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Hello Reader,
America Asserts Primacy in the Western Hemisphere
An American president just invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify military intervention in Latin America, forging his own corollary to the 1823 principle which asserted American primacy in the Western hemisphere.
Weeks earlier, he had positioned one of the Navy's most advanced warships offshore. The target: a failing authoritarian government deeply indebted to foreign powers seeking to exploit its resources and gain a strategic foothold in the region.
Then, American forces swept in, seizing the nation's economic lifeline.
This American president believes regional security justifies the projection of American power. He prioritizes stability over sovereignty. He puts order over democratic development. He puts America first.
But this is not Caracas, and it's not present day.
It's Santo Domingo, it’s 1905, and Teddy Roosevelt has just set a precedent that would transform the use of American power for the next century and beyond.
Roosevelt saw the Dominican Republic's instability—and the French and British warships in the Caribbean poised to collect on its debt—as existential threats that justified intervention. A year earlier, he had made his position clear to Congress:
"Chronic wrongdoing…may ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation...and in the Western Hemisphere may force the United States, however reluctantly, to the exercise of an international police power."
Roosevelt had just established his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, transforming it from a defensive warning against European intrusion into a claim of hemispheric authority.
His intervention worked—in the short term. European pressure receded. Dominican finances stabilized. The books balanced. Revenue flowed in, and the American interests were served.
Roosevelt cared only about results—stability, solvency, reduced violence—but he showed little interest in how Dominicans governed themselves once order was imposed. He never answered the harder questions that follow every assertion of American power: how does stability endure once it is enforced? How do you build a society where order no longer depends on foreign control—where citizens can live and thrive without fear?
That question didn't end in Santo Domingo in 1905. It remains unanswered in Caracas today.
Two Visions of American Power
Roosevelt never wanted boots on the ground. His intervention came with the formal approval of the Dominican president. Instead of Delta Force, Roosevelt sent accountants—backed by the unmistakable threat of force. In 1905, the U.S. created a customs receivership—American control would remain limited to collecting duties to help Dominicans repay their debt.
No occupation. No nation-building.
European powers departed. Dominican debt was consolidated under American banks. President Ramón Cáceres brought relative stability.
But in 1911, assassins shot him dead in the streets. Political chaos erupted—five presidents cycled through in five years.
By 1916, President Woodrow Wilson faced the choice Roosevelt had dodged: accept chaos that invited foreign encroachment, or send in the Marines. Wilson chose the latter. This time America would do it right: build democratic institutions, establish professional security forces, create stability that would last.
Eight years of military occupation followed. Marines built roads, crushed guerrilla resistance, and trained the Dominican National Guard to maintain order. In 1924, elections were held. The Marines withdrew. American officials reveled in their success.
Six years later, that order collapsed. In 1930, Rafael Trujillo—personally trained by U.S. Marines—seized power, unleashing a campaign of assassinations, disappearances, and terror. Political opponents were dragged from their homes, bodies appeared on roadsides and along the Ozama River, and fear—rather than law—became the foundation of the Dominican state.
His dictatorship lasted three decades, killing an estimated 50,000 people. In 1951, the U.S. State Department admitted the brutal truth: "The Dominican Republic offers a classic example of the impossibility of imposing democracy from the outside."
This failure exposed a rift in American foreign policy that endures today. Roosevelt believed in Realpolitik—projecting power to secure American interests, imposing order first, worrying about legitimacy later. Wilson believed America had a moral duty to export democracy, even at gunpoint, building institutions that would outlast occupation. Both approaches collapsed in Santo Domingo. Roosevelt's order bred Trujillo. Wilson's idealism couldn't survive contact with reality. The divide between pragmatic nationalism and idealistic interventionism still splits Americans—and defines every debate over when and how to use American power abroad.
Trump now faces that same choice in Caracas.
Venezuela's Descent and the Frigidity of Collectivism
Last week, New York's newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to replace "the frigidity of rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism." Ask Venezuelans about collectivism's warmth.
Most believe Venezuela's nightmare began with Hugo Chávez in 1999. It didn't. The rot started in 1958, when social democrat Rómulo Betancourt overthrew a pro-market dictator and tripled income tax rates to 36%. By the 1970s oil boom, President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the petroleum industry—Venezuela's lifeblood. Long before Chávez, Venezuela had embraced the Latin American faith that state control delivers prosperity. Oil production would eventually plummet.
That faith traces to Simón Bolívar's vision of centralized authority and Che Guevara's overly romanticized rebellion—ideas that captured imaginations across the continent while delivering poverty everywhere they took root.
Chávez merely accelerated the decay. In 2004, he packed Venezuela's Supreme Court, expanding it from 20 to 32 justices—all loyalists who rubber-stamped every decree. In 2009, he eliminated term limits through a referendum after the court declared such limits violated citizens' "right to vote" for whomever they chose. Courts that once checked power became instruments of it.
He seized 6 million hectares of farmland and fired 19,000 petroleum engineers who struck in protest, replacing expertise with loyalty. Production plummeted. State-run grocery stores required armed National Guard troops because price controls created black markets and desperation. Mamdani wants city-run grocery stores for New York—Venezuela learned they require guns to guard empty shelves.
The results speak for themselves. Venezuela's GDP collapsed 80% in a decade. Today, 82% of Venezuelans live in poverty—53% extreme. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2014, the largest migration crisis in Latin American history. Child malnutrition ravages 11% of those who remain.
Collectivism's "warmth" is measured in collapsed economies, mass exodus, and children going hungry.
Trump removed the tyrant. Removing decades of embedded ideology will prove far harder. That will prove impossible without the economic success only strong and independent democratic institutions can deliver.
Venezuela's Fate Hangs in the Balance
Donald Trump just removed a tyrant with precision Roosevelt would have envied and speed Wilson never achieved. The raid was surgical, coordinated, and devastatingly effective—one of the finest special operations in modern military history—with zero American lives lost.
Trump deserves some credit for delivering military force with maximum effectiveness and minimal casualties, avoiding the quagmires that consumed his predecessors. But Trump is no Roosevelt. He lacks Roosevelt's intellect, his physical courage, and his grasp of history.
More damning, Trump has what Roosevelt didn't: 120 years of evidence showing what works and what doesn't. Roosevelt operated in an era when democratic institution-building was experimental. Trump operates in an era where we know—with brutal clarity—that democracies deliver prosperity and dictatorships deliver ruin.
Roosevelt's mistake was forgivable ignorance. Trump's would be willful blindness.
Venezuela isn't hollowed out by European debt—it's hollowed out by decades of socialism that systematically destroyed every democratic institution and shattered economic freedom. The regime is gone, but the wreckage remains. Courts don't function. Elections have been rigged for years. Security forces answer to whoever holds power, not to law.
Removing a tyrant was the easy part; choosing what replaces him will define American power for decades—for better or worse.
Venezuela’s future hangs in the balance.
Which Vision Will Prevail?
An avowed "Chavista" revolutionary. The daughter of a Marxist guerrilla. Deputy to a brutal dictator. These are the credentials of the woman who now leads Venezuela—the same woman who helped architect the regime's torture and persecution apparatus for years.
This is Donald Trump's choice: stability over democracy.
Trump chose Delcy Rodríguez over María Corina Machado—Nobel Peace Prize winner who led Venezuela's resistance and won a sweeping primary victory in 2023. When Maduro banned her from running, she named retired diplomat Edmundo González in her place.
González won 70% of Venezuela's vote in 2024. 100 days later, Trump won less than 50% of America's. Yet on Saturday, Trump dismissed Machado as "not respected."
Trump may be learning from Iraq's catastrophic de-Baathification—purging entire regimes creates power vacuums that breed chaos. Machado doesn't control Venezuela's military and militias, but Rodríguez may not either. Real power likely rests with hardline interior minister and virulent anti-American Diosdado Cabello, whose “colectivo” militias roam Caracas, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López.
Trump has calculated that Machado doesn’t have the guns to succeed. He should be making sure she gets them.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio understands what's needed. His instincts are Wilsonian, Trump’s Rooseveltian. Rubio’s mention of "reconciliation" evokes Mandela's post-apartheid process—where former enemies shared power before transitioning to democracy. Institution-building requires those who hold the guns to willingly surrender them.
The question is whether Rubio's vision prevails over the isolationist MAGA wing and Trump's transactional instincts. JD Vance appears sidelined—a welcome sign that's possible.
But Machado's team states the long-term truth: without stability, democracy, and rule of law, Venezuela won't attract the massive capital needed to rebuild its shattered oil production.
The Wall Street Journal estimates it will take a $100 billion investment to restore Venezuelan oil production to 2010 levels. That requires enduring stability.
The oil executives now descending on Washington know this—Machado is right.
Caracas, Six Days Later
Saturday morning brought a moment Venezuelans had dreamt about for decades. Special Forces seized Maduro. Group chats erupted with disbelief. Champagne and tears flowed freely. After a decade of suffocation, the people dared to breathe. Scenes of jubilation among Venezuelan expats poured in from across the globe.
But now, the air has thickened again.
The regime struck back hard. Security forces detained 14 journalists in a single day, mostly from foreign outlets. Intelligence officers confiscated phones and combed through messages. In Mérida, authorities arrested two elderly Venezuelans whose crime was shouting anti-government slogans in the street.
The colectivos emerged from the shadows—Maduro's armed militia gangs, now answering to Rodríguez. They established roadblocks across the capital, stopping cars at gunpoint, forcing drivers to surrender their phones. Text messages spread warnings: avoid certain highways, the militias are checking for anything—a social media post, a private message—that celebrates the dictator's fall.
The hunt for U.S. sympathizers is underway.
Over 860 political prisoners remain locked away. Monday night, gunfire erupted near the presidential palace. Just warning shots at rogue drones, the government insisted. Everything was perfectly calm.
One man captured the contradiction perfectly: "Of course I have hope things could get better without Maduro. But from where I am, all I see is the same people who destroyed my country still in power. They're still persecuting us. And we're still afraid."
Six days after the most surgically precise military operation in modern memory, Caracas remains a city holding its breath—waiting to see if freedom follows force, or if only the faces at the top have changed.
The Path Forward
Roosevelt chose order. Wilson chose idealism. Both failed because neither built institutions Dominicans controlled.
Trump must learn from both. Venezuela needs Wilsonian ends through Rooseveltian means—institution-building backed by American resolve, not American occupation. Empower Machado and González. Support independent courts and civilian-controlled security forces. Let Venezuelans run Venezuela.
The oil infrastructure will follow democratic stability, not precede it. Only institutions Venezuelans trust can deliver lasting prosperity—and American interests.
To the "America First" crowd: Even if you don't care about Venezuelan freedom, this is how you secure American interests. Legitimacy is the only path to stability. Everything else is Santo Domingo, 1905, waiting to breed the next Trujillo.
This is what long suffering Venezuelans deserve, and what we owe them in the wake of our violent intervention.
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