As Trump and Rubio eye Cuba and Colombia, danger grows for new era of interventionism | Opinion

Right now, our attention is riveted on what happens next in Venezuela, but there’s a broader development that the U.S. — and Miami in particular — should be watching carefully: President Trump is using the attack as an opportunity to advance a “might makes right” new world order, and Colombia and Cuba are potentially in the crosshairs.

The threat isn’t subtle. “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened,” the State Department posted on X Monday.

A bold claim, and one that’s incredibly dangerous, even if this is posturing. The United States’ actions in Venezuela coupled with words like those from the Trump State Department could, of course, be seen as opening the door for China and Russia to act as we did. No matter how much Venezuelans deserved to see Nicolás Maduro out of power, the result must not be that force can be used by great powers whenever it suits them.

We heard Trump on Saturday, hours after the arrest of Maduro and his wife by U.S. forces in Venezuela, say that the Monroe Doctrine, the 200-year-old foreign policy agenda that viewed South and Central America as the United States’ strategic “backyard,” could be called the “Donroe Doctrine.”

That sure sounds like a Trump-style embrace of interventionism — or even American imperialism. Remember the boat strikes off Venezuela, largely regarded as illegal? Those American forces are still amassed in the Caribbean.

Trump may be viewing the Venezuela strike as a template for more of the same — even though he has repeatedly campaigned against “forever wars” in places like the Middle East. Also, we cannot forget America’s history of interfering in Latin America and propping up authoritarian regimes.

In the last few days, the president has made offhand threats toward various countries: Cuba “looks like it’s ready to fall” because it has no income from Venezuela, he said. Colombia is “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he’s not going to be doing it for very long, let me tell you,” he told reporters on Sunday. Trump ignores that Colombians elected President Gustavo Petro, like him or not, in 2022.

Asked by reporters Sunday if the U.S. would launch a military operation against Colombia, Trump responded, “Sounds good to me.” Petro responded on X in his own style: “If you detain a president whom much of my people want and respect, you will unleash the people’s jaguar.”

Trump has had other recent targets, too, including Mexico and Denmark’s territory of Greenland, which Trump wants to annex. The prime minister of Denmark told Trump on Sunday to “stop the threats.”

Unlike Venezuela, Colombia is a democracy, as is Mexico. The leaders in those two countries were elected; they are not dictators. Cuba, though, is communist, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American from Miami whose parents left the island before Fidel Castro took power, called the government there “a huge problem,” on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

The Trump administration seems to be of two minds on Cuba. Cuba could fall on its own: The economy has been flat-lining and the ongoing U.S. blockade of Venezuelan oil along with Maduro’s ouster “places us in a critical existential dilemma for our survival,” Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba’s foreign minister, said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Rubio’s long-standing hostility toward Cuba may mean the U.S. is putting a target on the island nation. “If I lived in Havana and I worked in the government, I’d be concerned — at least a little bit,” Rubio said on Saturday. In Miami, where the hope of freeing Cuba from communism has been all-consuming for decades, those comments are likely to be embraced.

Will the Venezuela attack become a blueprint for more invention in Latin America, posing a potential threat to the stability of the region? An emboldened Trump administration seems to be saying so.