Jorge Majfud
Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She is the author of several books, including Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, and Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice. We spoke shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered military action against Venezuela to seize its president, Nicolás Maduro, along with First Lady Cilia Flores. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: In a January 3 press explaining the U.S. attack on Venezuela’s capital of Caracas and the seizure of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump cited the Monroe Doctrine. What is that exactly?
Aviva Chomsky: The Monroe Doctrine is from 1823, and we should emphasize that it wasn’t any kind of treaty or law; it was just a statement by President [James Monroe]. We’re used to those, right? Articulating an aspirational policy that, in the context of 1823, was a policy proclaiming that the United States would not allow foreign—that meant European—influence and interventions in the Americas. So it was directed toward our partners on the other side of the Atlantic, primarily Britain and France, which were the big imperial threats to Latin American independence at the time.
It was greeted with mixed feelings by Latin American independence leaders, for whom clearly the struggle was against Spain, but they were also wary of U.S. domination. So they were looking in both directions. I should also say that, certainly not all of the independence fighters and movements, but the dominant political classes that emerged out of the independence struggles in Latin America also had a great affection for both the racial hierarchies of Spanish colonialism and the emerging global, racial, economic hierarchies led by Britain and the United States. Their attitude toward the United States and Britain was always a combination of, “We don’t want you undermining us, but you are our model, and we want to be like you and have good relations with you.” So there were open invitations to U.S. investment on the part of these elites.
Now, of course, Latin American societies are extremely divided socioeconomically and racially, and Latin America continues to be, I believe, the most economically unequal region on the planet—not the poorest but the most economically unequal. The divide between the elites and the popular classes in Latin America is very, very deep. And while they may share a certain kind of anti-imperialism, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, it became increasingly clear that the imperial threat was the United States. Even the elite classes were somewhat divided between their being very enamored with the U.S. model—and wanting U.S. investment and U.S. connections, and to send their children to the United States to be educated—and a kind of populist, nationalist reaction against U.S. domination. So the Monroe Doctrine has always had a mixed reception in Latin America.
Q: The interesting thing is that the Monroe Doctrine was promoted less than fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was put forward in what would become the United States. Is there a contradiction with this new country casting off an imperial colonizer and then almost immediately claiming rights to make determinations about a whole group of other countries?
Chomsky: The American Revolution was basically led by slaveholders and land speculators, and they had a lot of nice things to say about rights of man and stuff, but they were clearly founding a white man’s expansionist country. It was an imperial country from the very first days. The Declaration of Independence refers to “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” One of the sparks for the Revolution was actually British treaty making and the Proclamation of 1763, which limited settler expansion, along with immigration and naturalization. So [in terms of] the idea of being a white settler state, Britain was putting some limits on settler expansion. One of the goals of the American Revolution was to free up settler expansion.
Louis Dalrymple
Also, [twenty years before the Monroe Doctrine] was the Louisiana Purchase. We always hear that the United States purchased it from France, but of course France had very little presence in the entire region that it so-called sold to the United States, which was Native land. From the moment of independence, the United States embarked on more than a century of permanent and expansionist warfare against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Louisiana Purchase was not the end of declaring U.S. sovereignty in that territory; it was the first step, followed by warfare and conquest to establish U.S. control of that territory.
The same thing is true of the Mexican-American War [1846-1848]. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 created an agreement between the United States and Mexico, but it was the beginning of the Indian wars in what we call the American West to actually impose U.S. domination over the peoples who lived there.
So the United States as an imperial, expansionist power does not begin in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and the United States taking islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean; it is absolute continuity from the conquest of Native lands that begins with the first arrival of the British.
We should also point out that in contrast to most anti-colonial independence struggles, the U.S. movement for independence was carried out by the colonizers, not the colonized. The people who were colonized were the forcibly transported Africans and the Native Americans; they were not the protagonists or the victors of the struggle for independence in the United States. It was the British colonizers who said, “We want to split with the government of Britain.” It was not an anti-colonial war in any way if you put it in the context of the anti-colonial wars that followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Haitian Revolution is the perfect counterexample—the second American revolution, or the first actual American anti-colonial war revolution that was carried out by the colonized people. The counterparts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were kicked out of Haiti. It was an anti-colonial war that got rid of the colonizers instead of the one in the United States that empowered the colonizers.
Q: In 1904, the “Roosevelt Corollary” was added to the Monroe Doctrine, which changed the focus to what is often called “Big Stick” diplomacy.
Chomsky: The Roosevelt Corollary revised [the Monroe Doctrine] to say that the real threat wasn’t European intervention, although the United States was still invoking the Monroe Doctrine and saying, “Well, we can’t allow a Latin American country to be indebted to a European country; we can’t let them accept European loans because then that could be a threat to us in terms of European power in the continent.” What the Roosevelt Corollary did was to say that Latin American governments themselves, and especially Latin American people themselves, are the real threat to U.S. dominance. So Latin American governments—specifically Central America and the Caribbean—must protect our investments. And if they don’t, if they allow popular mobilization that threatens or challenges our investments, or if a Latin American government itself were to threaten or challenge our property in their country, then we must exercise an international police power to make sure that doesn’t happen.
It’s called the “Big Stick,” but it’s also called “dollar diplomacy,” because the sword follows the dollar. We take over the economies; we take over the banking systems. We have to run these things to protect our investments, and we’re basically hearing this from the Trump Administration right now: Latin America is a place for the United States to make money. And if that is threatened in any way, we are going to [act]. Latin American sovereignty doesn’t mean anything; the only thing that means something is U.S. investors in Latin America, and we can exercise international police power there to protect our investments. We can take over the customs collection; we can depose governments at will; we can occupy countries. And this leads to the long occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, among others, in the first half of the twentieth century.
In the post-World War II period, the Monroe Doctrine is really revived in the Cold War context. So we have both of these things. One, there’s this foreign threat that is challenging our domination in Latin America, which in the Cold War period was clearly communism. These countries can’t have alliances with the Soviet Union; they can’t allow leftist organizing in their countries. So the two become overlapped as we see in the United States’ responses to the [1944-1954] Guatemalan Revolution, the [1953-1959] Cuban Revolution, and the [1970] election of Salvador Allende in Chile.
Q: Today, we have Donald Trump doing a couple of things. One is significantly othering the people of Venezuela by presenting them as criminals, drug dealers, and dangerous gang members. Secondly, this very strong and rapid military response. And we’ve heard not only Trump but also his acolytes, like Marco Rubio in a January 7 press conference, talking about the United States as a superpower. Then White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN that “we are going to conduct ourselves” like one. So is this new “Donroe Doctrine,” as the New York Post and the President himself are calling it, really about saying, “The gloves are off; we’re going to own our imperialism and our superpower nature”?
Chomsky: I’ve spent a lot of time trying to disentangle what’s new and different and what’s more of the same in what we’re seeing now. I think Trump is building on this black-and-white thinking that there are good guys and bad guys, and this is really deeply embedded in U.S. culture and in the narratives of both political parties. Every political leader says, “We’re going to go after the bad guys because we know who they are, and we can do anything we want to them.” So that, I feel, is not really new, and certainly the glorification of the military and military action on the part of the United States is nothing new, and has been done equally by Democrats and Republicans. It is just built into our culture: our parades and celebrations, and our patriotic music. The glorification of war is deeply embedded in us. I really appreciate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s work on the settler colonial aspects of this, and how we keep fighting the Indian wars over and over.
So what is new about what’s going on under Trump? It’s not the glorification of violence—that’s not new—the self-congratulatory “we got rid of a bad guy, the gangs, the drug wars.” Just go back to Bill Clinton and the black-and-white thinking that we are the international good guys. It was the Roosevelt Corollary that used this language that we have to exercise international police power, so that’s not new. But, of course, it is taking new incarnations. How many countries has Trump bombed in one year? Is it seven? And most of it either is completely unreported or just quickly forgotten. The imperial arrogance is not new. The popular support for imperial arrogance—that’s not new, either. So what is new? I don’t know; what do you think?