Opinion: Time for Trump to Invoke the Monroe Doctrine and Liberate Venezuela

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

President Trump and the modern populist conservative movement have campaigned on ending the forever wars, and are proud that they’ve started no new conflicts (so far, anyway) during either Trump term.

But we are now talking openly about the possibility of some form of action in Venezuela, and the question arises: is this consistent, or would this be a betrayal?

To be fair, in politics, there are always surprises. Sometimes an administration encounters problems that were unexpected, enemies that were inactive but suddenly become active, especially in foreign policy where so much is out of our control.

Venezuela is an interesting case.

On the one hand, it’s a foreign country, a sovereign nation in another continent. We could arguably say it’s none of our business what goes on there, and wash our hands of it.

On the other hand, Venezuela is in the New World, the Western Hemisphere, the arena over which the United States announced its supremacy and leadership two centuries ago through the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine. If we thought it necessary to act, this is the hemisphere where it would be most in keeping with MAGA to do so.

Venezuela once had among the highest standards of living in Latin America. As recently as 45 years ago, in 1980, it was the fourth strongest economy south of the United States; today it ranks ninth.

Socialism did that.

But that alone isn’t a justification for military action and political involvement on our part; we can’t threaten military action against every country with bad policies; we’d be at war, all the time, with practically everybody.

But Venezuela is a special case. Venezuela was taken over by a communist dictator, Hugo Chavez, who governed with policies illegal under Venezuelan law. When he finally died, his successor, Nicolas Maduro, proved to be an even more authoritarian Marxist-Stalinist than Chavez. And while Maduro has “held” elections, he has not abided by them, refusing to acknowledge his opponents’ victories, and refusing to relinquish power accordingly.

Venezuela was once an ally, a friend among the nations, from the American perspective, but today it is an enemy, under the iron fist of another Mao, another Castro. The people of Venezuela are suffering; they need a hero to restore their independence, their self-respect, their economic opportunity. That hero could be the United States.

But still, we don’t believe in starting military action if it’s avoidable; we Americans – in the age of Donald Trump, anyway – are peacemakers. We only go to war if it is necessary.

So now we must look directly at what the Venezuela of Chavez and Maduro is doing to us, specifically. What affronts has it committed toward the United States?

Venezuela – under Chavez and Maduro – has engaged in the practice of emptying the prisons and sending robbers, rapists, and killers to the United States. As we feel sorry for the good people of Venezuela, we want to welcome their refugees, but Maduro is hardly going to allow his best people to come here; he sends his worst instead.

During the Biden-Harris regime alone, it’s estimated that there were at least a million Venezuelans among the tens of millions of legal and illegal (mostly illegal) arrivals crossing our southern border. When looking back on those four disastrous years, the officially counted numbers from Venezuela are high for a single country.

And who are these immigrants, migrants, refugees and others? They are a mix of course, including willing workers, honorable people looking for a fresh start, criminals, and welfare-seekers. What’s the percentage breakdown? No way to tell, exactly, but the crime stats tell us a lot.

Tren de Aragua is the best known of the Venezuelan-based drug gangs, a vicious crowd of killers who take over neighborhoods, apartment complexes, and other drug territories across the United States, operating heavily in at least sixteen US states.

But perhaps more shocking is the joint activity of Venezuelan drug gangs and Islamofascist terror networks like Al Qaeda and ISIS, undermining western nations across Europe, Africa, and North America with drugs while supporting the geographical growth of these islamist termites.

We may be torn, at first, upon learning that a foreign country is sending in drugs to meet American demand. We are tempted to take the libertarian view, that if someone chooses to ruin his life by dependency on cocaine or other such poisons, that’s his choice, and not the business of our government to waste our tax dollars and risk our lives trying to restrict.

An understandable position. But there’s more to it than that.

The drug dealer doesn’t just sell drugs to happy, willing customers with money. The drug dealer is a pusher, who gets people addicted and then makes sure they pay the bill, by whatever it takes. They use their drug debts to cause robberies, to recruit new gang members, to enslave women and girls in the sex trade.

The drug trade isn’t like the neighborhood drunk who spends his Social Security or welfare check at a bar; the drug trade is a magnet that pulls everyone in its orbit into a network of almost inescapable crime, poverty, depravity, and destruction.

So we find ourselves asking the question, is it worth it to take military action to remove Maduro from power, and to install the real winners of the 2024 election? Is it worth American blood and treasure to restore honest governance to our neighbor?

We must think of what Maduro and his government have done to not only their own country but to others as well, to their neighbors in Latin America, to Europe and Africa, and to us in the United States.

The status quo means that Venezuela continues to order the massive crime wave of Maduro’s foot soldiers across dozens of countries including the United States. The status quo means that people will continue to flee Venezuela and seek safety in the United States – it’s harder now that we’re watching our border again, but they will still try.

The status quo means that we continue to spend countless billions of dollars on the criminal justice system and the imprisonment of these Venezuelan criminals. The status quo means that we continue to spend countless billions of dollars on the welfare benefits, the costs to our healthcare system, our transportation system, our housing stock and school systems. Legal or illegal, the indigents will remain a massive, permanent financial drain on our cities and states, even if our federal government succeeds in tightening its belt and shutting off most federal benefits.

In the end, the status quo means more of our neighborhoods being taken over by Maduro’s exports, more of our hospital emergency rooms treating the victims of their violence, more of our schools being robbed of their academic potential because this tower of babel system doesn’t allow anyone to learn.

Overthrowing the increasingly isolated Maduro, it turns out, only seems expensive and risky if you don’t consider the cost and risk of leaving him alone.

There are times when the doctor has to excise a cancerous tumor to save a human life, and when we consider how much damage the Maduro regime is doing in the community of nations, including our own, it may well be that the time has come for the United States to invoke the Monroe Doctrine, and, with the blessing of Divine Providence, set that once-proud nation free from the Chavistas, once and for all.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo