Americans awoke Saturday morning to the news that the U.S. military had invaded Venezuela , bombing multiple targets and abducting its president, Nicolás Maduro, to face criminal charges in New York. President Donald Trump says the U.S. will now “run” Venezuela and its oil industry, though precisely how his administration will do that, and for how long, remains nebulous. Regardless of how these dramatic events play out in the days and weeks to come, Trump asserting the power to take this action will have global repercussions.

The incursion shouldn’t have been surprising. Trump had not been shy about threatening Maduro with war, and his administration had already been arguably conducting acts of war against Venezuela for months through strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and interdictions of oil tankers.

Nonetheless, Saturday morning’s incursion in Venezuela telegraphs a great deal about Trump’s worldview as regards U.S. foreign policy, presidential powers, and the use of force. It also invites a great deal of panicked speculation about what he will do next, where, and how other countries, particularly U.S. rivals like Russia and China, will react.

One key signal this sends to the world is that Trump is firmly committed to reasserting the U.S. sphere of influence throughout the Western Hemisphere. His administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, published in November, proposed a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine — the 200-year-old foreign policy document opposing further European imperial designs on the Americas — stating that the U.S. “will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.”

This corollary jibes with the foreign policy doctrine Trump developed during his first presidency, centered on the notion that the U.S. should use its economic and military might to enforce its interests abroad without regard for international law or multilateralism or democratic principles. Importantly, it focuses that doctrine on a sphere of influence that spans North and South America. In addition to his intervention in Venezuela, in the past year, Trump has refused to rule out taking Greenland by force if Denmark........

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