During rambling remarks on January 3, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had bombed Venezuela, “captured” President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and gained control of that country’s oil reserves.

Now what? Trump has no idea, but historical precedent portends disaster.

The Dubious Legal Basis

As with his bombing of alleged drug-smuggling boats that have killed at least 115 civilians, Trump offered no justification under international law for his actions:

Repeatedly, Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine, saying that he had expanded it “by a lot.” But in fact, Trump has stood President James Monroe’s 1823 seminal proclamation on its head while emboldening China’s President Xi and Russia’s President Putin to follow Trump’s lead in dictating the affairs of sovereign countries.

Trump has no knowledge of history, much less respect for its costly lessons. And with the “Donroe Doctrine,” he has created new danger for the nation and the world.

Monroe v. “Donroe”

In 1823, President Monroe announced a new defensive principle: The United States would object to Europe’s further colonization of the Western hemisphere as “dangerous to our peace and security.” The US would not interfere with existing European colonies, but it would regard future attempts to determine the destiny of these independent nations “as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

In 1904 and 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary expanded the Doctrine, permitting the US to act as an “international police power” to prevent “some civilized nation” from intervening to assure a struggling country’s financial solvency.

Rather than a defensive warning to would-be foreign interlopers, Trump has transformed the Monroe Doctrine into an offensive weapon to invade, conquer, and control independent nations.

Trump calls it the “Donroe Doctrine.” It stems from his 19th-century worldview that the United States, China, and Russia are each entitled to operate within their own spheres of influence—kings carving up the world: China gets the Far East; the United States gets the Western Hemisphere (and Greenland!); Russia gets whatever it wants that’s left.

China’s designs on an independently democratic Taiwan are well known. Russia started a war to absorb Ukraine into the new Russian empire. And now Trump has conquered Venezuela.

The Pottery Barn Rule

Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Gen. Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush that the strategy was fraught with risk

“If you break it, you own it,” Powell said, invoking the “Pottery Barn rule.”

Powell meant that if the US intervened militarily and destabilized a country, it bore long-term responsibility for rebuilding, governing, and managing the consequences. Bush would “own” Iraq's 25 million people.

Venezuela’s population is 28 million.

Trump said that he, Secretary of State Marco Rubio,........

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