On November 16, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, sailed into the Caribbean to join Operation Southern Spear – the largest US military deployment in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
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Donald Trump is, however, a very different president from John F. Kennedy. Whereas Kennedy endorsed the burden of American exceptionalism to “assure the survival and the success of liberty” at “any price” or “hardship”, Trump promises to prioritise “America first”.
Whereas Kennedy claimed his actions in 1962 aimed for a moral victory for freedom, the Trump administration makes clear Operation Southern Spear acts in defence of American interests. “This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” declared Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on social media.
The rhetoric, however, goes beyond defending the homeland, also laying claim to the western hemisphere. Narco-terrorists are not being removed from the western hemisphere but our hemisphere – for Hegseth: “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighbourhood.”
While Trump is seen as breaking with many US international objectives, in regarding the Americas as Washington’s neighbourhood he adheres to one of its oldest: the Monroe Doctrine. First articulated by president James Monroe in 1823, the doctrine declared the United States as the unilateral protector of the western hemisphere. In promising to eradicate narco-terrorism, at face value at least, Trump could be considered as continuing the tradition of acting as the Americas’ defender.
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Except the consensus is that the military build-up has little to do with narco-trafficking – Venezuela is not a principle route for US-bound cocaine trafficking. It is speculated that Trump’s real goal is regime change in Caracas, President Nicolas Maduro being a long-standing opponent of Washington.