In recent weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has raised the pressure he has been putting on Venezuela since earlier this year. In addition to the now months-long campaign of bombings targeting alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean—a campaign whose legal underpinnings are rejected by most experts and under growing congressional scrutiny—the administration has amassed naval forces in the region, declared the airspace over Venezuela closed and made threats to conduct ground operations.
One might look at these actions and see them as incongruous with Trump’s much-touted “America First” foreign policy. Specifically, it seems that he is on the verge of pursuing the very kind of “regime change” operation that he criticized previous administrations for undertaking. One could also point out that Trump’s criticism of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as an autocratic dictator seems inconsistent with his seeming admiration for other autocrats, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.
One would not be wrong in pointing to these apparent contradictions. But another way to understand Trump’s actions is that his America First approach is perfectly compatible—and even consistent—with a long-standing essential trait of U.S. foreign policy: control of the Western Hemisphere.
