The Trump Doctrine: If We Don't Like Ya We'll Kill Ya

John Mearsheimer, speaking with Danny Davis, explains it—not that it needs much explaining. Monroe must be rotating in his grave. The Monroe doctrine was about keeping the Great Powers of the day out, not about allowing the US to act like a Great Power at the expense of its neighbors.

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DD: The last thing I want to talk about--because it’s very much in line with something you mentioned a second ago about the morality and the the utility of our foreign policy--is what’s happening down around Venezuela at the moment, because by all accounts it it seems we just want to get rid of Maduro. We want a regime change war and we’ll get it. In fact, I think the latest offer is Maduro either voluntarily walks away, he’s assassinated, or he’s captured. And we’re saying that out loud in public. That doesn’t seem to follow international law as far as I’m aware. What do you say?

JM: Oh, there’s no question about that. But just to talk about the morality of our foreign policy, the United States is blowing boats out of the water and killing people who we don’t even know. We don’t even know who they are or what they’re doing. Supposedly they’re narco terrorists who are bringing drugs to the United States or terrorists to the United States. But there’s no evidence that that’s true. And, as we know, the US Navy has the capability to stop these ships, board them, and find out exactly who is on board and what those people are doing. You would think that the United States would do that before it just blew those ships, those boats, out of the water and killed all the people who were on the boats.

DD: What does this do to our--I don’t even say credibility--but to our interaction with other countries in the region, in our own hemisphere here, when you have the president of the United States--when asked about that issue--and Trump just says, ‘Yeah, I don’t wanna mess with that. I don’t wanna worry about a declaration of war. We’re just gonna kill ‘em.’ But is there any justification, internationally or otherwise, even domestically, to just summarily execute people because you suspect them of running drugs?

JM: No! He’s the assassin in chief. Period. He just thinks he has a right to kill anybody who he deems an enemy of the United States. He doesn’t need any evidence to support that decision. He doesn’t need to get approval from Congress. He is the assassin chief and he just does what he wants.

And you have the same situation with regard to the Maduro government. He has just decided that we have to get rid of Maduro and he’s going to go in there and figure out some clever way to do that. And, as you know, Danny, the United States has a rich history of behaving this way in the Western Hemisphere. ... And I think virtually all of our neighbors south of the border fully understand that the United States is a ruthless country when it comes to running the Western Hemisphere, and they better be very careful that they don’t anger the United States.

DD: Do you ever see a scenario in the future where all of these things building up--going back to the ‘ 50s, ‘60s, maybe even before that--can come back to haunt us?

JM: Well, with regard to the western hemisphere, we are so powerful and so secure that we can behave in careless and ruthless ways. And, by the way, during the unipolar moment--you know, from roughly 1992 up to about 2017, when we were the only great power on the planet and were remarkably powerful relative to everybody else and remarkably secure back here in the western hemisphere--we were able to behave in very cavalier and careless ways. We got in the habit of acting that way and it’s carried over now into this multipolar world. But the United States--despite all the talk about how dangerous the world is and how vulnerable we are to this threat and that threat--the United States is the most secure great power in the history of the world. We’re remarkably powerful. And if you look at our geographical location, it just doesn’t get any better. You have Canada to the north, Mexico to the south, fish to the east, and fish to the west. I mean, this is the ideal strategic situation, and it allows us to just do all these foolish things that would get other countries into deep trouble, but don’t get us into much trouble. And someone like President Trump, he understands this. He understands how powerful we are. He understands what all the levers of power are and he understands he can do pretty much everything and get away with it.