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But first, here’s Leigh Ann with the latest on the Hill…

Now, the main event…

On January 3, on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. military carried out a secret, surgical strike to remove a foreign leader. No, this wasn’t last weekend’s early morning raid in Caracas in which U.S. special forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The year was 2020, and the leader was Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the country’s notorious Quds Force, who was sitting in a car near Baghdad when an American missile took him out.

At the time, the chattering classes in Washington freaked out: Surely, Trump was about to get the U.S. into another war in the Middle East, this one with a far more powerful and wily adversary than Saddam Hussein had ever been. But the escalatory spiral never materialized. Instead, four days later, the Iranian military fired a dozen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases housing American troops—and warned Iraqi officials that the attack was coming. There were no American deaths, although a few dozen troops reported traumatic brain injuries. And, despite the Ayatollah’s fury, that was that.

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Last June, Trump again launched a military strike against Iran, this time hitting the crown jewels of the regime—its nuclear facilities. Once again, the chattering classes were certain: Trump had just tripped the wire for war in the Middle East. And wouldn’t it be rich, they said, if the man who’d campaigned on stopping the forever wars wound up dragging the country into another one? Again, though, the Iranian regime responded with far more bark than bite. After warning Qatar that they would strike the American base there and giving Americans troops enough time to evacuate, the Iranians lobbed a few missiles at the Al Udeid Air Base. And that, once again, was that.

The pattern has repeated itself in smaller ways, too. Trump repeatedly hit Yemen last spring, with no apparent blowback. Ditto after he struck Islamic State positions in Syria and Nigeria last month.

Time and time again on the world stage, Trump has learned the same lessons he learned in New York real estate, while dealing with New York tabloids, and then enmeshed in the world of U.S. domestic politics: that intimidation works. That your opponents will wilt quickly if you throw the first punch—and threaten more. That might makes right. And that using American military power abroad doesn’t always lead to war. In fact, it rarely seems to, at least with Trump’s luck.

Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden largely shared the view of the Western foreign policy establishment that the rules-based international order had delivered unprecedented peace and prosperity across the world, particularly for the United States. But in Trump’s mind, there was a better deal to be had. For a man who thinks in zero-sum terms, there’s no such thing as a qualified victory, especially not in the technocratic, legalistic, tedious framework of multilateral diplomacy that just feels beta. (Or, as one MAGA personality recently called international law, “fake and gay.”)

The affinity for using American military force has, weirdly, thrown Trump into alignment with the same neoconservative camp that he trampled during his ascent to the White House. This cohort, which has praised Trump’s moves in both Venezuela and Iran, has long insisted that Democrats are constitutionally uncomfortable with American power and that they are too scared to use it. In their view, liberals overlearned the lessons of Iraq and, as a result, grew too prone to overthinking and overanalyzing—imagining consequences to military action that are far worse than reality merits. Recall, for example, Obama’s August 2013 Rose Garden stroll with Denis McDonough, which gave him the peace of mind not to enforce his own red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria. And how, when Trump made the opposite decision in 2017, exactly none of the Democrats’ nightmare scenarios came to pass.

Now, with Trump’s decapitation of the Maduro regime, the G.O.P.’s remaining neocons are trying to make sense of an ostensibly isolationist president exulting in the projection of military power into Venezuela, and issuing threats against Colombia, Cuba, and Denmark as well. Even some advocates of regime change are cautioning that Trump hasn’t thought this through, that he hasn’t considered the second- or third-order effects or planned for the day after.

To be sure, this isn’t exactly the regime change that traditional neocons like Marco Rubio might have imagined. President Maduro and his powerful wife are gone, but the rest of the Venezuelan government is still very much intact, led by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez. Opposition leader María Corina Machado has been sidelined by Trump on the grounds that “she doesn’t have the respect” within the country that she’d need to govern it. Rodríguez, for her part, spent the weekend vocally slamming Trump’s actions—inciting the president to threaten her with a fate worse than Maduro’s and “boots on the ground.” (He also kept insisting, over Rubio’s denials, that it’s actually the U.S. that’s “in charge” of Venezuela.)

Right on cue, Rodríguez changed her tune, saying on Sunday night that she wants a cooperative relationship with the U.S. Her rhetorical resistance cracked after less than 24 hours—no second-wave attack, no American boots on the ground, no forever war. The Trump doctrine, such as it is, seemed to have been vindicated again.

Trump’s zest for intervention would be—should be—the stuff of America First nightmares, at least in theory. According to an analysis by the Military Times, Trump has ordered at least 626 airstrikes in the past 12 months alone—and that doesn’t count this weekend’s rendition of Maduro. Biden, by comparison, ordered 555 airstrikes over four years.

And yet, the MAGA movement has faithfully gotten on board with every foreign military strike. What used to bill itself as a noninterventionist movement has deftly reformatted. Now, America First does not mean prioritizing domestic concerns over foreign ones. Instead, America First means “this is our hemisphere,” as right-wing influencer Benny Johnson wrote. “And Trump,” he continued, “just reminded everyone we run this joint.” Others dutifully chimed in. “I totally support turning other countries in our hemisphere into subordinate vassals of the United States,” tweeted MAGA podcaster Matt Walsh. “That’s the very definition of an America First foreign policy.” It’s a message the administration ran with this afternoon, tweeting out an image from the State Department account of Trump with the words “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE.”

This is what Trump has dubbed the Donroe Doctrine—a juiced-up version of the 19th century U.S. imperialist approach to the Western hemisphere. It’s the export version of MAGA’s muscular approach to domestic politics and culture: hyperaggressive, cartoonishly macho, relentlessly bullying. It means Cuba could be next, and, hell, maybe even Colombia. And Greenland, too—as Katie Miller, Stephen’s wife, tweeted and Trump re-threatened over the weekend.

You could point to dissenters like outgoing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who condemned the Venezuela operation as “exactly what many in MAGA thought they voted to end.” You could wonder, as she did, why Trump pardoned Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of “trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into America,” if the administration were really set on fighting “narcoterrorists.” You might even note J.D. Vance’s 2023 Wall Street Journal editorial crowing that “Trump’s best foreign policy” is “not starting any new wars.”

But pointing out hypocrisy in MAGA is a fool’s comfort. MAGA isn’t an ideology-first movement, and certainly not one built on consistency. It’s whatever Trump says it is. “MAGA was my idea. MAGA was nobody else’s idea,” Trump told Laura Ingraham in November. “I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” And arguably, technically, Trump hasn’t started any new wars. He’s launched targeted strikes without, so far, drawing America into new quagmires. Call it dumb luck, call it strategic brilliance, but so far it’s worked. And if Trump does it, it’s MAGA.

European officials were notably muted in public, if furious in private, over Trump’s brazen flaunting of the international order upon which their own security depends. E.U. foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas offered a typically needle-threading statement calling Maduro illegitimate while pleading that “the principles of international law and the U.N. Charter must be respected.”

China and Russia, meanwhile, were predictably apoplectic—with Beijing declaring that Maduro’s rendition “threaten[s] peace and security” in the region and the Kremlin calling the operation “an act of armed aggression” and vowing to stand with the “Bolivarian” government. The rage was understandable given that Venezuela was their ally and client, a supplier of cheap oil as well as their foothold in America’s backyard.

But in other ways, Trump’s kidnapping of a foreign leader is great news for Beijing and Moscow. Both regimes have long cynically amplified the Global South’s accusations that the U.S. dresses up its imperialist ambitions with the fig leaf of “values” and “democracy” (even as both regimes pursued imperialist aims in Ukraine and Taiwan). Now Trump has tossed away the pretense. After decades of Washington picking and choosing who gets to run which country, after fighting two wars with Iraq that America said were about democracy but everyone suspected were really about oil, a U.S. president effectively came out and said: Yes, it’s about the oil. For skeptics of Pax Americana, I’d venture to guess, this admission was almost refreshing.

Moreover, if this hemisphere belongs to Trump, surely Russia and China can claim dominion over their own backyards now, too. Not long after he first launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and his elites dreamed of a Yalta 2.0, where the big boys leading the three big superpowers (as Russia imagined them) would carve up the world into spheres of influence in which Russia, China, and the U.S. could do what they wanted, without interference or scolding. The idea seemed laughable then. But after this weekend, it looks like Trump, armed with the Donroe Doctrine, might have given them exactly that.

That’s all from me, friends. Don’t miss me on Colbert tonight—or wherever you watch the day after. I’ll see you back here next week. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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