\n<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON — <\/span>WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 President Donald Trump<\/a> hasn’t minced words about the larger message he’s trying to send the world with the U.S. military raid to capture Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a> and spirit the deposed Venezuelan leader and his wife to the United States to face federal drug trafficking charges<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerican dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump declared following Maduro’s capture, \u201cwill never be questioned again.\u201d<\/p>\n In the days since the audacious raid, Trump and his team have doubled down on the notion that the new focus on American preeminence in the hemisphere is here to stay. He also held up Maduro’s capture to make the case to neighbors to get in line or potentially face consequences. <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s rhetoric harkens back to the muscular talk of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when American presidents deployed the military for territorial and resource conquests, including to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s been periods, Vietnam and Iraq, which have evoked questions about a return to American imperialism, but the U.S. leaders\u2019 messages in those periods were cloaked in talk of democracy. The way Trump is talking about it is something we haven\u2019t seen in a very long time.\u201d said Edward Frantz, a historian at the University of Indianapolis.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the operation, Trump’s tough talk has been been directed at titular allies in Greenland<\/a> \u2014 where he renewed calls for the U.S. to take over the Danish territory for national security reasons \u2014 and Mexico. Trump says America’s southern neighbor needs to \u201cget their act together\u201d fighting drug cartels. <\/p>\n Trump has also warned that longtime adversary Cuba is \u201cgoing down\u201d<\/a> now that Maduro, who has provided deeply discounted oil to the economically isolated government in Havana, has been deposed. And the president has heightened anxiety with Venezuela’s neighbor, telling reporters that a military operation in Colombia \u2014 the epicenter of global cocaine production \u2014 “sounds good to me.”<\/p>\n The Republican president has also said his administration will \u201crun\u201d Venezuela<\/a> policy and threatened the country’s new leader, interim President Delcy Rodr\u00edguez,<\/a> with an outcome worse than Maduro’s if she does not \u201cdo what\u2019s right.\u201d He’s made plain that he expects Caracas to open its vast oil reserves to U.S. energy companies, further igniting speculation about American overreach.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure \u2014 the oil infrastructure \u2014 and start making money for the country,\u201d Trump said over the weekend.<\/p>\n The Venezuela incursion has split Latin America, with Trump\u2011aligned leaders mostly from the right applauding the ouster, and non\u2011aligned leaders condemning it on sovereignty grounds. It’s sharpened concerns that Trump might actually be serious about his desire to annex Greenland as well.<\/p>\n Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned Monday that Trump would mark the undoing<\/a> of the transatlantic military alliance, NATO, if he attempts to follow through on his assertion that the U.S. \u201cabsolutely\u201d needs to take over Greenland for national security reasons. The alliance, which includes the U.S. and Denmark, has been a linchpin of post-World War II security.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops,\u201d Frederiksen told Danish broadcaster TV2. <\/p>\n In the early part of the 20th century, American leaders repeatedly turned to the Monroe Doctrine,<\/a> a foundational U.S. foreign policy document authored by the nation’s fifth president, which had been aimed at opposing European meddling in the Western Hemisphere. <\/p>\n Now, Trump too is leaning on the doctrine to justify U.S. intervention in Venezuela and threaten action around the hemisphere in the name of protecting the safety and welfare of Americans.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump’s rhetoric conjures up images of Teddy Roosevelt and gunboat diplomacy. The rhetoric is a return to a pre-Great War era,\u201d Frantz said, referring to the 26th president’s intercessions in unstable Caribbean and Central American economies as well as his backing of Panama’s secession from Colombia in the name of the U.S. national interest.<\/p>\n Just weeks before the ouster of Maduro, Trump rolled out a long-awaited National Security Strategy<\/a> that had some disparate elements that seemed to be at odds with each other.<\/p>\n On one hand, Trump, who has long eschewed America’s role in foreign wars, asserted that the administration would have a \u201cpredisposition to non-interventionism.\u201d But the strategy document also made clear that the administration would push \u201cto restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.\u201d<\/p>\n With the ouster of Maduro, the administration has clearly doubled down on the latter.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the Western Hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio<\/a> said in an appearance on NBC’s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d on Sunday. “This is where we live \u2014 and we\u2019re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors and rivals of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n The capture of Maduro and Trump’s rhetoric could certainly be a level-setting moment for global leaders as they consider what may lay ahead in the final three years of Trump’s second term.<\/p>\n