The Don-roe Doctrine in Action: Trump’s Gangster Intervention in Venezuela
It has been an accusation long levelled at certain US politicians that their brains might have been softened by a lengthy diet of television, Westerns, and the heroic triumphalism of the prattling cowboy. There was never going to be a break with this tradition regarding President Donald Trump, except for the fact that he claimed to be more restrained on the draw. Of late, that restraint has vanished. A buildup of US army personnel in the Caribbean; the bombing, on fatuous grounds, of vessels in the Caribbean Sea carrying fictional narco-cargo destined for the United States, and, just to top things, delirious notions about attacking the Islamic Republic of Iran in the early hours of the morning in the event protestors are shot.
It was clear after the release of the 2025 National Security Strategy that this administration was going to shred the inhibitions imposed by international law and opt for the more liberating costumery of gangsterism. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States would assert its muscle and dictate terms, as it has done previously, to countries in Latin America. Washington desired “a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations”, one “that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains,” and ensured “continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
Venezuela has become the first target of this corollary. On January 3, a little after 2 am local time, US forces attacked Caracas and other sites in the country as part of Operation Absolute Resolve. By 4:21 am, Trump announced that the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores had been captured. The Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, at a press conference held at the President’s Florida compound, spoke of, “An extraction so precise it involved more than 150 aircraft launching across the Western Hemisphere in close coordination, all coming together in time and place to layer effects for a single purpose, to get an interdiction force into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise.”
Caine also revealed that US intelligence teams had been eyeing Maduro and his wife for months. With a thuggish flourish, the general explained that those teams had monitored the leader to “understand how he moved, where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate, what he wore, and what were his pets.”
Trump, in explaining the rationale behind the Venezuelan action, spoke ever immodestly about the “Don-roe Doctrine.” The Maduro regime had hosted “foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing offensive weapons that could threaten US interests and lives”. This was “in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy, dating back more than two centuries”. The Monroe Doctrine had been “a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, a real lot. They now call it the ‘Don-roe Doctrine.’”
US Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly announced that Maduro had been indicted in the Southern District of New York on a fruit salad array of implausible charges: “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States.” As with previous, implausibly elastic categories of combatant hatched by the US Justice Department and White House – that of “unlawful combatant” or “unprivileged belligerent” conceived by the administration of George W. Bush comes to mind – a category has been invented to inspire a false resolution.
The invented category of narco-terrorism has revealed the limits of legal literacy of the Trump administration. Such a term, imputing links between government officials, organised crime and terrorism, supposedly vests war-making powers in the executive, along with, it transpires in the case of Maduro, abduction powers regarding the foreign leader of a state. The US Congress has again been roguishly sidestepped.
The dress rehearsal for this commenced on September 2 last year when Trump stated in a War Powers Resolution notification to Congress that military strikes on alleged narco-vessels operating in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean were “self-defense” measures motivated by “the inability or unwillingness of some states in the region to address the continuing threat to United States persons and interests emanating from their territories”.
In October, a presidential notice was issued turning those killed in alleged drug smuggling as “unlawful combatants”, thereby twinning this administration’s lexical imagination with that of George W. Bush. For Bush, that imagination extended to fictional weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) held by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that might be used against Americans and their allies at any given moment. Furthermore, they might fall into the hands of non-state actors.
In Trump’s case, fantasies about Maduro as a wily drug chieftain hosting rebel groups proliferate. Much of this is sheer nonsense, given that the country has little to nothing to do with the flow of cocaine into the US. But there is oil to be seized and managed by US companies and the Don-roe doctrine to maintain.
In responding to this act of breezy criminality, countries programmed to emphasise the “rules-based” international order find themselves in a bind. The European Union, instead of spluttering and raging, proved meek, mocking Maduro’s status as Venezuela’s leader yet finding it hard to condemn Trump’s flouting of convention and the UN Charter. The EU high representative for foreign affairs, Kaja Kallas, was most indicative: “The EU has repeatedly stated that Mr Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition. Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be respected. We call for restraint.”
In Britain, Trump fanboy and leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage expressed that ecstatic confusion that comes with admiring an untutored, unrestrained bully in international relations. “The American actions in Venezuela overnight are unorthodox and contrary to international law – but if they make China and Russia think twice, it may be a good thing.”
The response from Roderich Kiesewetter, MP from Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, was more tutored. “The coup in Venezuela marks a return to the old US doctrine from before 1940: a mindset of thinking in terms of spheres of influence, where the law of force rules, not international law.” The reaction from the Cuban government was much in the same vein, though more colourful: “This is a blatant imperialist and fascist aggression with objectives of domination, aimed at reviving US hegemonic ambitions over Our America, rooted in the Monroe Doctrine, and at achieving unrestricted access to and control over the natural wealth of Venezuela and the region.”
The kidnapping of leaders by bullying powers in the post-1945 world is not new. Hungary’s deceived Imre Nagy, seen as the figurehead of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, was seized by the Soviet Union for disciplinary action that culminated in his trial and execution. Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubček, leader of the crushed Prague Spring of 1968, was spared execution but faced similar ideological chastisement by the Soviet leadership for implementing reforms. Within their sphere of influence, the Soviets were keen to dissuade unruly contrarians that their leaders might, at any moment, be kidnapped, executed, or reprogrammed at will. Trump has, without knowing it, joined a most dubious club.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Kidnap
Presidents
What was defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime (one country attacking another one) is depicted by Trump and even the supposedly anti-Trump corporate media as some sort of law enforcement. Bombing is liberating. Kidnapping is capturing. Murdering people on boats is “impeding the flow of drugs.”
Imagine if, say, Saudi Arabia or Norway or India were to impose deadly sanctions on the United States, attempt numerous comical coups, murder boaters off the U.S. coast, impose a no-fly-zone and naval blockade, bomb Washington, kidnap the U.S. president, and declare its intent to “run” the country and its most planetarily destructive resources. Unlike in Venezuela, in the United States, you could poll the public and find majority support for disappearing the president. The problem is that, after our national town square was deprived of its idiot, the country wouldn’t be “run” at all. Even a coalition of 100 nations couldn’t occupy the United States without massive tumultuous resistance of the predictable violent or the more powerful but less likely nonviolent sort. And if an occupied nation were ever well run, more bombings and kidnappings by someone else could put an end to that.
Whether Trump and those bowing before his illegal orders simply pretend they are running Venezuela or attempt to militarily occupy it, Venezuela is in for worse times than ever. And so is the globe, with the rule of law shredded and the pirates of the Caribbean dressed up as cops of the world. And so is Trump, as his latest war promises to drag on as long as his Epstein ordeal.
To state the obvious, the United Nations Charter makes it a crime to threaten war and a crime to wage war except in defense or by UN authorization, neither of which is the case here, and neither of which has even been alleged here.
The shortcomings of a government provide no legal basis for a foreign government to attempt to overthrow it. Trump was just threatening to attack Iran should its government engage in any of the sorts of behavior Trump would celebrate if he were making a buck off it. If you could attack governments because they were barbaric or possessed weapons or possessed oil, obviously anyone could attack the United States.
The illegal drug trade, even where real, provides no legal basis for waging war or committing murder. Trump’s claims about the illegal drug trade regarding both Venezuela and over 100 people thus far murdered in boats with U.S. missiles from drones are without evidence and widely considered not even plausible. But they could be the perfect truth and would still do absolutely nothing to justify mass murder. (Trump’s now pretending to search for survivors of his attacks, though it’s not clear whether that’s to rescue them or to murder them.)
Seizing a nation’s oil provides no legal basis for waging war or committing murder. We can call it refreshing and exciting that Trump makes no pretense about hiding this motive. But ugly reasons for crimes don’t legalize them any more than beautiful ones.
The U.S. Congress is a collection of court jesters masquerading as legislators. Trump told them there was no need to oppose this war because it wouldn’t happen. Now that the war or murders (call it whichever of its two names you like) has lasted this long and arrived at the “Mission Accomplished” commercial break, Congress Critters who failed to pass a redundant resolution against the war are now patting themselves on the back, supporting the Monroe Doctrine, endorsing murder and kidnap, and presenting themselves as so moronic as to believe the drug lies and to believe such drug lies are able to legalize the supreme international crime. These men and women expect to be able to go on not only threatening other nations but criticizing them as lawless, and doing so with a straight face.
A Congress member who wanted respect would immediately demand of his or her colleagues that they
- End all war and hostilities toward Venezuela.
- Cut off the funding that allows such crimes.
- Free Venezuela’s kidnapped president.
- Bring all U.S. troops and equipment back to the United States from Venezuela and vicinity.
- Cancel the brutal economic sanctions, naval blockade, and no-fly zone.
- Renounce overthrows and the Monroe Doctrine.
- Impeach, convict, and remove President Trump from office.
But what about us? We need to be protesting at every U.S. embassy the world over, at every state and local government in the United States, and in Washington D.C., in a manner to prevent the functioning of the Monrovian mafia.
And those who think the United Nations or the Nobel Committee can still be saved should be protesting at those places as well.
They Kidnapped Maduro Because The World Is
Ruled By Unaccountable Tyrants
Well, Trump finally did it. US special forces attacked Venezuela and abducted President Maduro from Caracas, reportedly killing at least 40 people in the process.
And now that it’s all over, the White House is getting a lot more honest about the real motives behind its actions. After all those months of babbling about fentanyl and “narcoterrorism” and freedom and democracy, the Trump administration has come right out and admitted that its regime change interventionism in Venezuela has always been a good old-fashioned oil grab.
“We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump told the press following Maduro’s abduction, saying “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.”
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said.
“We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves, we need that for the world,” the president added.
Trump made it explicitly clear that this is going to be some sort of long-term US occupation project, contradicting early claims of his supporters who had defended the president’s actions in Venezuela as a brief in-and-out, one-and-done special ops intervention.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” the president said. “And we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high level. Actually, we’re not afraid of it, we’re we don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
You would think, after all these incredibly honest admissions, that this was a regime change operation aimed at controlling the resources of the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, people would get real and accept that they were lied to about the Trump administration’s real reasons for targeting Venezuela. But I am still getting Trump supporters prattling on about drugs, terrorism, and democracy in my social media replies defending my criticisms of his monstrous act of war.
I had one Trump supporter try to tell me the president’s admissions that it was all about the oil don’t necessarily prove it wasn’t also about fighting drug trafficking, arguing that it could possibly have been motivated by both. Which to me kinda sounds like a grandmother acknowledging that yes, she had been victimized by an email scam, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the nice man who scammed her wasn’t also a Nigerian prince.
Trump supporters would make excuses for literally anything he did. Literally anything. I am not using hyperbole for effect. There is literally nothing he could do that they wouldn’t twist themselves into cognitive pretzels trying to justify.
Trump is spelling out the truth of what he is and what the US empire is, and anyone with open eyes can see it plain as day.
For those whose eyes are open or are beginning to open, I hope you continue learning the same lessons with Venezuela that you learned with Gaza. The US empire always lies, the mass media always facilitate its lies, and the global south continues to be ransacked by the murderous abusers who run things.
While I was decrying Trump’s Venezuela assault, some empire simp mockingly told me, “It must be sad for you to lose a tyrant.”
I told him no, it’s sad for me that we live in a lawless world that is ruled by tyrants.
It’s sad for me that we are ruled by chaotic despots who can invade a sovereign nation and abduct its leader and suffer no consequences.
It’s sad for me that the people with their hands on the steering wheel of the fate of our species are a bunch of sociopathic thugs who can smash and rob any country they please with total impunity.
It’s sad for me that our planet’s population is subject to the whims of a globe-spanning empire which topples governments, wages wars, sponsors genocides, targets civilians with starvation sanctions, backs proxy conflicts, drops bombs, brainwashes entire nations with propaganda, uses its military and economic might to bully and cajole states into bowing to its dictates, and sows suffering, destruction and death around the world every moment of every day.
It’s sad to me that these are the people making the decisions that will determine humanity’s path into the future. The future of our society. The future of our planet’s resources. The future of our technological innovation. The future of our ecosystem. The future of our militaries. The future of our nuclear weapons.
That is what is sad for me. I have no special emotional attachment to Maduro as an individual, but I do have a strong emotional attachment to the possibility of a healthy world emerging in the future.
And as things stand right now, it’s looking pretty dark.
I find that sad.
Alexander Willis
January 4, 2026
A person wears a MAGA style cap that reads "Make Venezuela great again" as they react to the news after U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. has struck Venezuela and captured its President Nicolas Maduro, in Doral, Miami, Florida, U.S., January 3, 2026. REUTERS/Marco Bello
As MAGA figures rushed to champion the Trump administration’s unprecedented Venezuela attack and takeover, critics couldn’t help but dredge up old remarks that exposed a stark reversal of their once anti-interventionist rhetoric.
Vice President JD Vance, for instance, aggressively criticized supporters of the Iraq War in 2023, mocking the notion of wasting billions of dollars and American lives to depose tyrannical rulers abroad, remarks that lie in stark contrast to his recent championing and defense of his administration’s attack on Venezuela.
MAGA influencer “Gunther Eagleman,” who’s amassed more than 1.6 million followers on X, championed Trump as recently as June for having started “no new wars,” only to hail Trump Saturday for his attack on Venezuela.
“This is huge!” they wrote in a social media post on X Saturday. “I am completely amazed at the might of our military.”
Critics were quick to mock Vance and Gunther Eagleman for their apparent newfound appreciation of interventionism, with Christian cultural commentator Morgan Ariel posting a screengrab of Gunther Eagleman’s past anti-interventionist remarks alongside the caption: “This you?”
MAGA-aligned conservative attorney Will Chamberlain was also mocked for his apparent change of heart. In 2020, he wrote on social media that the “Republican Party is no longer the party of regime change and endless wars,” only to state on Saturday that he could “think of few better uses of [his] tax dollars” than to attack Venezuela and kidnap its president.
“Ooops…there’s always a tweet…this you Will Chamberlain?” wrote X user “Wu Tang is for the Children," a popular political commentator with more than 284,000 followers, alongside a screengrab of Chamberlain’s past anti-interventionist remarks.And the popular MAGA influencer “Catturd” with their nearly 4 million followers was ridiculed for having previously condemned regime change wars, only to champion
Venezuela’s newfound “freedom” in the wake of the Trump administration’s takeover of the country.
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