by Sam Sifton

January 07, 2026

from NYTimes Website

Article also HERE

In Caracas, Venezuela, on Monday.

Credit: The New York Times
 

We ask where America's

new foreign policy

might take us

- and the world...

What are the larger lessons of the U.S. raid on Venezuela last weekend to oust Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president?

Vice President JD Vance offered his answer on Saturday:

Any nation that crosses the United States and defies its wishes does so at its own peril.

 

President Trump, he said,

"was very clear throughout this process: The drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States."

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, had a more epigrammatic take on Maduro:

"He effed around and he found out."

But two of my colleagues wrote recently about another takeaway that bears watching:

the notion that a powerful nation has the right - or at least the ability - to command affairs in nearby, less powerful nations.

It is the principle that stands behind the "Donroe Doctrine," a Trumpian rebooting of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which staked U.S. claims over the Western Hemisphere.

On Monday night, Stephen Miller, a top Trump policy adviser, gave the rawest expression of the idea in an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN.

"We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power," he said.

 

"These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time."

Territoriality

In the Eastern Hemisphere, China has for years made roughly the same argument about Taiwan, as David Pierson reported yesterday.

"China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's just a fact," the foreign minister told Southeast Asian officials in 2010.

Sounds familiar...!

Since then, China has tightened its grip on Taiwan by punishing nations that support it and by working to isolate it.

Barely more than a week ago, Beijing shot rockets all around its coastline, a warning that the Chinese military would make it difficult for any outside force to come to the island's defense in a conflict there.

The I-can-do-what-I-want prerogative, of course, also applies to President Vladimir Putin's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine (twice).

Sovereign power is an argument Putin could someday use in other parts of the former Soviet Union, like the South Caucasus and Central Asia, which the Kremlin thinks of as within its sphere of influence, Anton Troianovski reports.

"If we have the right to be aggressive in our own backyard," a first-term Trump administration official told Anton, "why can't they?"

Future histories

What could happen if this principle governed more of world affairs, as it did in centuries past?

It would certainly buttress the Trump administration's desire to,

take control of Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark, to say nothing of its designs on Canada.

 

Landlocked Ethiopia could assert a right to its own Red Sea port - in neighboring Eritrea.

 

And Rwanda could annex the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Could Serbia take back Kosovo or Sudan take back South Sudan?

 

Could Israelis declare that they will run Gaza again in perpetuity?

 

Could any powerful nation launch a mission into Jerusalem and execute an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Israel's prime minister?

 

Could Australia grab all of Antarctica...?

Anton put it bluntly...

Trump's assault on Venezuela, he wrote,

"has ushered in new uncertainty around the globe, with allies and adversaries alike scrambling to reckon with a superpower ready to use force in the service of a transactional, might-makes-right foreign policy."