The long-term impact of U.S. intervention in Venezuela will not be decided in Caracas or Washington, but elsewhere. With intervention now framed as a standard policy instrument of the USA, it is the response of other states — including in Europe — that will determine whether the erosion of international law becomes normalised across regions.

To understand why the response now matters so much, it is worth recalling how earlier U.S. interventions were treated. For decades, interventions in the region were framed as exceptional episodes, allowing the broader legal order to absorb the shock.

This pattern is evident in the long series of U.S. interventions in Latin America, from the Dominican Republic to Guatemala to Panama and Haiti. While many states condemned these interventions as violations of international law, they were nonetheless treated as incidents. Once the storm had passed, the US expressed its continued support for international law, and the rest of the world again accepted the United States as a loyal pillar of the international legal order, as if nothing had happened.

That pattern no longer holds once intervention is declared policy rather than an exception. The intervention in Venezuela cannot be considered as an incident or an isolated reaction to an unfavourable regime. Instead, it represents an application of a new foreign policy.

Chronicle of a foretold intervention

The shift from exception to policy is made explicit in the United States’ National Security Strategy. In this document, the Trump administration leaves no room for doubt about its intentions. The United States intends to restore its dominance in the Western Hemisphere, without hostile foreign (read: Russian and Chinese) presence, and with American control over supply chains and resources (read: oil).

To properly appreciate the significance of the policy, historical context is helpful. The original Monroe Doctrine, formulated in 1823, was primarily defensive and can, with the benefit of hindsight, even be seen as morally justified. Its aim was that European countries should refrain from colonial expansion in the Americas.

In 1904, President Roosevelt gave the doctrine a sharper turn; in his version (the Roosevelt Corollary), the United States declared that it had the right to intervene in Latin American states when American interests were at stake. This shifted the doctrine from defence to intervention.

After that, the Monroe Doctrine disappeared as an explicit point of departure for foreign policy. Although the United States intervened in the region on multiple occasions, successive National Security Strategies no longer referred explicitly to the Monroe Doctrine. Interventions were incidents, not declared policy. Some say it was irrelevant to U.S. grand strategy.

In hindsight, it may have been naïve not to recognise these interventions for what they were: a clear and recurring pattern across successive administrations, even if not articulated as a coherent or consistent policy. But precisely because such an explicit policy was absent, other states could treat these interventions as isolated incidents.

The new National Security Strategy clearly marks a change in this situation. It once again places the doctrine at the centre of U.S. foreign policy and further sharpens Roosevelt’s version. The “Trump Corollary” unequivocally commits to U.S. dominance, intervention, and the deployment of military means.

Consequences for international law

Admittedly, the National Security Strategy does not explicitly state that the United States intends to disregard international law. But read in light of its first application in Venezuela, and alongside statements by President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, and other officials, the strategy conveys an unequivocal message about how the United States now approaches international law.

That message can be broken down into three elements.

First, the United States reserves the right to frame armed intervention in other countries as “law enforcement” — as if it were taking place within the United States itself. There is no doubt that law enforcement in another state, with or without the use of force, violates international law. Yet the United States now normalises this instrument and incorporates it into policy. While this is not the first time breaches of international law have been justified through the language of extraterritorial law enforcement, it is now articulated as policy.

Second, the Strategy turns intervention into a legitimate policy instrument. In international law, intervention has a precise meaning: the unlawful use of coercion in the internal affairs of another state in order to influence its free will. This is precisely what occurred when President Trump stated that Vice-President Rodríguez would “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not bend to his wishes. Intervention is no longer treated as exceptional but routinised as part of foreign policy.

Third, and most fundamentally, the policy normalises the use of military force, as if Article 2(4) of the UN Charter did not exist. The actions in Venezuela constituted a clear violation of the prohibition on the use of force. Subsequent statements make clear that the United States reserves the right to use such force again (“boots on the ground”) if it deems it necessary — even in the absence of legal justification. What was previously presented as an incidental violation of a norm, and for which some form of legal justification was still sought (even in regard to the recent lethal strikes on ships with suspected drug traffickers), is now elevated to a guiding principle of policy.

Observers may argue that the National Security Strategy is merely policy rhetoric rather than law. But that would understate its significance. In international law, rhetoric matters precisely when it organises practice, signals intent, and reshapes expectations of compliance: opinio juris and patterns of justification determine how norms function and whether they endure.

The Trump Corollary as part of a broader U.S. policy on international law

In deciding the course and content of its response, Europe might be tempted to assume that this new strategy is limited to Latin America, and that the United States should be given some room there.

That would, of course, be irresponsible; in terms of its implications for international law, and with regard to Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba — not to mention Greenland.

More fundamentally, however, it would be a mistake to treat the implications of the Trump Corollary in isolation from the broader U.S. approach to international law. The disregard for international law embodied in the Trump Corollary does not stand alone. The intervention in Venezuela fits into a now lengthy series of actions, including the U.S. government’s announcement that it intends to permit deep-sea mining outside the UN regime, the imposition of sanctions on judges and staff of the International Criminal Court, the use of import tariffs that violate the WTO regime, and the unlawful attack on Iran.

Taken together, these actions point to a broader subtext in the National Security Strategy that extends well beyond the section on the Western Hemisphere. The Trump–Monroe doctrine is accompanied by a policy line that reserves the right for the United States to disregard international law whenever it conflicts with foreign-policy objectives, wherever in the world that may be.

Consequences for other regions: spheres of influence

Although the Trump Corollary is, strictly speaking, regional in scope, it can readily be understood as an application of a classical theory of great-power politics that recognizes the need for — or even a right to — spheres of influence.

There are important differences between this approach and earlier thinking about spheres of influence. Classical theorists such as Morgenthau regarded spheres of influence as a necessary limitation on power, aimed at preventing direct confrontation between great powers. It was an inevitability that states had to reckon with, rather than a policy aim. By contrast, the Trump Corollary deploys spheres of influence as a unilaterally enforceable instrument in the service of explicitly American regional objectives.

At first glance, this difference might suggest that the implications for other regions are limited. The Trump Corollary does not appear articulate a general theory of influence spheres in the way classical realist thinking did.

A different reading is possible, however. If one can identify a principle underlying the Trump Corollary, it is not easy to see how it should be limited to the Americas. The idea that it stands for a wider entitlement that would hold for other regions, helps explain the pragmatic American attitude toward Russian claims in Ukraine. Indeed, it can well be argued that the idea of spheres of influence only works as a balance of power strategy if all great powers accept it. If the spheres of influence concept is indeed understood as a general entitlement of great powers, its consequences will extend far beyond the Western Hemisphere.

President Trump’s framing of the US entitlement to the Western Hemisphere, and the application in the case of Venezuela, therefore risks legitimising similar uses of force by Russia and China within their own perceived spheres of influence. While Moscow and Beijing formally condemned the intervention, the new policy does create strategic opportunities and perhaps even entitlements for both powers: Russia may see greater room to press its claims in Ukraine, while China could feel emboldened in the South China Sea or toward Taiwan. By openly sidelining international law and presenting intervention as a negotiable instrument of power in a sphere of influence, the United States undermines its ability to criticise or restrain comparable actions by other great powers.

A crossroads

Of course, the actions in Venezuela and the broader policy choices of the United States do not stand alone. They form part of a much broader pattern across the world — from Ukraine to Gaza to the situations in the Congo and Rwanda — reflecting a deepening disregard for the fundamental rules governing the peaceful coexistence of states.

This makes the response of Europe and other states critical.

So far, many European governments have reaffirmed the importance of upholding international law in general terms but have largely refrained from directly criticising the action itself. Ironically, the most principled condemnation came from China — the very country that Europe regularly criticises for undermining the international order.

In earlier cases of seemingly incidental violations of international law, Europe could look the other way or limit itself to brief, cautious condemnation, in the hope and expectation that the international legal order would resume functioning the next day. Now that the violation of international law has become policy in Washington, that option is no longer available.

Europe faces an uncomfortable choice. The desire for a good relationship with the United States may tempt European states to go along, toward a world of spheres of influence, in which international law offers less guidance, but where one might still hope to rely on favours from the United States.

However, that would be an extremely risky and irresponsible strategy. In a world in which great powers can appropriate spheres of influence while disregarding international law, Europe cannot afford such accommodation. A close reading of the National Security Strategy suggests that Europe cannot rely on the favours of President Trump — at least not without paying a high price.

At this point, it may be argued that Europe lacks the power to alter U.S. behaviour, rendering condemnation merely symbolic. Even if that is partly true, it misses the point. In international law, state reactions matter not because they coerce, but because they shape whether violations are treated as aberrations or normalised practice — and thus affect the legal status of extraterritorial law enforcement, intervention, and the use of force. Vague affirmations of international law are insufficient; what matters is a clear judgment on the legality of the acts themselves.

The positions taken by states in the Security Council illustrate this ambiguity: many Latin American states, and China, condemned the action; some (e.g. Argentina) offered support; and European states largely confined themselves to general affirmations of the importance of international law, without taking a clear position on whether the intervention itself violated it. Such statements do little to prevent the corrosive effects of these practices on international law.

It is for these reasons that, in the interest of South America, of Europe itself, and of the international legal order, a clear and principled European position on the legality of the intervention in Venezuela — coupled with a more autonomous approach to its own security — is now indispensable.