Under his ‘Donroe’ doctrine, Trump no longer treats Venezuela as sovereign and Canada fears the same treatment
By Greg Ip
A few months after capturing Venezuela’s leader, President Trump mused about making it the 51st state.
Venezuela didn’t end up an American state. It is more of a vassal, or protectorate, or a colony. Call it what you will, it isn’t sovereign. Its interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, was installed by the Americans and serves at their pleasure. American troops come and go at will. Its oil revenue flows through the U.S. Treasury. And last week, Trump boasted that the U.S. had taken control of a sizable chunk of its oil reserves at zero cost.
Venezuela is the most extreme manifestation of Trump’s “Donroe” doctrine. Under that reformulation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. seeks dominance of the Western Hemisphere.
Trump has intervened in Argentina’s markets to help an ally while meddling in the elections of Brazil and Colombia in hopes of defeating adversaries. In Venezuela, Trump has prioritized control of oil over the restoration of democracy.
Trump’s treatment of Venezuela helps explain why Canada broke off trade talks with the U.S. Yet, American officials seem puzzled that Prime Minister Mark Carney would risk trade war given the disproportionate cost Canada is likely to bear. “He’s not doing what’s best for the Canadian people,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared Monday.
For Carney, it isn’t about economic cost, but sovereignty. “No Canadian leader wants to be the Delcy Rodríguez of the North,” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s former deputy prime minister, told CNBC last week.
Since World War II, the U.S. pursued trade liberalization as a goal in and of itself, a way to generate mutual benefit and strengthen ties with allies. In that spirit, Canada in the 1980s took what it called a “leap of faith” and negotiated a free-trade deal with the U.S.
President Ronald Reagan described the resulting pact as a “model for the future of this country and the world.” A few years later, Mexico joined. The North American Free Trade Agreement was followed by numerous new bilateral pacts slashing trade barriers, including with Colombia, Chile, Peru, and the Dominican Republic, as well as Central America.
When Trump came to office in 2017, he set out to reverse the free-trade tide. His trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, was anti-free trade and pro-tariff. But he also knew his counterparts had to be able to sell a deal politically back home. The resulting U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced Nafta, and deals with Japan and South Korea favored the U.S., but were nonetheless embraced by its partners.
In his second term Trump’s approach was completely different. Not only did he hit almost everyone with steep tariffs, he regularly linked the levies to political or territorial goals. He threatened Colombia with tariffs for refusing to take deportees, Brazil for prosecuting his ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, and Europe to make Denmark hand over Greenland. He said Canada could avoid tariffs by becoming the 51st state.
The U.S., of course, has a long history of interfering in Latin America. Still, Venezuelan-born Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann says this was often to establish free market institutions and keep out the Soviet Union. Trump’s demands on Venezuela lack any such “moral compass,” he said, and are simply “an illegitimate power grab.” (The U.S. said it captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro for drug trafficking.)
Canada’s stance in trade negotiations was heavily shaped by the threats against its sovereignty from Trump and his allies. In January, Bessent appeared to express support for Alberta secession. The province holds a referendum next month on the question.
This led Canada to view U.S. demands through a different prism than in the past. Once eager to prove itself a secure supplier of resources, Canada now worries about the leverage the U.S. could wield as the dominant customer of those resources. Canada feared U.S. tariffs on autos and trucks were intended to wipe out its industry, which Trump did little to dispel. “I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything,” Trump said on social media.
Like imperial Britain and modern China, Trump sees its neighbors as a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured products. This shapes his negotiations. While insisting on steep tariffs on Canadian-manufactured goods, Trump has kept tariffs low on Canadian oil, and indeed pressed for greater access. Though the U.S. is the world’s largest oil producer, Trump wanted to revive the Keystone XL pipeline from Canadian oil fields to American refineries. President Joe Biden killed the pipeline, which Canada had long pushed for, in 2021.
Most problematic was what Canadian officials interpreted as demands for a veto over trade deals with other countries. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer disputed that, saying the U.S. wanted to ensure cheap aluminum and steel, such as from China, didn’t enter the U.S. from Canada.
Canada in the past had suggested a common approach toward China: “Fortress North America,” as Carney sometimes puts it. But the U.S. envisioned “a ‘Fortress North America’ where one ruler would have dictated what other inhabitants of the fortress could have done with the outside world, while feeling free to impose restrictions at will on them within the fortress,” former Canadian trade negotiator Steve Verheul wrote in a commentary.
It’s an open question whether Canadian defiance will outlast a brutal trade war. Its leaders may hope they only have to outlast Trump. Tariffs of some sort are likely here to stay; the Donroe doctrine, not so much.
Congress didn’t clamor for control of Venezuela. It could be years before the U.S. reaps any tangible benefits from its oil reserves, even as resentment in Venezuela grows.
Meanwhile, large majorities of Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs on Canada and his changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” according to an Ipsos poll.
Big changes in American trade policy require “some sort of societal consensus,” said Doug Irwin, a trade historian at Dartmouth College. “Here it’s one person, Trump, or maybe two, with [Commerce Secretary] Howard Lutnick, that have anti-Canada animus. It’s hard not to see the hope of a reset.”
There is precedent. After being hit with the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, Canada elected a protectionist government that promptly retaliated. Seventeen years, a depression and world war later, Canada joined with the U.S. to create the postwar trading system.
