“The Monroe Doctrine Inverted” — Venezuela and the Ongoing Interventions

Episode 19 traces the two-hundred-year arc from James Monroe’s 1823 doctrine — originally a defensive warning to European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere — to its contemporary inversion into a claim of American authority to reshape Latin American governments at will. Opening with Major General Smedley Butler’s 1933 confession that he had been “a high-class muscle-man for Big Business,” the episode examines the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, the Cold War template of Latin American interventions (Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Bolivia), and situates Operation Absolute Resolve against Venezuela in January 2026 as the culminating case of a pattern, not the beginning of one. Closes with a survey of simultaneous American military operations across Africa, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, and the strategic overextension those commitments represent. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com