When Good Neighbors Go Bad
Trump is rolling back American policy in Latin America a hundred years. Or more.
In March, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address in the dismal depths of the Great Depression. With the financial system near implosion, civic collapse loomed. Roosevelt famously set out to calm a terrified nation with his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” line.
But as critical as the domestic situation was, Roosevelt understood the United States and all other countries needed to restore international trade while avoiding war. So he included the following resonant observation.
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others — the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.
This became known as FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” although the idea originated with his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s involvement is significant.
The Republicans of the 1920s had been isolationists with regard to Europe and much of the world but in Latin America they were enthusiastic imperialists. The US occupied Nicaragua between 1912 and 1933 in order to hold the land for a second cross-isthmus canal, an occupation which spawned a brutal six-year war with insurgents between 1927 and 1933. In Haiti, the story was similar. So, too, the Dominican Republic. There were also briefer invasions and occupations of Panama and Honduras.
American corporations — notably the United Fruit Company, which begat the term “banana republic” — loved this approach. So did corrupt elites in Latin American countries. Ordinary Latin Americans were not so enthusiastic. The leader of the insurgency in Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, became a folk hero across the whole region.
To Hoover’s credit, he recognized that these squalid wars and occupations were a foolish waste of resources that poisoned America’s reputation so badly they actually weakened American trade and security. So he started a pull-back. With the coming of the Depression, and America fighting for its survival in 1933, FDR embraced and extended Hoover’s work.
The United States entered into a genuinely new era in its relationship with Latin America.
Of course the coming of the Cold War created a powerful new incentive for American meddling in Latin America, and there was plenty of that over the decades, but the old, naked imperialism never returned. America rationalized its interventions, while insisting it remained a good neighbor. However small the fig leaves sometimes were, they at least offered an honorary nod to the sovereignty of Latin American nations. The naked imperialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries remained in the history books.
Donald Trump can’t be bothered to rationalize.
Without offering so much as a coherent explanation for his actions, Trump bombed Venezuela, had its president and his wife kidnapped, and declared the United States would “run” Venezuela until a government to Trump’s liking is installed. Nicolas Maduro and his wife will also be tried for trafficking cocaine, which wouldn’t qualify as a legal pretext for the invasion even if the courtroom were run by Judge Pam Bondi — but it looks even sillier given that a mere month ago Trump bestowed a full pardon on the wealthy and connected Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras convicted of industrial-scale cocaine trafficking. No, the war on drugs is not Donald Trump’s thing. Money and power are.
Few things deliver money and power like oil, which is why, on many occasions, Donald Trump publicly insisted that the dumbest thing the US did in Iraq — this is no small claim — was “not taking the oil.” (By the way, “taking the oil” would have been a crime under international law, but I think it’s already quite clear how much Donald Trump cares about anything labelled “international” or “law,” much less international law.) Given this precedent, it’s a safe bet what lies in store for Venezuela, home of the largest oil reserves in the world.
Venezuela will be a bonanza for American oil companies, something Trump has already said, more or less. And we can be sure the industry will fulsomely express its appreciation to Donald Trump, his sons, and the burgeoning Trump empire. On The Sopranos, they called that “kicking up.” The boss always gets a taste. As every wise guy knows, that’s rule number one.
For more than a year, I’ve been saying that Trump’s attack on the international order — notably his willingness to reward Russia with land in violation of a cornerstone principle of American foreign policy and international law — is demolishing what was built after the Second World War by America and her allies. We are sliding rapidly backward to the order that existed prior to 1914. The order that produced the First World War. And the Nazis. And the Second World War.
But with his invasion of Venezuela, Trump seems to be pushing the United States back even further, to the last quarter of the 19th century, when American imperialism was naked and any intervention could be justified on the grounds of extending the reach of business, perhaps flavoured with a little talk of advancing civilization to the benighted brown peoples.
Or perhaps he is rolling back the calendar even further.
Prior to the Civil War, Southerners repeatedly hatched schemes to seize Mexico, Cuba,or some other sultry spot, in order to add slave states to the Union. Even after the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant pushed a scheme to absorb the Dominican Republic into the United States so the new state could become a refuge for blacks fleeing the KKK and white supremacy in the South. Would some of the growing numbers of groypers, fascists, corporate monarchists, racist nuts, and general-purpose whack jobs in today’s GOP seriously contemplate adding a tropical star or two to the flag? I doubt it. They want to get rid of wetbacks, not add more. But Grant’s idea? Listen to Nick Fuentes. Read X. If they could be convinced such a scheme would mean fewer blacks in the continental USA, there would be plenty of takers.
I fully acknowledge that I am now into the territory of lunatic speculation. But cast your mind back to January 3, 2025. If I had said that in fewer than 365 days after taking office Donald Trump would threaten to invade Panama and Greenland, launch a global trade war, bomb five countries, and invade South America — all while griping about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize — you would have thought I was completely nuts. Yet here we are.
In the Trump era, the real crazies are those sober-minded sorts who won’t speculate about the ridiculous.
Latin America will not forget this.
Been doing a lot of digging on this issue today. Gardner's piece argues that Trump is rolling back over a century of U.S.-Latin American policy evolution. That's essentially correct but understates how recent and concrete the shift is. The U.S. just executed Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3rd, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a stunning military operation involving 150+ aircraft, and Trump immediately declared the U.S. would "run" Venezuela temporarily while extracting oil profits. He framed this as applying the Monroe Doctrine, which he rebranded the "Donroe Doctrine". Simultaneously, Trump secured a framework agreement with Panama granting U.S. warships priority and free passage through the canal while simultaneously pushing Panama to back away from Chinese investments and port contracts. This represents a dramatic departure not just from the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, which renounced military intervention and emphasized non-interference, but also from the Cold War era approach that prioritized anti-communism without openly seizing territory or resources.
Gardner's historical framing is sound. The Good Neighbor Policy explicitly rejected the Roosevelt Corollary and gunboat diplomacy that characterized early 20th-century U.S. interventionism. Yet what's happening now is sharper: Trump isn't just reversing soft power initiatives or using military pressure diplomatically, he's conducted unilateral military strikes on a sovereign state, captured its leader, and claimed operational control of the country and its resources. That represents a rollback not just to the 1890s-1920s era of explicit intervention, but potentially beyond it, since this operation occurred without congressional authorization and has drawn criticism for violating the UN Charter and basic international law.
One clarification Gardner's framing might benefit from: this shift is less about returning to some old doctrine and more about inventing new justifications for unilateral dominion. Trump's "Monroe Doctrine 2.0" explicitly frames Western Hemisphere dominance as a security imperative tied to migration and drugs, not European colonization. That changes the politics of legitimacy in ways that historical precedent doesn't fully capture.