Last night (January 2-3, 2026) the United States invaded Venezuela to capture the President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an extremely expensive extraterritorial abduction to bring them to New York to face U.S. indictments related to drug trafficking. Well, at least, that’s the best summary I can write in a single sentence; there is a lot to unpack here, and my characterization is far from neutral. But what struck me as a Canadian during the late-morning press conference today was that Trump explicitly mentioned the Monroe Doctrine as a justification.
From my perspective as a Canadian, the Monroe Doctrine is also tied to the concept of “Manifest Destiny.” They are technically separate, but Wikipedia calls them “a closely related nexus of principles;” the two together can be vastly oversimplified as “the United States owns the entire Western Hemisphere.” Monroe was talking about the interference of colonial powers with U.S. interests anywhere in the Americas; it was part of his 7th State Of the Union address on December 2, 1823. Manifest Destiny is more of a zeitgeist starting early in U.S. history (even before the Revolution) that the colonies had the right to expand westward, into “Indian land,” but, eventually, also into territory controlled by France and Spain. John Quincy Adams wrote in 1811 about taking over all of North America (a concept technically called “continentalism”). Apparently expansionist ideas about the Americas declined over the years, but in 1904 Roosevelt articulated a U.S. right to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries. Hoover repudiated that idea in 1930 – but the 20th century had many instances of the kind of interference Roosevelt was talking about.
So, in the context of Trump’s rhetoric in 2025 about making Canada “the 51st state” as “an idea that made sense,” his reference to the Monroe Doctrine ramps up my concern about what (if any) limits there are on the U.S. unfairly pressuring Canada. We can at least expect a serious fight over the renewal of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, especially as Trump appears to reject the concept of win-win: a deal is “unfair” unless he wins and the other side loses.
Carney’s government is making a lot of effort towards reducing our dependency on the U.S.A, such as joining the European Unions’s Security Action for Europe, and expanding trade with many other countries. I just worry that he can’t get everything in place before we take a huge economic hit from the end of the USMCA. We elected him as the best person to deal with Trump; I just hope my fellow Canadians realize just how hard his job is if we start to suffer.