Trump wants to claim Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle. In November’s revision of the National Security Strategy, his aides announced a “‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” to prevent “hostile foreign” ownership of “key assets” and to ensure the “Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” (In the press conference, he jokingly referred to it as the “Don-roe Doctrine.”)
But Roosevelt was, by his own reckoning, a “pretty good imperialist,” whose chief foreign policy aim was the growth of the United States into a globe-spanning empire whose reach and landholdings would rival those of the European powers. Trump, on the other hand, has long claimed to disdain forever wars and nation building, and as president has generally sought to keep the world out, not govern it. But now he has announced an open-ended managerial occupation of Venezuela—“until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition” to a friendlier government—and seemed to imply that it could be done without “boots on the ground.” Even more fancifully, he stated that the entire operation would pay for itself with “money coming out of the ground”—that is, with the profits generated by handing control over Venezuela’s vast oil fields to ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other U.S.-based energy companies.
In this, he more resembles Teddy Roosevelt’s predecessor, William McKinley. A morally small man, personally indebted to businessmen who rescued him from bankruptcy after he’d made bad loans during an 1893 depression, McKinley stumbled into the 1898 war with Spain that resulted in the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay. (He was pushed in no small part by Teddy Roosevelt, then his assistant secretary of the Navy; reporting suggests Trump was similarly eased into the Venezuela operation by his far more ideological Secretary of State Marco Rubio.) McKinley did so on the promise that, as a pro-war senator said, war with Spain would be a boon to “every branch of industry and domestic commerce” and that he would not have to directly administer Cuba’s nonwhite, Spanish-speaking, Catholic, and Santería-practicing masses.
When he found himself facing a revolt by Filipino nationalists, incensed by the betrayal of U.S. forces who had come in the guise of liberators from Spanish rule, McKinley could only throw more troops and money at the problem, betraying the lack of preparation and foresight. He was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist outraged in part by American atrocities in the Philippines.