Speaking Loudly, Carrying a Big Aircraft Carrier: The Donroe Doctrine and The Return of Naked Imperialism

Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos

1. Chronicle of an Announced Attack

THE UNITED STATES’ military intervention against Venezuela, culminating in Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping on January 3, 2026, has been in preparation for a long time. In an article published in February 2019, entitled “Donald Trump, the End of Globalism, and the Crisis in Venezuela,”(1) I argued that the then-president revealed with unprecedented candor the true objectives of U.S. imperialism: not the defense of democracy or human rights, nor the (selective) respect for international treaties based on liberal ideology, but control over resources with strategic and economic value. Already at that time, Trump openly criticized his predecessors for not having “taken the oil” from Venezuela or Iraq, or the rare minerals from Afghanistan, making explicit a predatory logic that liberal discourse traditionally concealed.

During his first term, Trump considered imposing tributes to support the American Empire, demanding that allies provide more financial resources to fund American bases in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Bob Woodward, in his book Fear, recounts that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (former CEO of Exxon-Mobil) disagreed with Trump’s demand that countries pay for American military bases in what Trump called ‘protectorates,’ arguing it would convert the U.S. military into a mercenary force.(2) Woodward also reports that Trump insisted his cabinet plan the seizure of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth (rare earths) to pay for the war costs, repeatedly asking: “Why aren´t we there taking them?” Tillerson argued that such mineral exploitation would be a gift to anti-American extremists worldwide.(3) There are no such advisors left in Trump’s second term.

In January 2013, Trump tweeted: “I still can’t believe we left Iraq without the oil.”(4) In a debate with Hillary Clinton in September 2016, he proposed returning to the 19th Century: “You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor… But I always said: Take the oil.”(5)

As president, Trump insisted twice with the Iraqi president to cede more oil as reparation for the costs of war. His former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster reportedly rebuked him the second time: “It’s bad for America’s reputation, it’ll spook allies, it scares everybody, and it makes us look like… criminals and thieves.”(6) In January 2019, Vice President Mike Pence stated that Trump “is not a fan” of foreign interventions, except that “he’s long understood that the United States has a special responsibility to support and nurture democracy and freedom in this hemisphere.”(7)

This was a presage of the Donroe Doctrine. Also in January 2019, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton stated: “We’re in conversation with major American companies… Venezuela is one of the three countries I called the ‘Troika of Tyranny’ (along with Nicaragua and Cuba)… It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”(8)

In April 2025, at the “IV Dilemmas of Humanity: Perspectives for Social Transformation” meeting, organized by the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, the Landless Workers’ Movement, and the International Peoples’ Assembly in São Paulo, I argued that Trump would choose Venezuela as his first military target in the so-called Western Hemisphere, in what would be the first U.S. direct military intervention in South America in history. The reasoning was simple: attacks on Canada or Greenland would be incomparably riskier and diplomatically indefensible; Venezuela, on the other hand, while owning vast oil reserves and critical minerals for technological competition with China, offered justifications palatable to the MAGA movement’s political base — the supposed threats of Venezuelan immigration and drug trafficking instead of being another costly nation-building forever war — that would keep this base rallying around the flag even though inflation increased due to his tariff war.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) published by the Trump administration on December 4, 2025, formalized this hemispheric strategy, centered on “strengthening critical supply chains… (to) reduce dependencies and increase American economic resilience… while making it harder for non-Hemispheric competitors to increase their influence in the region.”(9) This document enshrines the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, or, more sarcastically, the “Donroe Doctrine”: an explicitly transactional and coercive version of pan-Americanism that subordinates all of Latin America to the security and capital-accumulation imperatives of the United States.

Moving to action, the military intervention in Venezuela does not represent a defense of democracy or a humanitarian intervention: it is officially the end of the “globalism” that tied U.S. military power to the liberal ideology of national sovereignty in the UN Charter, as I warned was Trump’s objective back in 2019. It is the end of the American Century imagined for the world by Woodrow Wilson during World War I and rehearsed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in World War II. It represents the securitization of strategic resources in the context of Sino-American rivalry and, eventually, the attempt to restructure global production chains along geopolitical lines. This is a dangerous precedent that threatens sovereignty throughout the region, beginning with the new “Troika,” the new dominoes to be toppled by the American empire: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

2. The Geoeconomic Logic of the Choice of Venezuela as First Target of the Donroe Doctrine

Reported proven oil reserves for Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Venezuela was chosen as the first military target not by chance, but because it offered the ideal convergence of geoeconomic opportunity and political viability. The country holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves(10) and vast deposits of critical minerals essential to clean energy technologies and defense.

Trump repeatedly declared the importance of these resources, including in the interview where he stated that, after Maduro’s kidnapping, he would “run the country.” He added:

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money… We’re in the oil business… We’re going to have a presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil… We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”(11)

This was not a slip of the tongue. Weeks before Maduro’s ouster, Trump had already hinted to American oil executives that major changes were coming in Venezuela, telling them: “Get ready.”(12) The coordination between military action and corporate interests couldn’t be clearer.

This candor about material objectives connects directly to the broader friendshoring or nearshoring strategy articulated in the 2025 National Security Strategy. The document does not limit itself to proposing diversification away from Chinese production chains; at least rhetorically, it aims to systematically restructure global value networks according to geopolitical criteria. Thus, the dual objective regarding Latin America is explicit: first, to guarantee U.S. control over critical mineral resources (oil, lithium, copper, rare earths) and strategic infrastructure (ports, telecommunications networks, energy systems); second, to integrate Latin American economies into manufacturing chains completely insulated from Chinese participation or influence.

María Corina Machado’s offer in an interview with Donald Trump Jr. perfectly illustrates the mineral question: in exchange for support for regime change that would put her group in power, she offered to grant $1.7 trillion in Venezuelan assets to U.S. corporations.(13) The arrangement does not differ substantively from the mineral concessions and land grabs that characterized classic imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that led to two World Wars. However, the occupation aimed at regime change sought by the Venezuelan opposition never materialized. Instead, Machado was unceremoniously sidelined by Trump after Maduro’s kidnapping and will keep on being at least as long as the Chavista administration does, as was apparently promised in the oil bargain.

On the supply chain question, this goes beyond traditional concerns with resource extraction to encompass the reorganization of regional production systems. In labor-intensive, energy-intensive, and cheap-input sectors where onshoring reindustrialization in the United States is not viable, Washington will propose promoting Latin American manufacturing links in strategically sensitive chains — semiconductors, batteries, pharmaceuticals, advanced materials — but only within governance structures that exclude Chinese investment, technology, or market access. This involves an attempt at geopolitical compartmentalization of production networks, creating parallel supply chains organized by strategic allegiance. Only thus can one understand the Mexican government’s decision to implement, on January 1, 2026, tariffs on imports of various products originating in China, Brazil, and other countries without trade agreements with Mexico.(14)

The symbolic dimension of choosing to attack Venezuela also deserves attention. The MAGA narrative requires enemies that threaten the “traditional American way of life.” Venezuela can fulfill this role: it can be presented simultaneously as a source of unwanted immigration and drug trafficking, two central obsessions of the Trumpist base. Unlike Canada or Greenland, whose invasion would be challenging to justify domestically and would provoke a crisis in the Western alliance, an attack on Venezuela mobilizes deep-seated prejudices and offers convenient scapegoats for the United States’ internal problems.

3. Dismantling the Official Justifications

The three narratives mobilized by the heterogeneous Trump base to legitimize the military intervention — defense of democracy, combating drug trafficking, and humanitarian intervention — crumble under minimal scrutiny, revealing themselves as pretexts for an operation motivated by interests of economic domination sustained by political and military power, and seeking to reinforce them in the medium term.

The democratic argument is particularly untenable coming from Trump. Without needing to recall January 6, 2021, Trump himself publicly ridiculed, on multiple occasions, the use of “defense of democracy” as justification for imperial interventions, denouncing it as liberal hypocrisy that has immense economic costs. In December 2015, Trump defended Vladimir Putin, stating, “our country does plenty of killing also… There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity.”(15) In February 2017, already president, Trump reacted to Bill O’Reilly’s criticism that “he (Putin) is a killer,” stating, “there are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”(16) Just as Clinton, Obama, and Biden, his record confirms the cynicism of democratic rhetoric: Trump maintains close alliances with friendly dictatorships, from the Gulf’s absolutist monarchies to Saudi Arabia, including enthusiastic support for Bolsonaro’s and company’s coup-mongering in Brazil. The problem is never the absence of democracy, but the lack of alignment with Washington.

The anti-drug argument proves equally fraudulent. A few days before the invasion of Venezuela, Trump granted a presidential pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was formally tried and convicted in the United States for conspiracy to traffic drugs on an industrial scale.(17) Drug trafficking serves as a convenient narrative when it is necessary to demonize adversaries; it becomes irrelevant when the defendant is a strategic ally.(18) The selectivity could not be more transparent: once kidnapped as head of the ‘cartel de los soles,’ Maduro ceased to be accused of this by the Department of Justice due to the complete fragility of the case. The argument that Maduro’s kidnapping was merely a law-enforcement operation supported by the armed forces only reinforces the hypocrisy of any democratic justification for a military operation that was not even evaluated, much less previously approved by the U.S. Congress, as required by the U.S. Constitution.

The humanitarian justification is perhaps the most obscene of the three. An administration that offers unconditional military, diplomatic, and political support to the Israeli genocide in Gaza(19) — where more than 60,000 Palestinian civilians, including over 18,000 children,(20) were killed in a few months — possesses no moral credibility to invoke humanitarian concern. Moreover, the United States’ own military actions against Venezuela — bombings that hit civilian infrastructure, a blockade that prevented the importation of food and medicines for many years — dramatically aggravated the suffering of the Venezuelan population they supposedly intended to alleviate.

Curiously, the absurdity of traditional pretexts for military intervention may embarrass a small portion of Trump’s political base, but hardly the core of the MAGA movement. For this core, spending taxpayer resources on humanitarian or democratizing interventions is intolerable, but extracting resources from a defenseless country is putting America First. This cost-benefit analysis holds even if Chavismo remains in power ensuring the social peace and political stability necessary for new investments by U.S. oil corporations in Venezuelan oil extraction and the remittance of corresponding profits.

4. The Military Operation and Its Regional Repercussions

The Trump team: CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio monitor the military operation from Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. (Molly Riley)

The sequence of events leading to Maduro’s kidnapping followed a predictable script of coercive escalation. After months of intensifying unilateral sanctions and increasingly explicit threats, the Trump administration ordered an aerial and naval blockade. He doesn’t know it, but it was the maritime blockade and military intervention by Great Britain, Germany, and Italy in Venezuela in 1902 that led to the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, as I sought to show in a long academic article analyzing U.S. imperialism over Latin America between 1898 and 1933.(21) Like Trump, Theodore Roosevelt arrogated to the U.S. the exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere, publicly announcing the intention to expel other military and financial empires from Central America and the Caribbean. Trump imitated the military intervention pattern of the so-called Dollar Diplomacy of the early 20th Century also by coordinating his special forces and CIA with sectors of the internal opposition and, maybe, defecting military, culminating in the illegal kidnapping of the Venezuelan president on January 3, 2026.

Trump’s subsequent declarations were candid: the United States would “run the country” and use oil revenues to “pay for the military operation and rebuild Venezuela the way it should be.” There is no doubt about the objectives: direct control over strategic resources and the reorganization of the Venezuelan state in line with imperial interests.

The regional repercussions of this action are profound and dangerous. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Colombia are the most likely targets to follow. Trump has already threatened them, and the Venezuelan precedent demonstrates that such threats do not constitute mere rhetoric. The Cuban communist regime, isolated after decades of blockade and recently weakened by severe energy crises, may have its days numbered. And Gustavo Petro may pay for speaking truths in New York and for representing a critical domino piece in the Latin American left that Trump wants to demolish.(22)

Mexico, Brazil, and even Western powers like Denmark (regarding Greenland) and Canada find themselves on medium-term alert. Trump’s threats against Greenland can no longer be dismissed as empty provocations. Toward some countries, Trump’s objective is to bargain for greater resource extraction and space for U.S. corporate investments through military intimidation, speaking loudly and carrying a big aircraft carrier. In others, the intention is to have a firm political and military base to threaten land invasion against undisciplined neighbors, if necessary. Overall, the ideal objective is to dominate all political systems and supply chains in the Western Hemisphere and push China out of it.

Of course, Latin America does not respond uniformly to imperial coercion. Javier Milei’s Argentina offers an instructive counterexample: total ideological and strategic alignment with Washington was rewarded with a $40 billion rescue package ($20 billion in U.S. government funds plus $20 billion in private loans).(23) This pattern of differentiated rewards and punishments confirms the explicitly transactional nature of the new hemispheric strategy: countries that accept subordination receive financial support; those that resist face growing coercion.

However, Ecuadorian resistance to foreign military bases, confirmed in a popular referendum in November 2025, demonstrates that imposing Washington’s will faces obstacles even in relatively small countries.(24) The invasion of Venezuela, however, dramatically raises the potential costs of resistance, establishing that the United States is willing to employ direct military force when it considers its interests sufficiently threatened.

5. Brazil, China, and the Limits of Coercive Unilateralism

The Trumpist strategy of hemispheric subordination through tariff blackmail and military threats, however, faces significant structural limits. The Brazilian case illustrates these contradictions particularly sharply.

Europe, Japan, and South Korea quickly ceded to Trump’s commercial demands due to military dependence on the United States; that is, they were forced to “pay tribute to maintain the American empire.”(25) Brazil, on the other hand, maintained relatively successful resistance. This resilience derives from specific structural advantages: China consolidated as Brazil’s main trading partner more than a decade ago, absorbing a growing share of commodity exports; because of this, Brazil accumulated substantial international reserves that provide room for maneuver in currency crises; Brazilian diplomacy cultivated alternative relationships through BRICS and other Global South multilateral platforms.

Lula’s dedollarization campaign, intensified after his April 2023 visit to China, represents a direct challenge to the fundamental instrument of U.S. power: control over the international monetary system.(26) Proposals for bilateral settlements in national currencies, discussions about a common BRICS currency, and diversification of international reserves shift business away from New York and gradually erode Washington’s capacity to use financial sanctions as a geopolitical weapon.

This relative autonomy of Brazil provokes evident irritation in Washington. Trump advisors publicly revealed that the United States is “very concerned” about BRICS and dedollarization, identifying Brazil as a particular problem.(27) The attempt to force Brazil into alignment through punitive tariffs, however, faced the problem that the U.S. market, while important, is no longer indispensable for the Brazilian economy as it was in previous decades. Access to Wall Street is still essential, but blocking Brazilian access as a form of pressure would accelerate what Trump wants to avoid: pushing Brazil out of the dollar world and toward BRICS.

The most fundamental limits of the “Donroe Doctrine,” however, transcend any specific country. Prolonged military occupations are prohibitively costly, as Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated. Opinion polls in the United States indicated that 55% of the population opposed the invasion of Venezuela, suggesting that additional military adventures will face growing domestic resistance, especially if they produce significant U.S. casualties or high fiscal costs.(28)

More importantly, the United States cannot offer development packages comparable to China’s. While Washington offers market access conditioned on political compliance and employs sanctions as an instrument of coercion, China provides physical infrastructure, long-term financing, technology transfer, and growing markets with minimal political conditionalities. This asymmetry in development offerings creates a structural Chinese advantage that punitive tariffs and military threats cannot completely neutralize.

The risk of geopolitical blowback should not be underestimated either. Each coercive action by the United States strengthens the Chinese narrative that Washington represents a threat to Global South sovereignty, driving countries to seek protection through closer alignment with Beijing. The invasion of Venezuela provides dramatic evidence for this argument, potentially accelerating the formation of blocs and alliances with China that Trump’s strategy ostensibly seeks to prevent.

6. The Die Is Cast: The Dangerous Precedent and the Need for Collective Resistance

The United States’ military intervention in Venezuela and the capture of Nicolás Maduro constitute a flagrant violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. Regardless of any assessment one makes of the Venezuelan government, the principle of non-unilateral military intervention represents a fundamental civilizational achievement prepared at least since 1648 (Westphalia) that cannot be discarded without catastrophic consequences for the international order.

The precedent established is grave. If the United States can invade a sovereign country, depose its government, and assume direct control over its natural resources based on such transparently fraudulent justifications, no country is safe unless it has deterrent armed forces or strong military alliances. The normalization of unilateral military interventions destroys any pretense of a rules-based international system. The emperor stands naked. Therefore, perhaps the military escalation reveals more weakness than strength. A hegemon confident in its economic, technological, and cultural primacy does not need to resort to military invasions to ensure access to resources or markets. The United States’ willingness to employ direct force reflects the erosion of more subtle forms of domination.

Maduro’s kidnapping weakens but does not eliminate Chavismo’s dominance in Venezuela. Nor does it resolve the structural contradictions of U.S. hegemonic decline. The U.S. cannot offer an attractive development model that effectively competes with the Chinese alternative; it lacks the political will to finance a hemispheric Marshall Plan; it cannot reverse decades of domestic deindustrialization through punitive tariffs on allies. The imposition of direct military control over Venezuela, if possible, may guarantee access to Venezuelan oil, but does not restore U.S. centrality in global production chains.

Alternatives to subordination exist but require political coordination and strategic courage from Global South governments. The strengthening of regional platforms such as CELAC, UNASUR, and BRICS creates institutional spaces for collective resistance. Deepening South-South economic integration reduces vulnerability to U.S. economic coercion. Diversification of international reserves and development of alternative payment systems undermine the power of financial sanctions.

The fundamental lesson of the invasion of Venezuela is that isolated sovereignty is vulnerable; only collective coordination can counterbalance imperial power. The challenge for progressive governments in Latin America and the Global South is to transform rhetorical indignation into practical cooperation. The precedent has been set. What is at stake is decisively historical: the new moves will determine whether the 21st Century will be marked by the resurgence of predatory military imperialism or by the consolidation of a genuinely multipolar international order.

Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos is a Full Professor at the Institute of Economics at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), where he coordinates the Center for Economic History and is a researcher at the Center for Conjuncture and Economic Policy Studies (Cecon) and at Transforma. He developed the arguments presented here in greater detail in the paper “Donald Trump’s Unilateralism, Brazilian Nationalism, and the China-BRICS Nexus,” presented at the Fudan-Latin America Universities Consortium – FLAUC 7th Annual Meeting (PUCP, Lima, Peru, December 4-5).

Notes

  1. Bastos, P. P. Z. (2019, February 12). Donald Trump, o fim do globalismo e a crise na Venezuela. Carta Capital. https://www.cartacapital.com.br/mundo/donald-trump-o-fim-do-globalismo-e-a-crise-na-venezuela/
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  2. Woodward, B. (2018). Fear: Trump in the white house. Simon and Schuster, p. 263-267.
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  3. Woodward, B. (2018), p. 357-359.
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  4. https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/294161251137884160
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  5. Time. (2016, September 7). Read Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s remarks at a military forum. https://time.com/4483355/commander-chief-forum-clinton-trump-intrepid/
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  6. Swan, J., & Treene, A. (2018, November 25). Trump to Iraqi PM: How about that oil? Axios. https://www.axios.com/2018/11/25/trump-to-iraqi-pm-how-about-that-oil
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  7. Democracy Now! (2019, January 24). A coup in progress? Trump moves to oust Maduro & install pro-U.S. leader in oil-rich Venezuela. https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/24/a_coup_in_process_trump_moves
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  8. Norton, B. (2019, January 29). US coup in Venezuela motivated by oil and corporate interests — militarist John Bolton spills the beans. The Grayzone. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/us-coup-venezuela-oil-corporate-john-bolton/
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  9. The White House. (2025). National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, DC, p. 17. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
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  10. Oil reserves in Venezuela. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_Venezuela
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  11. Associated Press (2026, January 03) LIVE: Trump speaks after US strikes Venezuela and captures Maduro (Quotes at 06:50, 45:38, and 54:15).
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  12. Collin Eaton and Alex Leary, “Trump’s Hint to Oil Executives Weeks Before Maduro Ouster: ‘Get Ready,'” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2026.
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  13. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, November 13). ‘Massive privatization’: María Corina Machado offers to sell $1.7 trillion of Venezuela’s assets to US corporations. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/11/13/privatization-maria-corina-machado-sell-trillion-venezuela/
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  14. BBC News. (2025, December 11). Mexico approves up to 50% tariffs on China and other countries. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36z43ll06zo”>https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36z43ll06zo
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  15. Diamond, J. (2015, December 18). Donald Trump lavishes praise on ‘leader’ Putin. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/donald-trump-praises-defends-vladimir-putin/
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  16. Tatum, S. (2017, February 4). Trump defends Putin: ‘You think our country’s so innocent?’ CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/04/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin/
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  17. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, December 5). Trump frees drug trafficker: US meddles in Honduras’ elections, amid fraud accusations. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/12/05/trump-drugs-joh-meddling-honduras-election-fraud/
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  18. Marcetic, B. (2026, January). Trump’s war on Latin America must be stopped. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/01/trump-war-venezuela-latin-america
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  19. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, September 22). Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, UN commission says, as USA blocks peace for 6th time. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/09/22/israel-genocide-gaza-un-us-veto/
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  20. Gaza genocide. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
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  21. Bastos, P. P. Z. (2015). Da Diplomacia do Dólar à Diplomacia da Boa Vizinhança: continuidades e diferenças na política dos Estados Unidos para a América Latina (1898-1933). Nova Economia, 25, 59-80.
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  22. Burgis, B. (2026, January). The fake antiwar right goes to war. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/01/trump-vance-maduro-venezuela-war
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  23. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025d, October 25). Why Trump is bailing out Argentina’s libertarian leader Javier Milei with $40 billion. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/25/trump-bailout-argentina-javier-milei/
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  24. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, November 18). Big loss for US empire: Ecuador votes to reject foreign military bases. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/11/18/noboa-ecuador-vote-foreign-military-bases/
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  25. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, April 10). Trump advisor reveals tariff strategy: Force countries to pay tribute to maintain US empire. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/04/10/trump-advisor-miran-tariff-pay-us-empire/
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  26. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2023b, April 15). Brazil’s Lula travels to China and calls to end US dollar dominance. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/04/15/brazil-lula-china-us-dollar-dominance/
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  27. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, July 14). US gov’t is very afraid of BRICS and dedollarization, Trump insiders reveal. That’s why he’s attacking Brazil. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/07/14/us-afraid-brics-dedollarization-trump/
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  28. Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025, November 15). What is really happening in Venezuela? US attacks and economic situation explained. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/11/15/analysis-venezuela-us-attacks-economy-sanctions/
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  29. References

    Associated Press (2026, January 03) LIVE: Trump speaks after US strikes Venezuela and captures Maduro (Quotes at 06:50, 45:38, and 54:15).

    Bastos, P. P. Z. (2015). Da Diplomacia do Dólar à Diplomacia da Boa Vizinhança: continuidades e diferenças na política dos Estados Unidos para a América Latina (1898-1933). Nova Economia, 25, 59-80.

    Bastos, P. P. Z. (2019, February 12). Donald Trump, o fim do globalismo e a crise na Venezuela. Carta Capital. https://www.cartacapital.com.br/mundo/donald-trump-o-fim-do-globalismo-e-a-crise-na-venezuela/

    BBC News. (2025, December 11). Mexico approves up to 50% tariffs on China and other countries. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36z43ll06zo

    Burgis, B. (2026, January). The fake antiwar right goes to war. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/01/trump-vance-maduro-venezuela-war

    Collin Eaton and Alex Leary (2026) “Trump’s Hint to Oil Executives Weeks Before Maduro Ouster: ‘Get Ready,'” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2026.

    Democracy Now! (2019, January 24). A coup in progress? Trump moves to oust Maduro & install pro-U.S. leader in oil-rich Venezuela. https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/24/a_coup_in_process_trump_moves

    Gaza genocide. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2023a, April 13). How Brazil and China are resisting the U.S. economic weapon of mass destruction. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/04/13/brazil-china-us-economy-dollar/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2023b, April 15). Brazil’s Lula travels to China and calls to end U.S. dollar dominance. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/04/15/brazil-lula-china-us-dollar-dominance/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025a, April 10). Trump advisor reveals tariff strategy: Force countries to pay tribute to maintain U.S. empire. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/04/10/trump-advisor-miran-tariff-pay-us-empire/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025b, July 14). U.S. gov’t is very afraid of BRICS and dedollarization, Trump insiders reveal. That’s why he’s attacking Brazil. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/07/14/us-afraid-brics-dedollarization-trump/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025c, September 22). Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, UN commission says, as USA blocks peace for 6th time. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/09/22/israel-genocide-gaza-un-us-veto/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025d, October 25). Why Trump is bailing out Argentina’s libertarian leader Javier Milei with $40 billion. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/25/trump-bailout-argentina-javier-milei/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025e, October 27). The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: This is Trump’s neocolonial plan for Latin America. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/27/donroe-doctrine-trump-neocolonial-plan-latin-america/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025f, November 13). ‘Massive privatization’: María Corina Machado offers to sell $1.7 trillion of Venezuela’s assets to U.S. corporations. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/11/13/privatization-maria-corina-machado-sell-trillion-venezuela/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025g, November 15). What is really happening in Venezuela? U.S. attacks and economic situation explained. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/11/15/analysis-venezuela-us-attacks-economy-sanctions/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025h, November 18). Big loss for U.S. empire: Ecuador votes to reject foreign military bases. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/11/18/noboa-ecuador-vote-foreign-military-bases/

    Geopolitical Economy Report. (2025i, December 5). Trump frees drug trafficker: U.S. meddles in Honduras’ elections, amid fraud accusations. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/12/05/trump-drugs-joh-meddling-honduras-election-fraud/

    Marcetic, B. (2026, January). Trump’s war on Latin America must be stopped. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/01/trump-war-venezuela-latin-america

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