The Context You Need To Know About Maduro’s Capture EXPLAINED
Sources
Birnbaum, Michael. “Trump Revives an Old Vision of American Power, with Global Implications.” The Washington Post, January 5, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-western-hemisphere-monroe-doctrine/.
Bromwich, Jonah E. “A Pardon and a Prosecution in New York Show Trump’s Personal Geopolitics.” The New York Times, January 3, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/world/americas/trump-maduro-juan-orlando-hernandez.html.
Crandall, Britta, and Russell Crandall. “The Monroe Doctrine Turns 200. Why Won’t It Go Away?” Americas Quarterly, July 25, 2023. https://americasquarterly.org/article/the-monroe-doctrine-turns-200-why-wont-it-go-away/.
Dewey, Caitlin. “America’s Century-Long Interest in Venezuelan Oil.” Vox, January 5, 2026. https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/474027/venezuela-oil-industry-trump.
Kinnard, Meg. “How the Monroe Doctrine Factors into US Arrest of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.” Politics. AP News, January 4, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/monroe-doctrine-venezuela-trump-western-hemisphere-maduro-e5581d71ea15f2fb02461e74ac6b08ca.
Levitz, Eric. “Did Trump Really Invade Venezuela for Oil?” Vox, January 5, 2026. https://www.vox.com/politics/473986/maduro-venezuela-invasion-war-trump-oil.
Monroe, James. “December 2, 1823: Seventh Annual Message (Monroe Doctrine). Miller Center, October 20, 2016. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-2-1823-seventh-annual-message-monroe-doctrine.
National Archives. “Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1905).” September 15, 2021. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/roosevelt-corollary.
“National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” November 2025. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26341039-national-security-strategy/.
President Trump Holds a Press Conference, Jan. 3, 2026. 2026. https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1jMJgRQeDdeGL.
Rachman, Gideon. “Venezuela and the Trouble with the Donroe Doctrine.” Financial Times, January 5, 2026. https://www.ft.com/content/dcd8aa7d-630b-45b0-889c-07c3e8052804.
Trump, Donald. “America 250: Presidential Message on the Anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine.” The White House, December 2, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/america-250-presidential-message-on-the-anniversary-of-the-monroe-doctrine/.
Transcript
Hi, it’s Monday, January 5th, 2025, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. In case you live under a rock, over the weekend the United States carried out an extensive middle-of-the-night military operation in Caracas, Venezuela, arresting president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and bringing them to New York to be prosecuted for various naro-terrorism related charges. In the aftermath of the operation, the central questions have been “why?” and also “what happens next.” So I’m going to try to answer these questions this week in a two-part series on the recent developments, and hopefully provide some historical and legal context behind this move by the Trump administration. We’re going to look at this entire situation through the lens of power and the law–who has power, who doesn’t, who’s trying to get more of it, and how are they attempting to bend the law to their will to create legitimacy for what is being criticized the world over as an illegal act of war contrary to major international treaties and in violation of international law. Today, we’re discussing the Monroe Doctrine and how the Trump regime is attempting to stretch it to encompass their boldest plans for the Western hemisphere. The media reports I’ve been reading about what Trump has now termed the “Donroe Doctrine,” because the right loves a rebrand, miss some important points and history in their analysis. Turns out this isn’t a particularly new or innovative strategy, but it is a decided turn away from recent precedent and one that is based on faulty law and reasoning, which I suppose is par for the course for this regime.
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This headline from NPR about this story caught my eye, “Maduro faces drug charges in U.S. even as Trump freed others convicted of trafficking.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can get helpful background information on this publication in one quick glance. To get the big picture, I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.
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In my research for this episode, I noticed that a lot of media outlets and commentators were postulating why they think that the Trump regime decided to escalate things like this in Venezuela. Part of the guessing comes from the fact that the Trump regime in its PR campaign since the attack has not provided any actual sound legal reasoning for their actions and each of Trump’s advisors provides slightly different reasoning. In the press conference Trump held on Sunday after the news dropped, Trump spent a lot of the time talking about oil, American oil companies, and making the US and US oil companies and, as an afterthought, the Venezuelan people, a whole lotta money because oil. Then Marco Rubio stood up to say that actually it was really just a Department of Justice operation that required the support of the military. This wasn’t an act of WAR or AGGRESSION, it was just the department of justice carrying out a criminal enforcement matter, as though that can be compartmentalized from the US military being involved in the ouster of a sitting president in a foreign country. It was just a routine run of the mill little arrest!! JD Vance on Twitter said it was about holding a criminal accountable. But of course that ignores the reality that literally last month Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez who was convicted in the United States of conspiring to import cocaine and using a machine gun to do so, the same charges Maduro faces. When pushed by anchors on the numerous different news shows that Marco Rubio made the PR rounds on on Sunday, Rubio largely avoided the questions and grew frustrated and provided no comment when pressed on the clear contradictions in the administration’s actions. Okay so within all this chaos, we’re all trying to decipher what the fuck is going on.
But the piece that a lot of the media reports I was reading seemed to miss or leave out is that they did kind of already lay their reasoning out for us. The references to the Monroe Doctrine over the weekend didn’t materialize out of thin air. Their strategy and goals have been pretty clear. As with a lot of what’s happening with this regime, they tend to pretty flagrantly say what they want to do and do a lot of the law breaking out in the open where past administrations tried to at least pretend to be above board. There are two primary source documents that are informative–one is a proclamation Trump issued last month, in fact exactly 1 month prior to the Venezuela operation, titled “Presidential Message on the Anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine.” The other is the 33-page document titled “National Security Strategy for the United States of America” that was issued by the administration two months ago in November, 2025. Both documents reinforce one another and are part of the same overall strategy. The proclamation announces the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, saying that quote “the American people–not foreign nations nor globalist institutions–will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere.” It also is clearly part of the larger regime priority of forcing Americans to be patriotic and whitewash our history so that we can all be proud of the incomplete or entirely manufactured version of US history they want us to believe in. It is a very Nazi-inspired philosophy that is wielded against any version of US history that provides criticism or even just a neutral account of events that make the US look bad. Through the America 250 program to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, they are attempting to aggrandize various moments throughout US history through these presidential proclamations that editorialize or completely rewrite parts of US history in a positive light. This is just one of those proclamations.
But the “Trump Corollary” is more clearly set forth in that other document, the National Security strategy dropped in November. And as I say over and over on this show, even though the regime loves to lie and hide the truth and twist facts and rewrite history sometimes as it is happening, you can take their word on what they say they are going to do. Not the EFFECTS of what they do, that they will always lie about, but the actual actions? You can take them at their word on that, whether it’s Project 2025 or this national security strategy document, which is linked along with all my other sources in the description. In that document they don’t say “we will attack Venezuela” but they give us the WHY behind the operation. They say they want to encourage quote unquote “stability” in Latin America as a means of discouraging the mass migration that is flooding our southern borders. They want cooperation among Latin American governments to help prosecute narco-terrorists and prevent importation of drugs into the United States. They want to prevent quote “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.” Basically if we take the assets in these countries then China won’t. A continuation of the anti-communist rhetoric of the last century. On page 15 they sum it up, saying “Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as “Enlist and Expand.” We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.” They are also intent on supporting US businesses and private sector investments in the region while also pushing out foreign companies. And so, when a reporter asked at the news conference on Sunday how it could possibly be “America First” to oust another country’s president and vow to “run” the country from abroad–this is how they justify it as America first. America First was never an isolationist policy. It is a strong-man policy, one where America imposes its will on its neighbors–consent is never a part of the equation, of course–and takes whatever it wants. They’re not hiding behind the lie that they want to spread democracy to other countries, that’s a thing of the past. They’re not even pretending at this point. It’s about America’s sphere of influence being used to bully the countries around us into doing things we think will protect us from Drugs or China or competition from other parts of the world. And this the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is nothing new, in fact it’s frankly rather gratuitous to call it a “corollary” at all. A corollary implies a proposition that adds on to a previous proposition. But Trump’s “corollary” is really just restating an interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that’s been around for at least a century.
And for all the talk of the Monroe Doctrine, I found few actual quotes to it in the slew of media coverage over the last two days. So here’s the history you actually need to know to put this all into context. Along with actual primary source quotes, because we’re getting fucking acaDEMIC up in here, okay?
President James Monroe issued what is known as the “Monroe Doctrine” in an annual message to Congress on December 2nd, 1823. He didn’t call it that. It’s a couple paragraphs in a much larger speech that later became known as the Monroe Doctrine. In 1823, numerous Latin American countries had recently gained independence from their European colonizers. And Monroe was seeking to assert US dominance in the region. But that dominance was not, in 1823, really a thing. It was aspirational at best. As professors Britta and Russell Crandall wrote for Americas Quarterly back in 2023, quote “At the time [of the Monroe Doctrine], Great Britain was the preeminent global power, while the United States was little more than a ‘second-ring show in the high-strung Atlantic circus,’ in the words of historian Caitlin Fitz.”
Nevertheless, Monroe made bold proclamations about his hopes for establishing a strong delineation between the overreach of the powers in Europe into our own quote unquote backyard. In relevant part he said, quote:
“It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers.
…
We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers [in Europe] to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere, but with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
Mmkay, very bold, very assertive. But as the Crandalls wrote for Americas Quarterly, quote “it’s worth noting that at the time of its announcement, the Monroe Doctrine was more of a symbolic display than one showcasing military might. The U.S. lacked the ability to enforce Monroe’s stated goals. Despite the fierce reputation the doctrine would gain in future decades and centuries, the pronouncement did not prevent European moves violating Monroe’s warning—such as the British annexation, in 1833, of the Falkland Islands (which Argentina refers to as the Malvinas), Spain’s reassertion of colonial control in Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic) in 1861, or, most famously, Napoleon III’s bold gambit to establish a French puppet regime in Mexico during the U.S. Civil War. Until very late in the 19th century the United States was busy becoming the master of its own continental territory, focusing on its westward expansion to the Pacific Coast.”
So, despite the Trump proclamation characterizing the Monroe Doctrine by saying “With those mighty words, every nation knew that the United States of America was emerging as a superpower unlike anything the world had ever known—and that nothing could ever rival the strength, unity, and resolve of a freedom-loving people.” Well, that’s not actually true based on ensuing historical events. It is part of the mythmaking of America to say that the Monroe Doctrine at the time of its pronouncement was seen as this foreboding thing. No, Europe was like sick bro we’re gonna just keep doing what we’re doing.
It isn’t until 1904, when various European powers are trying to bully Venezuela into paying the debts it can’t pay by sending boats into Venezuelan waters that Theodore Roosevelt issues his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to assert that actually it is our job in America to step into the affairs of the rest of Latin America to protect ourselves. In his annual message to Congress on December 6, 1904, Theodore Roosevelt said, quote:
“It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.”
This is why I think Trumps quote unquote “corollary” is nothing new and doesn’t deserve the title. It’s just a restatement of Teddy Roosevelt’s corollary. Act “civilized” and we’ll play nice, but if you don’t, it’s our job to protect ourselves by unilateral intervention.
Okay but then there’s a piece of the puzzle a lot of media outlets are glossing over: Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in 1933. Back to the Crandalls who wrote quote “- President Franklin Roosevelt embraced consultation and cooperation over gunboats and U.S. marines with his Good Neighbor Policy, accepting the principle of non-intervention at the Montevideo Conference of 1933.
The creation of the Rio Pact in 1947 appeared to make the Monroe Doctrine multilateral, transferring the responsibility for defense from the United States to all 19 signatories. With the ensuing creation of the Organization of American States in 1948, Teddy Roosevelt’s pugilistic version of the Monroe Doctrine would often seem obsolete in ensuing years. The John F. Kennedy administration invoked the Rio Pact, not the Monroe Doctrine, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Similarly, President Johnson’s major policy speech outlining intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965 also omitted any reference to the Monroe Doctrine.” Now of course I don’t think anyone would argue that the Cuban Missile Crisis and our ensuing relationship with post-revolutionary Cuba would fall under what could be called a collaborative “Good Neighbor” policy, but that was at least the interpretation, at the time, of the Monroe Doctrine.
It wasn’t until the Cold War that the idea of heavy-handed unilateral military intervention into Latin America once again became the prevailing theory, especially in the increasing push against any perceived incursion of communism into the hemisphere. And so you have US intervention in Chile after the democratic election of leftist President Allende and into Nicaragua and into Panama and so many other countries either directly or indirectly, this latest operation in Venezuela is part of an exceptionally long and complex history of US intervention in the region, all under the guise of the Monroe Doctrine, a couple paragraphs in a speech that President James Monroe gave once in 1823. It’s not a written law. But it’s the sole thing that the Trump regime is pointing to to legitimize its actions over the weekend, and it knows because of history that’s all it really takes to justify taking whatever actions they want in Latin America. Which is why I’m making this a two-parter, because we haven’t touched on the actual word of the law, and what the law actually says when it comes to kidnapping a country’s leader and bringing them to the US to face “justice.” Because that’s also happened before. We’ll address that on Wednesday BUT I also wanted to touch on the oil.
A lot of commenters like to say it’s the oil. That’s the why. I’m sure there’ll be many people who don’t even watch this video all the way through who will be in my comment’s section saying no you’re overthinking it it’s just the oil. Let’s play a fun game, go ahead and try to find those comments and respond to their comment with a clown emoji so we can all point and laugh because they didn’t watch all the way through to the end. Because it actually doesn’t make sense that it would be about the oil. Not entirely, at least. There are two stories from Vox that lay this out well, I’ve linked them in the sources which are linked in the description as always. Venezuela’s oil is the type of crude oil that is hard to extract and it is hard to process. Despite having the largest confirmed oil reserves on the planet, there’s easier oil to extract elsewhere. On top of this, where past US invasions especially in the 21st century into the middle east HAVE been about gaining access to oil, the reality in the US now is very different than when George W Bush was president. We have lots and lots of oil. Too, much, in fact, if you’re a major oil executive whose paycheck relies on the price of oil. Oil prices are way down to the point where many are barely at their break-even point. Because there’s so much of it. Supply and demand. When supply goes up and demand stays the same or even gets lower as cheaper renewable energy is created, the price is going to tank, and that’s what’s happening right now. It doesn’t make sense for the US, a country producing a fuck ton of oil, to want Venezuela’s oil, or for oil companies to be vying to increase the global supply of oil. On top of that, the investment of time and money it would take to build up Venezuela’s infrastructure is not something most oil companies are interested in.
And it’s not about making Venezuela “pay back” US oil companies for some sort of wrongdoing, as Trump has repeatedly claimed, saying that we’ll start producing oil so that oil companies will get the money back and was stolen from them. That’s a complete fabrication of history. Here’s what really happened, in condensed version: Tons of foreign oil companies came into Venezuela in the early 20th century by invitation of the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez. In 1976, Venezuela decided to nationalize its oil industry by buying out foreign firms–a relatively uncontroversial move in which the Venezuelan government PAID those foreign oil companies. This became an issue in 1998 when Hugo Chavez took a more confrontational approach to renegotiate contracts that led to ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips pulling out of Venezuela and eventually suing the country for their lost investments. Lawsuits that the oil companies won, meaning they were compensated by court order for any loss incurred as a result of their picking up and leaving Venezuela. There is no money for those companies to get reimbursed for. The reimbursement has already happened. There is no money for them or the US or the Venezuelan people to make from Venezuelan oil, the world is already oversupplied with oil and adding more to the mix would only lower the price of oil and lead to losses for big oil companies. It’s not about the oil.
Here’s what it’s really about, in the end: power. The Monroe Doctrine started as a pie in the sky aspirational ideal from a fledgling country, strengthened by the Roosevelt Corollary and subsequent cold war intervention into Latin America, and is being continued by this administration, just in a much more out in the open way than past administrations, as a show of force. Who’s the biggest gorilla in the cage that is the western hemisphere. Who’s the alpha male. Through that show of dominance, administration after administration has been certain that America will be safer, that American business will prosper across the region, and that, ultimately, the rich will be made richer hey yup it’s that time again, that time in the program where we draw it all back to how the rich are fucking us all over. This may not be something the oil tycoons are vying for, but it sure makes the big guy Don Trump feel like a strong strong man. It sure keeps countries in Latin America under our thumb so our businesses, you know the ones that every major actor in government has strong ties to, can continue to exploit their resources, whether it’s Venezuelans training our AI chatbots for a few cents an hour or something else, keeping an entire resource-rich region and its people desperate is really beneficial for the American enterprise machine. For Donald Trump himself it is likely mostly an ego trip, but for the apparatus that holds him up, the people like Marco Rubio and others working behind the scenes on these policies, it’s about power and control and dominance, the benefits of which only a few people at the top will see. Tune in Wednesday for a breakdown of what’s to come in the criminal case against Nicolas Maduro and how we’ve seen this all before and how, once again, the law is being stretched and twisted by powerful people to gain more power. Love that for us!
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about Somali fraud in Minnesota.
