Front Burner - A veteran diplomat explains the 'Donroe Doctrine'

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

The seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by military force. Promises to "take back" the Panama Canal. Massive tariffs on Brazil. Threats to take action against cartels in Mexico.Donald Trump's foreign policy in Latin America in recent months has been chaotic, even contradictory at times. But it all seems to be part of what Trump has referred to as the "Donroe Doctrine": a reinvention of the Monroe Doctrine that saw America looking to exert hegemonic dominance across the entire western hemisphere.John Feeley worked as a diplomat for the American government for nearly 30 years, including serving as ambassador to Panama. He breaks down the current geopolitical situation and lays out the Trump administration's goals for the region — and beyond.

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Hey everybody. I'm Jamie Poisson. For nearly three decades, John Feeley had a front row seat to U.S. foreign policy. He was a helicopter pilot in the United States Marine Corps, worked at the State Department under Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. He was deputy chief of mission and charged affairs in Mexico City. He was also the ambassador to Panama. but resigned in protest during Trump's first term. So as you'd imagine, he's got a lot of thoughts on what this Trump administration just did in Venezuela and is threatening to do all over Latin America.

John, hi, thank you so much for coming on to the show today. Well, thanks very much for having me, Jim. It's great to have you. So over the last little while, I've seen several pieces like in Donald Trump's approach to foreign policy, to that of a mafia, Don, really. economist Paul Krugman wrote, he's more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory

believing that if he knocks off a rival boss, he can bully the guy's former capos into giving him a cut of their take. You compared him to financial mob boss, Tony Soprano, as far back as February of last year. Why is this a useful way, you think, to understand Trump's actions in Venezuela and the so-called Don Roe doctrine?

Because I think that to ascribe to Donald Trump any kind of academic or historical doctrine or theory of organization is just a fundamental mistake. I share some things with Donald Trump, even though we disagree on mostly everything in politics, but I'm also a New Yorker from the era when Donald Trump was a young builder, the 60s, 70s, and 80s in New York City. You have to understand that his worldview is shaped like all of ours, to a certain degree, by his personal experience. But this is not a man who went on to study, who went on to broaden his mind, who went on to challenge his own thoughts. This is a guy who grew up in a very rough and tumble world, not the mafia, but he was a builder. And in New York City, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, you didn't get a building built without the mob.

I had a great faith in New York. Primarily, our purchases have been in New York. And about five years ago, New York was not considered very hot, and cities in general weren't considered too hot. And we purchased... So he's seen power, the exercise of power up close. And I think it's just something he has internalized and then had polished,

if anybody's ever seen the movie The Apprentice by Roy Cohn. There is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no... Truth with a capital T, it's a construct. It's a fiction. It's man-made. None of it matters except winning. Who may have been the only kind of intellectual or academic influence on Donald Trump. So I think that's where it comes from. I think somebody had to tell him what the Monroe Doctrine was. And then what about the others working under him? I'm thinking about people who do seem to have quite a bit of influence in this administration. Marco Rubio, certainly Stephen Miller.

Absolutely. Look, if you are in his inner circle and you listen to what the president says on a daily basis, you are either willfully or genuinely ignorant of historical American values. I think the people that you just mentioned, Rubio Miller, certainly, well, actually, not Miller, I should back up. Marco Rubio is a Vichy bureaucrat. Compare and contrast what he used to say about human rights. While I deeply value and think it is a very important alliance

between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this alliance cannot allow our country to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses. And I hope that we will take up this cause. About democracy. A cursory glance around the globe reveals disturbing trends of an authoritarian resurgence threatening human rights and democracy. From Russia to China. About sovereignty, about the importance of the rule of law.

No one can be above the law, not even the Attorney General of the United States. About creating a good business investment client. I literally, the guy just took the entire thing and chucked it out the window to work for Donald Trump. And that's because he made a Faustian bargain. Miller, I believe, is actually a genuine ideologue. You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength that is governed by force, that is governed by power.

He fundamentally does not believe that the values of historical America, that is e pluribus unum, all the stuff that our founders came up with, I think he just doesn't believe that works. He doesn't, he clearly doesn't like to have foreigners, non-native-born Americans, come to the United States. And he is a very, very effective, inside bureaucratic player. Hegseth, quite frankly, is just a junior officer masquerading as a senior defense official. He's got all of the testosterone and, you know, hyped up monster drinks and push up prowess that you can muster.

But this guy is just doing whatever Donald Trump says after, I fundamentally believe, he suffered serious trauma during his two tours in Iraq and felt nobody. was held accountable. So now he's going to go and, you know, help Donald Trump perform it. But I don't think among any of them, you've got any real studied academic or even even just intellectual history operating. You have Donald Trump's gut instinct and everybody else's recognition of the power of the presidency. When Donald Trump's. looks at a map of Latin America.

What do you think he's ultimately seeing and thinking about? Well, I don't think he looks at a map of Latin America very frequently. Let's say he did, right? Let's assume he did. Yeah. I think what he sees, and you've seen some of this in memes, right? Jamie, you've seen, you know, Donald Trump's view of the world with like big crayon circles around, you know, Putin's, Xi Jinping's, mine. Yeah.

I think he sees mine. I fundamentally believe that we have to take the man more or less at his word, even though sometimes it's confusing. He has said, his people have said, that in the Americas in the Western Hemisphere, and that goes from Greenland down to Tierra del Fuego, the United States must be preeminent. Must its interests must be more important than Canadians' interests, then Argentine's interest, than Chilean's interest. So this is a group of people, and Trump leads them, that fundamentally does not believe in partnership. They believe in vassal states that pay rent. And I think that's what he sees in Venezuela. And how do you think that that is fundamentally different from how U.S. foreign policy has worked in the post-war era, right?

The country has had a prolific century or so of military interventions in Latin America. in other parts of the world, too, but just to focus on Latin America, how do you think that this is like materially different? I read something over the weekend that said, you're really going to miss American hypocrisy in the Trump era. Look, I am the first. As a former diplomat, I am the first to admit that the United States has not always lived up to the ideals enshrined in our Constitution, to the ideals enshrined in the U.N. charter to international law. But the thing about the United States and what I always fundamentally believed, and then many, I was not the only one, believed about American exceptionalism, if you'll call it that, was the pendulum swing and the self-correcting nature of American democracy.

But American democracy actually did for as big, as messy, as diverse as it was in the post-war era, talk in 1945 on, after having witnessed the horror of two world wars and conflagrations, after having crept right up to the precipice of nuclear conflagration, the United States recognized that it was in its own interests to create a rules-based system whereby at least the pretense, at least the effort, at least the desire to live by a rules-based international order was going to be in our own fundamental interests. And quite frankly, I think, I believe that the proof was in the pudding between NATO, the Bretton Woods systems, between all of the UN efforts, none of which are perfect, all of which did have slop on occasion corruption, all of which did

engage in hypocrisy at times, saying one thing, doing enough. other, all of them nonetheless combined to keep the world from nuclear war. And I think that's something that is far more valuable than the Trump team gives it credit for. With the Morale app, you can sharpen your French skills in no time. You'll have a blast learning with content from Radio Canada. It's easy as Arndor Tro. Learn French, have fun, repeat. Download the free Morial app now. As somebody who spent so much time in the region, you know, of course he's been outwardly blatant about wanting oil from Venezuela.

But what do you make of the argument that this is also about protecting American national security and pushing Russia and China out of the region, right, at countering them? the region. And do you think that that is a good aim, whether you like how they're doing it or not? A fundamental disregard both of those pretexts. And I think there are a few that you didn't mention, but it's important to look at when we're analyzing what recently happened in Venezuela. First things first, the counter-narcotics pretext. The president repeatedly lies, states something that is not true, which is that Venezuela was flooding the United States with drugs. His own DEA says it wasn't. So we scratch off the pretext of a narcotics threat to the United States. After that, you have the immigration threat from Venezuela, as the president said. Why would they do this? Why would

they allow people to come into our country from all over the world, not just South America, but from Venezuela, but from all over the world, they came, and they came by hundreds of of thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands a day. And they came in, though, by the millions. No, he led in a lot of refugees. So I think that has to be struck down. There was no real threat from the Venezuelan people. The oil was certainly an incentive. But the idea that he's advancing American interests, I'll throw it right back on you. Is he? How is he helping the average American? Venezuelan oil, according to the CEO of Exxon, Darren Woods last Friday in the White House. If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela,

today it's uninvestable. So I don't think we're going to see a lowering of pump prices here in the United States, especially with the type of Venezuelan Mary oil, heavy oil. It's going to benefit a few. sectors inside the petroleum sector. And what about the argument that Venezuela had become too close with Russia and China? Okay. And that's the second part. And thanks for bringing me back to it. Okay, let's go sort of one by one. First of all, they always throw in there in the unholy triumvirate, Iran.

You have a guy who decides he's going to invite Iran into his country, is going to, you know, do the confiscation of American oil companies. I can recall back in 2015, then Senator Bob Menendez had a law passed whereby the State Department had to do an all-agency review of Iranian intelligence activities in Venezuela. Literally 16 different intelligence agencies in the United States. I coordinated that report. We came up with literally next to nothing, a few symbolic visits, a few Iranian visitors. now, and since that time, you have drone, some drones that were purchased, none of it adds up to a threat to the United States from Iran. So we'll take that one off. Next, let's go to Russia. Undeniably,

Russia had a long term and still has, I would assume, some kind of relationship institutionally with Caracas. It certainly buys its sanctioned oil, and we know that. But I discount that. I discount that. I just fundamentally don't believe that that relationship represented a threat to the United States. And finally, China, in Venezuela and the rest of the region, China is a commercial competitor. It is a commercial competitor that has dual-use commerce activities. That means that they do use their commercial activities as fronts for industrial and potentially national security espionage. China bears very serious watching in Latin America, but not as a military threat. Not that the PLA, the, you know, the Chinese army or Devi is going to be, you know, taking up residence in the

Panama Canal any time. Those are just unrealistic scenarios. And yet they are all part and parcel of the stock speech that Secretary Rubio and the president give when assessing threats in the reason. able to allow in our hemisphere a country that becomes a crossroads for the activities of all of our adversaries around the world. We just can't allow it. We can't have a country where the people in charge of its military and in charge of its police department are openly cooperating with drug trafficking organizations. We're not going to allow that. These are these things are direct threats to the United States. And we intend to use every element of leverage that we have to

ensure that that changes. I want to broaden out from Venezuela and just talk about some of these countries specifically. So Trump has recently said that Cuba is ready to fall and called Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia. 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. Staying on Colombia for a moment, why has that country and its leader become a target for Trump? Well, Colombia is absolutely and has been for a very long time, the world's largest producer of cocaine. And under Gustavo Petro, he took a month. much more permissive approach to going after the cocaine producers, the illegal cocaine producers

in Colombia. But Petro also has a problem. And that is, he has, I think as we would say, prosaically, diarrhea of the mouth or of the Twitter account. Because Petro's really not terribly cagey when it comes to understanding who Donald Trump is. And he literally, perhaps he has kind of perverse wish to bring down Donald Trump's wrath on Columbia. But he seems to know just how to push the right buttons to get Trump torqued off. But let's face it, we're sitting here talking on January 12th. We've been hearing about this sick man, this twisted man in Columbia, who has cocaine factories. And yet he took an hour-long phone call with him.

And in the end, posted something that said, oh, no, I had a really good talk with him. He's going to come to Washington. We can work this out. I hope he sees my way of thinking. He called yesterday through people, and he wants to meet, and that's fine with me. I've made up with people also, you know. So we're going to have a meeting with him. We had a very good conversation.

The people of Colombia are incredible people. Look, here's the important part. Gustavo Petro is gone in six months. You know, I mean, he's not running under the Colombian Constitution. He's not allowed to run for another term. He's not the candidate. I think Trump just waits this guy out. What about Panama?

So you are the former ambassador to Panama. And of course, we've heard all kinds of threats, as you mentioned from Trump this year, that he's going to take back the Panama Canal. We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made. And Panama's promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated American ships. And above all, China is operating the Panama can. and we didn't give it to China.

We gave it to Panama and we're taking it back. I know that you initially didn't find those threats credible, but how would you describe what has played out with Panama this year? Well, I still don't find those threats credible if you use the standard English language meaning of take back the canal. However, what I have seen, what you have seen, what the world has seen is that's not exactly what he meant. It's not that the United States is going to take back the canal.

It meant that the United States was going to pressure President Molino to abrogate contracts. These are sort of, you know, things that were up for open bid, contracts on two of the five working ports that service the Panama Canal. And why? Because two of them, Christoval and Balboa, on either side of the canal, are operating. and have been operated very efficiently, very commercially for over 25 years now since the reversion in 1999 by Hutchinson, a company that is based in Hong Kong. And they are in the process, I believe, of, they haven't done it yet, but I think ultimately they are going to cancel those contracts, put them back out to bid, and ensure that perhaps an American or

or a non-Chinese port operating company gets it. It appears to me that that means take the canal back. There was a memorandum of understanding that was signed, which also indicated that the United States would step up its military training in Panama. Quite frankly, that's what we used to do there all the time. They're just doing a little bit more of it. And then finally was this issue of first and free. First and Free was a shorthand term that the president and his advisors came up with to mean that U.S. Navy ships.

They do go through that canal on a regular basis, and they do already, since the beginning of the operation of that canal by Panamanian sovereignty, they do have what's called first right of passage. They get to cut the line effectively. Second thing, they do pay the tolls. Military tolls are paid based on gross weight displacement of water, and commercial tolls are paid based upon a percentage of the merchandise that's being transported across the canal. So what the Trump administration said was, we want to go first. Well, they already were going first. And we don't want to pay the toll. And the Panamanians had a real problem with that. Panamanian said, look, according to the treaty that you and us and we signed, we can't do that. And secondly, in the operating laws of what's called Panama Canal Authority, it specifically stipulate that we can't give anybody a free shot through.

So what they did was come up with all kinds of wink and nod will reimburse you on the backside kinds of things. And that issue has been quiet for the last six months. And I think that if I had to predict, Donald Trump's got a lot of other fish to fry, and the Panamanians just want to kind of keep winking and nodding and whistling past the graveyard until he's out of office. Do you see President Molino and Kadi Shaibeam in Mexico as having kind of similar challenges here, having to fend off American threats while also cooperating with them? Yeah. I have to say, having met both President Trump and Clodie Scheinbaum, I couldn't find two more different operating styles or personalities if I was charged to. Clothes Seinfeldon is almost robotic and analytical, and President Trump is obviously

neither of those two things. I think it's fair to say that Clodia Scheinbaum sees President Trump as a much bigger problem than Trump sees Mexico. I spent almost seven and a half years of my working career in Mexico. And this is, I have to say, the most draconian response I've seen from the Americans, which is talking openly about militarily violating Mexico sovereignty by attacking the cartels. But I don't think Trump, he feels, I believe, he's motivated by his MAGA constituency to do something muscular and strong in Mexico. I don't think it's based on personal animus regarding the leader, like perhaps it is in Colombia, or was in Colombia until their great telephone conversation.

But remember, he does this. You know, Trump is not a reliably consistent guy. And I think he, He would even agree with that because he feels he thrives on that uncertainty and chaos. What do you think the implications of striking Mexican cartels could be? Oh, it would be massive. It would be devastating. It would be, I think. Look, he is fundamentally reordering how the United States engages with the region and the world. Whether you like him or you dislike him, you must admit he is fundamentally leading a revolution in how the world. geopolitics work. But I think that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the United States of how deeply felt Mexican sovereignty is. Now, a lot of Mexicans, and this has changed,

10 years ago, I would have said there isn't a Mexican to be found who would welcome the United States coming in and taking out the cartels. Today, I'm not sure that's true. I think among the business elite in Mexico, and this is anecdotal, you would find a number of people who would be just fine with that, as long as it didn't affect their commercial interests. And that's the part where you always have to say, hey, caveat emptier. This is Donald Trump. Let's do Brazil now. I want to ask you also about Brazil, specifically the U.S. has imposed really significant tariffs on Brazil 50 percent, even though the U.S. holds a trade surplus with Brazil. They have also sanctioned people involved in the prosecution of former president Jayao Bolsonaro.

And so what is the Trump administration strategy vis-a-vis Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America? Yeah, by far, actually. And their economy is deeply entwined with China's. And the United States has a kind of episodic attention or attention span with Brazil. Again, let's look at just Trump's engagement with leadership. Justice Morais takes what I considered to be an enormously strict constitutionalist view of Zaire Bolsonaro's attempted insurrection on January 8th, and he's convicted. Immediately, the United States responds.

Why? Because President Trump and Zaire Bolsonaro used to be besties. And so based on this highly personalistic approach of Donald Trump to the rest of the world, he slaps the tariffs on. He makes all kinds of noise. He huffs and puffs on truth social. Well, fast forward a little bit. He has a great conversation with Lula, just like he had a great conversation with Kim Jong-un in his first administration.

And like he had a great conversation last Wednesday, I guess it was, with Gustavo Petro. So again, all over the map, no way to predict exactly how his personal relationship is going to go. And his own people tell you this. It depends on the number Donald Trump feels he wants to slap on people. There's no science behind this. There's no econometrics behind this. This is just truly someone exercising raw economic power. There are some friends that he has in the region.

They're on the other side of the ledger here. Countries that have been given carrots, I think you could argue. Argentina received a $20 billion bailout from the U.S. and El Salvador. Has contracts with the U.S. to detain deportees from America, and they're sprawling Seacot mega prison indefinitely. So just what role do these Trump loyalists, like Javier Mule and Naïbe Buckele play in the region? Where do they fit in with what we're seeing right now, you think? I think those two in particular are consummate pragmatists.

I think they both, I mean, because of their domestic situations, they both saw early on that they had a very good hook upon which to hang some Trumpian rhetoric and hold the president up during the, during the second campaign and now during the first year of office as their model, right? On Javier Miele in Argentina, it was on the Trumpian line about the deep state. Up in El Salvador, Nye Bukele had truly one of the, I think it was for some time, the world's highest murder rate of any nation state in the world. The gangs, as they call them, Maras, had truly taken over much of the civic space. and Buckele, he just fundamentally abrogated every civil liberty and principle of democracy. And he did it with a very willing, supportive public because they were so desperate about the genuine insecurity that existed there. That is not the case in the United States, Tammy.

We have national guardsmen patrolling streets of cities that are doing just fine. Listening to you today kind of describe the hollowing out of like robust diplomacy, diplomacy that you were part of for many, many years. I just wonder if you could kind of elaborate for me on what that you think that's going to unleash and what the kind of most pertinent consequences of that kind of erosion. will produce. I think the first thing it does is it takes away emergency breaks. You know when you're riding on a train or on a bus and it's just break only in case of emergency, I think that diplomacy was sort of the inspector of those fire extinguishers or emergency breaks. George Schultz, an American

Secretary of State 4, Robin Reagan once called it, tending to the diplomatic garden. Diplomacy is like a limbic system of international relations. Most citizens in any country shouldn't know really who their diplomats are unless there's a crisis. But it's when there is a crisis, when there is something that's unexpected. The diplomats are the people and diplomatic institutions are the, entities that are able, they know where to go immediately. They have the muscle memory to grab the fire extinguisher to, you know, pull the emergency break. They know how to prepare options for the

president. They know basically how the world works, what people are thinking. And we lose that. So we kind of go through the world blind. We send in total amateurs like Steve Whitkoff. And And that's what happens when you replace wholesale your career professional diplomatic corps with friends who are businessmen who play golf with you. But the real loss is going to be in out years when people realize the United States has no ability to respond to development needs, to governance needs, to any corruption efforts, to all the things they may want help with. we won't have the limbic system that we can activate.

That feels like probably a good place for us to end today. John, this was really interesting. Thank you so much for letting me pick your brain here. A real pleasure, Jamie. I'm not sure there's much left of it, but what there is, I'm happy to offer it up to you. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca. podcasts.