At 2:01 a.m. on Jan. 3, 2026, over 150 U.S. military planes flew over Venezuela, bombing multiple locations to disable the country’s air defenses. U.S. forces entered the presidential compound in Caracas, dragged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores from their beds and ferried them to New York. The United States killed at least 83 people: 47 Venezuelan troops, 32 Cuban soldiers and at least four civilians. More than 112 were injured. Some international law experts have called the seizure illegal.
Hours later, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before reporters at Mar-a-Lago. “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump declared. He explained that the United States would also seize Venezuelan oil assets, which he claimed Venezuela “stole” through nationalization.
Peter Kornbluh told the audience of Rockefeller Hall 300 on Feb. 4, “There has never been a moment in the post-World War II era since Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America that a president has so baldly undertaken this type of operation and proclaimed himself in charge of another country, and then said, ‘And I’m taking its main natural resource, which is what we want.’” Kornbluh is a Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive (NSA). He has written prolifically on Latin America, especially Chile and Cuba. The archive is a research center dedicated to declassifying secret government documents and democratizing information about the U.S. government’s actions. (It is unrelated to the National Security Agency, a branch of the U.S. Defense Department.)
In his talk, Kornbluh argued that the Trump administration’s foreign policy in Latin America is a return to the “golden age of U.S. empire building” of the turn of the 20th century. The United States went to war with Spain, seizing the Philippines, annexing Hawai’i and occupying Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba. Gunboat diplomacy reigned: The U.S. Navy and Marines backed a small Panamanian independence movement against Colombia to build the Panama Canal, intervened in Nicaragua in 1912 and occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. These blatant violations of Latin American countries’ sovereignty were justified by President Theodore Roosevelt through the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, warned European powers that the United States would not tolerate further colonization in the Americas. In 1904, Roosevelt declared the corollary: Through adhering to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States would be “reluctantly” forced to intervene in Latin America as an “international police power” to prevent instability.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump argued that seizing Maduro was in line with Monroe because of Venezuela’s “gross violations” of U.S. foreign policy principles. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot,” he said. “They now call it the Donroe [Doctrine]… Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
“I see a direct line from the Monroe Doctrine to the Donroe Doctrine,” Kornbluh said, “from gunboat diplomacy to what the military code-named Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela.” He explained to The Miscellany News, “Trump has returned to the open era of ‘This region is ours, and we’ll do to it—in it—what we want and what we can.’” He continued, “It is a recycling of an onerous, dark history. That past history holds a lot of lessons for the future. So far, those lessons are being ignored.” Kornbluh defined the Donroe Doctrine through a quote from the White House’s new National Security Strategy: “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” Furthermore, Kornbluh argued that the Donroe Doctrine was a fundamental shift from the United States invading, funding military dictatorships and rigging elections in at least 13 Latin American countries during the Cold War. In those cases, Kornbluh contended, the U.S. government at least felt bound enough by international law to try to hide its illegal actions or justify them as furthering democracy.
On the other hand, in a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law.” When asked if there was a limit to his power, he responded, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Another difference, Kornbluh told the Miscellany, is the frequency of threats: “It’s a constant thing now. One day, it’s a threat to bomb parts of Mexico to take out the cartels. The next day, it’s a threat to Chileans that they better not have a trade agreement with China.”
Vassar Assistant Professor of History Daniel Mendiola, who specializes in Latin America and attended the talk, told the Miscellany, “[It was] pretty convincing, the argument that in harkening back to an age where the United States was very overtly imperial, that we’re essentially admitting now, or embracing, that we are an empire.” However, he contended, the difference between covert and overt action may be less stark for Latin Americans. “I think the way a lot of people in Latin America are experiencing it, that visceral experience is probably not that different than the things that were happening in the Cold War and really never stopped happening,” he said. Esther Cull-Kahn ’26, who attended the talk, commented, “I think the biggest danger in representing Trumpism as an aberration is it erases all of the horrible things that the United States has been responsible for in the past, and especially Iraq and Afghanistan.” Cull-Kahn, a history major, is writing her thesis on the Iran–Contra affair and the history of the U.S. military intervention in Latin America during the Cold War.
According to Kornbluh, Trump has learned from the Iraq War that nation-building is too expensive and dangerous: The government is now doing “remote control imperialism.” “There’s no U.S. military presence there,” Kornbluh said of Venezuela. “He is using coercion, which, in this case is control over all the external revenues that Venezuela can get from its oil, because we are taking the oil and we are selling it ourselves in order to basically hold the leaders that we have left behind there, feet to the fire.” Vassar Professor of Political Science on the F. Thompson Chair Katherine Hite wrote to the Miscellany, “The administration’s ‘surgical’ approach, aimed primarily at taking out a leader who virtually no one wished to defend, together with no U.S. continued ‘boots on the ground,’ makes organizing against Trump’s Venezuela campaign challenging, no matter how terrible Trump’s actions.” Hite organized the talk and has known Kornbluh since they worked together at the Institute for Policy Studies decades ago.
Kornbluh warned that Venezuela was not a one-off: Cuba is next. “Trump has made it absolutely clear that he wants to get rid of the communist government there,” Kornbluh told his audience, “and open up Cuba to the United States fully again and take over Cuba as the United States once had in those first 30 years of the 20th century.” On Jan. 11, Trump posted on Truth Social, “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” On Jan. 29, he signed an executive order declaring Cuba’s threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy a national emergency and pledging to impose tariffs on any country that directly or indirectly gives Cuba oil. “He can create social collapse in Cuba if all the lights go out,” Kornbluh explained. Without oil, Cuban electricity, water pumps and refrigerators would fail. Cars and hospital equipment would be unusable. Phones could not be charged, effectively cutting Cuba off from the world and one another. Kornbluh compared this to President Richard Nixon’s plan to prevent Communist Chilean President-elect Salvador Allende from taking power in 1970: “Make the economy scream.”
The day after his lecture, Kornbluh spoke about his work at the NSA and answered student questions at a small lunch organized by Hite in the Political Science lounge. Kornbluh has been instrumental in major document declassifications at the NSA. He personally indexed thousands of files after the Iran–Contra scandal broke. After Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, Kornbluh called for President Bill Clinton to declassify 24,000 secret documents on the dictator. “Peter’s work is dedicated to democratizing, to making public, making transparent U.S. foreign policy, both historically and now,” Hite told the Miscellany via email. “If we didn’t have the real historical past, which is arguably most concretely represented in secret documents, we wouldn’t have a basis for understanding what went wrong in the past, what went right in the past,” Kornbluh told the Miscellany. “It’s invaluable to have a historical record, and particularly in this day and age when there’s a constant effort to deny what history really was.”