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Excerpts from a well written piece in The Atlantic:

Trump’s ‘American Dominance’ May Leave Us With Nothing

By Anne Applebaum

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At his press conference on Saturday, Trump did not use the word democracy. He did not refer to international law. Instead, he presented a garbled version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a policy originally designed to keep foreign imperial powers out of the Americas, calling it something that sounded like the “Donroe Document”: “Under our new National Security Strategy,” he said, reading from prepared remarks, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Toward this end, he said the United States would “run” Venezuela, although he didn’t say who would actually be in charge. Viceroy Marco Rubio? Governor-General Pete Hegseth? Asked about María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Trump was dismissive. “She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect within the country,” he said.

Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, leads a movement whose presidential candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, received two-thirds of the vote in the 2024 election.

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For the moment, Trump isn’t interested in identifying the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

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Two days after the capture of Maduro, Trump already risks falling victim to his own propaganda, just like Putin. Venezuela, as one former U.S. ambassador to the country recently wrote, is “a failed state riddled with illegal armed groups and foreign terrorist organizations.” The regime has not been removed. The military and various paramilitaries are all still in place, and although some might cooperate with the Trump administration, others might not. With no U.S. troops in Venezuela, will Americans “run” Venezuela by issuing loud statements and threats? By ordering periodic military interventions? Perhaps the administration has made a deal with some members of the regime—that would explain why the American raid met so little opposition—but there is no guarantee that such a deal will produce the kinds of benefits Trump expects. Oil isn’t something that lies around on the ground to be picked up and taken home. It requires long-term investments, relationships, contracts. If the government of Venezuela is likely to fall or change at any moment, none of those will materialize.

But Trump’s error is even more fundamental. The division of the world into spheres of influence implies that smaller countries cannot influence events, and it’s a grave mistake to imagine Venezuelans won’t try. Many of them wanted an American intervention, are overjoyed that Maduro is gone, and no wonder: He and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, together turned the richest country in South America into the poorest, fortifying their ugly security state with guns and surveillance systems purchased from autocracies around the world.

But now that Maduro is gone, the people who fought for years for justice, freedom, and self-determination aren’t going to want to live in a Trump-backed dictatorship staffed with Maduro’s cronies.
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Most Americans still do want their country to stand for something other than greed, and most don’t want their expensive military to fight on behalf of Trump’s oil-industry donors. Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects.

If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.