The First Venezuela Intervention

Donald Trump’s military invasion on January 3, 2026 was not the first time the United States has intervened in Venezuela citing the authority granted unilaterally by the Monroe Doctrine. Nearly 130 years ago, that nation was at the center of an international confrontation involving claims of U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Then, as now, the underlying objective was largely to facilitate massive investment in resource extraction by U.S. companies.  

Great Britain had seized the territory of Guiana on the northeastern coast of South America (since 1966, the nation of Guyana) from Holland in 1814, a decade before President James Madison warned European nations against “any attempt . . . to extend their system” to the Americas. (The Doctrine did not declare any intention to extinguish existing European claims to territory in the Americas.) After border disputes in the 1830s, Britain unilaterally proposed the “Schomburgk line” in the early 1840s, which would have ceded England the mouth of the Oronoco River, which  the U.S. ambassador to Caracas described as controlling access to “the entire territory of South America.” Venezuela, which would have received interior forest lands in exchange, unsurprisingly rejected the proposed border.[1]

The discovery of commercial quantities of gold in the disputed Essequibo region led to the further deterioration of relations between the two countries; diplomatic relations between London and Caracas were soon severed. Venezuela turned to American President Grover Cleveland, a skeptic of  the imperial system, to safeguard its interests, but Cleveland’s initial foray at brokering a peaceful resolution was ended by his defeat Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Once he regained the office in 1893, he renewed efforts together with Congress to deflate tensions, in part to satisfy American economic interests hesitant to invest in Venezuela until the threat of conflict with Britain abated.

The hard line against England was articulated by the new Secretary of State, Richard Olney, who declared that the U.S. was “practically sovereign” in the hemisphere.” Having been stung during the 1892 campaign by rumors smearing him as a lackey for British interests – an effort by Republicans to reduce his support among Irish-Americans – Cleveland approved of Olney’s  sending a harsh note condemning British expansionism as violating “the doctrine of American public law.”[2]  Cleveland, reversing his earlier ambivalence about the legality of the Monroe Doctrine, now vowed it would never “be better defended or more bravely asserted” than in the current crisis, a sentiment he echoed in an assertive message to Congress, which unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Britain submit to arbitration.[3] Cleveland’s defense of our South American neighbor may have been influenced by the lobbying of his predecessor (and vanquisher in 1888) Benjamin Harrison, who was  representing the Venezuelan government.

Britain had its own reasons to seek a peaceful resolution. Quite unexpectedly, it had its hands full trying to quell the Boers in South Africa, a war that had strained relations between England and Germany. Parliament understandably had little interest in inflaming a military confrontation across the Atlantic. Insisting that Britain sought not “one inch of American territory,” Prime Minister Lord Salisbury agreed to proceed with arbitration, a decision that proved providential.

The Treaty of Washington in 1897 created an arbitration commission that ultimately granted Venezuela just 100 of the 60,000 square miles in dispute, most of which Britain had never disputed. The commission found that British settlers had laid the earliest claim by a European power to much of the contested  territory, a conclusion accepted, if reluctantly, by the Venezuelans who nevertheless won control of the strategically crucial Oronoco River delta. “We have gained all we wanted,” one British official gloated about the ruling, which was finalized in the Paris Arbitral Award of 1899.

The outcome was also highly satisfactory to U.S. interests as Britain tacitly opened the door for U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. Twenty-five American pro-business groups hailed the settlement, according to the New York World, and the U.S. ambassador proclaimed that “a good deal of American money [was] preparing for investment” in Venezuela. Soon, U.S. businesses secured extensive rights from the government in Caracas for railroad construction, mining and other “safe and fruitful investments.”[4]

The successful outcome briefly raised hopes that peaceful arbitration might supersede the reliance on the military to resolve international disputes. In 1899, the Senate ratified the Hague Treaty that established a Permanent Court of Arbitration, the same body that would mandate that Venezuela compensate U.S. oil companies for expropriation of their holdings in the 1970s. Indeed, the failure of the Venezuelan government under Nicholás Maduro to abide by those rulings was cited by Trump as a partial justification for seizing Venezuelan oil facilities and supplies.

The optimism over reliance on arbitration proved short-lived. William McKinley, the American president narrowly elected in 1896, embraced a more aggressive vision of an enlarged U.S. navy promoted by Admiral Alfred Mahan and Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt. Within a year of his inauguration, the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor with a massive loss of life, launching the U.S. into a war with Spain whose swift outcome added to U.S. imperial holdings in the Caribbean and the far Pacific.

The history of the largely forgotten 1895 boundary dispute includes tantalizing precursors to recent events, particularly the flexing of U.S. muscle to open Venezuela to U.S. business investment. Trump’s invocation of an updated “Donroe Doctrine” seemingly had less to do with crushing international drug cartels or restoring democracy in Caracas than with resecuring claims to U.S. oil leases cancelled in the 1970s. “We take the oil … in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country,” Trump declared, confirming the skepticism of many Latin Americans who can point the 1895 boundary dispute for evidence that U.S. hemispheric claims are often driven more by economic self-interest than by principled concerns for regional autonomy or democracy.

[1] Thwaite, B.H., “Britain and Venezuela” Fortnightly Review, v. LIX (1896) 235.

[2] George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford University Press, 2008) 307; Samuel F. Bemis, Diplomatic History of the United States (Government Printing Office, 1935) 415-416

[3] Montgomery Schuyler, Profile of Richard Olney in American Secretaries of State, Samuel Bemis, ed., 299-300.

[4] New York Times (October 21, 1895).