The United States Has Now Gone Full Villain

In March 1933, United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address in the dismal depths of the Great Depression. With the financial system near implosion, civic collapse loomed. Roosevelt famously set out to calm a terrified nation with his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” line.

But as critical as the domestic situation was, Roosevelt understood the US, and all other countries, needed to restore international trade while avoiding war. So, he included the following resonant observation:

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

This became known as FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” although the idea originated with his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s involvement is significant.

The Republicans of the 1920s had been isolationists with regard to Europe and much of the world, but in Latin America, they were enthusiastic imperialists. The US occupied Nicaragua between 1912 and 1933 in order to hold the land for a second cross-isthmus canal, an occupation which spawned a brutal six-year war with insurgents between 1927 and 1933. In Haiti, the story was similar. So, too, the Dominican Republic. There were also briefer invasions and occupations of Panama and Honduras.

American corporations—notably the United Fruit Company, which begat the term “banana republic”—loved this approach. So did corrupt elites in Latin American countries. Ordinary Latin Americans were not so enthusiastic. The leader of the insurgency in Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, became a folk hero across the whole region.

To Hoover’s credit, he recognized that these squalid wars and occupations were a foolish waste of resources that poisoned America’s reputation so badly they actually weakened American trade and security. So, he started a pullback. With the coming of the Depression and America fighting for its survival, in 1933, FDR embraced and extended Hoover’s work.

The US entered into a genuinely new era in its relationship with Latin America.

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In World War II, the US demonstrated why it is good to have neighbours who like you. Or at least don’t hate you.

Of course, the coming of the Cold War created a powerful new incentive for American meddling in Latin America, and there was plenty of that over the decades, but the old, naked imperialism never returned. America rationalized its interventions while insisting it remained a good neighbour. However small the fig leaves sometimes were, they at least offered an honorary nod to the sovereignty of Latin American nations. The naked imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained in the history books.

President Donald Trump can’t be bothered to rationalize.

Without offering so much as a coherent explanation for his actions, Trump bombed Venezuela, had its president and his wife kidnapped, and declared the US would “run” Venezuela until a government to Trump’s liking is installed. Nicolás Maduro and his wife will also be tried for trafficking cocaine, which wouldn’t qualify as a legal pretext for the invasion even if the courtroom were run by Judge Pam Bondi—but it looks even sillier given that, a mere month ago, Trump bestowed a full pardon on the wealthy and connected Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras convicted of industrial-scale cocaine trafficking. No, the war on drugs is not Trump’s thing. Money and power are.

Few things deliver money and power like oil, which is why, on many occasions, Trump publicly insisted that the dumbest thing the US did in Iraq—this is no small claim—was “not taking the oil.” (By the way, “taking the oil” would have been a crime under international law, but I think it’s already quite clear how much Trump cares about anything labelled “international” or “law,” much less international law.) Given this precedent, it’s a safe bet what lies in store for Venezuela, home of the largest oil reserves in the world.

Venezuela will be a bonanza for American oil companies, something Trump has already said, more or less. And we can be sure the industry will fulsomely express its appreciation to Trump, his sons, and the burgeoning Trump empire. On The Sopranos, they called that “kicking up.” The boss always gets a taste. As every wise guy knows, that’s rule number one.

For more than a year, I’ve been saying that Trump’s attack on the international order—notably his willingness to reward Russia with land in violation of a cornerstone principle of American foreign policy and international law—is demolishing what was built after the Second World War by America and her allies. We are sliding rapidly backward to the order that existed prior to 1914. The order that produced the First World War. And the Nazis. And the Second World War.

But with his invasion of Venezuela, Trump seems to be pushing the US back even further, to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when American imperialism was naked and any intervention could be justified on the grounds of extending the reach of business, perhaps flavoured with a little talk of advancing civilization to the benighted Brown peoples.

Or perhaps he is rolling back the calendar even further.

Prior to the Civil War, Southerners repeatedly hatched schemes to seize Mexico, Cuba, or some other sultry spot in order to add slave states to the Union. Even after the Civil War, then President Ulysses S. Grant pushed a scheme to absorb the Dominican Republic into the US so the new state could become a refuge for Black people fleeing the KKK and white supremacy in the South. Would some of the growing numbers of groypers, fascists, corporate monarchists, racist nuts, and general-purpose whack jobs in today’s GOP seriously contemplate adding a tropical star or two to the flag? I doubt it. They want to get rid of wetbacks, not add more. But Grant’s idea? Listen to far-right commentator Nick Fuentes. Read X. There would be plenty of takers.

I fully acknowledge that I am now in the territory of lunatic speculation. But cast your mind back to January 3, 2025. If I had said that, in fewer than 365 days after taking office, Trump would threaten to invade Panama and Greenland, launch a global trade war, bomb five countries, and invade South America—all while griping about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize—you would have thought I was completely nuts. Yet here we are.

Originally published as “When Good Neighbors Go Bad” by Dan Gardner (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.

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