political ally.
Tariffs used against a country whose courts were prosecuting Trump’s ideological ally.
And strategic minerals quietly changing hands beneath the political confrontation.
Then, outside the hemisphere, a war that exposed the danger of assuming the Venezuela model could simply be repeated somewhere else.
This is not simply conventional diplomacy—alliances, treaties, trade agreements and negotiation.
It is closer to what historians once called gunboat diplomacy, updated for the twenty-first century: tariffs as political weapons, access to money as leverage, economic blockades as instruments of regime pressure and military force waiting behind all of them.
The underlying claim is an old one:
This hemisphere belongs to Washington.
And Washington will decide who governs comfortably within it.
The danger is not only what that means for Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina or Brazil.
It is what it teaches our own government it can do.
Punish another country’s courts with economic force. Put American money behind favored foreign politicians. Assert control over another nation’s natural resources. Use military power to remove a government and then decide which pieces of that government are acceptable enough to keep.
And call all of it national security.
Once those powers are normalized, the precedent does not remain neatly overseas.
We are not just watching this happen elsewhere.
We are paying for it.
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