The policy is turning the world from a rules-based order to a strength-based one. January’s intervention in Venezuela may have seemed like a great success for the Trump Corollary, but it was actually a self-defeating gamble—physically controlling Venezuela in a short time but damaging U.S. soft power, its alliance system and its global strategic interests in the long run.
The Trump Doctrine, Economist Jan 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump formally put forth the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in December—on the 202nd anniversary of the original Monroe Doctrine. He dubbed it the “Donroe Doctrine.” Two days later the Trump Corollary appeared in the White House’s National Security Strategy. Fifty days later, the U.S. Department of War published its National Defense Strategy to announce that the department will implement the doctrine to reshape U.S. military dominance in the Western Hemisphere—illustrating that the Trump Corollary will be the fundamental guide in U.S. politics, economy, military and diplomacy in coming years.
James Monroe to Theodore Roosevelt
U.S. President James Monroe put forward his Monroe Doctrine in his State of the Union address in 1823, setting forth three tenets: noncolonization, nonintervention and separate American spheres, it forbade European powers from colonizing the Americas, promised that the United States would not intervene in Europe and called the Western Hemisphere the exclusive domain of the United States, thus laying down the fundamental doctrine for future U.S. hegemony.
Later, in 1904, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt put forth the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the United States has the right to police any country with incompetent government. This completely subverted the Monroe Doctrine’s tenet of nonintervention and took it from a defensive declaration to an instrument of offensive hegemony. The Roosevelt Corollary upgraded the Monroe Doctrine to a dual hegemony mechanism of “exclusion plus intervention” based upon civilizational hierarchy theory and provided the U.S. with a legalism to justify intervention in Latin American affairs.
The Trump Corollary
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is defined thus: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States. We also want a hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels and other transnational criminal organizations. And we want a hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and one in which foreign states support critical supply chains. Finally, we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.
There are three pillars:
Pillar 1, expands intervention fields. The Trump Corollary lowers the intervention threshold from “European new colony” and “incompetent government” to “any power threatening the Western Hemisphere’s stability,” which covers left-wing forces, foreign investment and even academic cooperation, and regards China’s infrastructure construction projects as potential threats.
Pillar 2 integrates the means of intervention. The Trump Corollary establishes an integrated intervention system including economic coercion, information stipulation, network attack, proxy subversion and precision decapitation, creating a precedent of domestic law overriding international law by decorating a power replacement as “anti-terrorist law enforcement.”
Pillar 3 recalibrates intervention goals. The Trump Corollary upgrades “control of government” to “takeover and governance,” directly seizing the resources and revenue of a sovereign country and hollowing out its sovereignty. The Trump Corollary is supported by U.S. strategic circles and the defense industry and is institutionalized by the NSS and NDS, finalizing the 200-year evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from a weak country’s defensive declaration to a power intervention instrument and hegemony weapon driven by personal will.
Operation Absolute Resolve, which took place on Jan, 3, was the first application of the Trump Corollary involving a real attack Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were captured and brought to the U.S. for interrogation. The United States Department of Justice accused Maduro of heading a transnational drug and terrorist organization by citing the USA Patriot Act and decorating the invasion and kidnapping as domestic law enforcement. At the same time, the Trump Administration supported an interim Venezuelan government, took all the revenue of Petroleos de Venezuela and nominated Venezuelan Central Bank officials, turning Venezuela into a mandated territory of resources without any intention to restore its constitutional order.
The behavior was strongly condemned by the international community globally and by some Latin American countries, but it was supported by conservatives at home, showing that under the Trump Corollary sovereign borders are no longer a legal shield that cannot be violated.
Destruction of international order
The Trump Corollary destroys the international order in three dimensions:
First, it hollows out the principle of national sovereignty. The traditional international law system is based upon the principle that “national sovereignty is inviolable,” but the Trump Corollary degrades national sovereignty to conditional rights that can be evaluated by the United States and accuses a sovereign nation’s elected president of leading a transnational drug and terrorist organization. This creates a precedent under which domestic law overrides international law.
Second, it paralyzes the international legal system. The International Court of Justice held a hearing to judge whether the U.S. blockade of the Panama Canal constituted an illegal blockade of international navigation in May, but the U.S. refused to show up in court and only submitted an informal memorandum asserting that “the canal is an American asset and its use is not subject to international law,” which indicates that the U.S. is turning from a rule participant to a rule breaker.
Third, it collapses international trust. The impact of the Trump Corollary has gone beyond geopolitics and filtered into economic and financial fields. Enterprises across the world began to reassess the political risks they might face.
In March 2026, Germany’s Siemens announced the suspension of all cooperation programs with Latin American governments because “it is unpredictable when the U.S. will name a legal government a terrorist organization,” Swiss Bank closed all accounts related to the interim Venezuelan government because the sanctions list of the U.S. Treasury Department could be expanded to any entity of the interim Venezuelan government at any time.
All these demonstrate that the Trump Corollary is turning the world from a rule-based one to a strength-based one. Operation Absolute Resolve may have seemed like a great success for the Trump Corollary, but it was actually a self-defeating gamble—physically controlling Venezuela in a short time but damaging U.S. soft power, its alliance system and its global strategic interests in the long run.
The only way out for the Trump corollary is to pivot from a unipolar hegemony dominated by the United States to an equal partnership of multipolar governance—in other words, from forced control to willing cooperation, and from zero-sum competition to win-win cooperation and coexistence.
