While many students were still celebrating the ringing in of the new year on Jan. 3, many awoke to the news of the overnight operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. In a press conference following the operation, President Trump put it as part of the greater “Donroe Doctrine.” This was a play on words of the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy strategy created by President James Monroe in 1823 that asserted the United States’ dominance in the Americas to prevent European intervention. Following the perceived success of the Venezuelan operation, concerns have been raised about what comes next under the Donroe Doctrine: with possibilities being Colombia and Greenland.
“Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long,” President Trump said on Air Force One in reference to Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro. When asked whether the United States could conduct a military operation in Colombia, like in Venezuela, the President responded: “It sounds good to me.”
For context, President Petro was first elected in 2022 and is considered Colombia’s most left-wing elected leader, with Petro having been a member of the revolutionary rebel group M-19, which was active in the region for most of the latter part of the 20th century.
“I think… history repeats,” said Juan Pablo Guzmán Fernández, a third-year Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major and Colombian student, to The Triangle when asked his perspective on Trump’s comments on Colombia specifically. “We’ve walked through this before, colonial intervention multiple times. It’s frustrating to see this happen again, and I just hope we’re not next in line.”
Yet as quickly as President Trump seemed open to the possibility of conducting a similar operation in Colombia, he appears to have changed his attitude on the idea. In a report by NBC News, a last-minute phone call between the two leaders led to a dramatic de-escalation, with plans for the pair to meet in Washington, D.C., next month.
“Great Honor to speak with the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who called to explain the situation of drugs and other disagreements that we have had,” President Trump said in a post via Truth Social following the call. While Trump’s attitude towards Colombia seems to have at least temporarily been tempered, there is still an effort to acquire Greenland.
In 2019, during his first term, President Trump originally expressed an interest in purchasing the world’s largest island. This continued into his second term, saying, “I think the people want to be with us,” in late Jan. 2025. Yet a poll conducted by a Danish newspaper would say the opposite: 85 percent say they do not have an interest in joining the United States, and they are almost split on whether they took Trump’s comments as a threat or an opportunity. Trump’s interest in what would be the largest land acquisition since the 1827 purchase of Alaska seemed to have waned in his second term, but it was renewed after Maduro’s capture.
“[Trump]’s ego is testing the limits of power at the expense of good relations with [America]’s historical allies,” said a Global Studies student who asked to remain anonymous.
A statement by the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, to CNN’s Pentagon and national security correspondent, Natasha Bertrand, declared: “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region.”
Leavitt qualified that “utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option at the Commander in Chief’s disposal.” Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark (as with Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States), and it is also a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the transatlantic mutual defense alliance chartered after World War Two.
The situation raises a seemingly serious possibility that the United States will take military action against a fellow NATO member. Andrius Kubilius, a leader within the European Union (which, while distinct from NATO, also aims to promote stability in Europe), said that such military action “will be the end of NATO.”
Additionally, if Trump were to use force in attaining Greenland, it would violate international law.“I don’t need international law,” President Trump said in a statement to the New York Times. He would clarify that while the United States does follow international law, it is up to the United States to determine how those constraints would be applied. In this new age of the Donroe Doctrine, when asked if there was anything that could stop this perspective, he responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”