Citing the Monroe Doctrine does not make Trump's Venezuela stunt right or legal

The Americans - well, let's be clearer: SOME Americans - are fond of invoking the Monroe Doctrine as a kind of all-encompassing justification for some of the most egregious foreign policy initiatives of the 20th amd 21st centuries, including, most recently Trump's invasion of Venezuela and his threats to annex Greenland.

The problem is that the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (and the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary that followed it) was never very defensible, and Trump's willful misinterpretation of it (the Trump Corollary" or "Donroe Doctrine" as he calls it) moves it even further from a reasonable justification or vindication for problematic foreign policy. It was never a binding law, a legal principle to be followed, or a foundational tenet of US foreign policy; it was only ever a notional statement of intent, as applied to a very specific situation. In the modern world, it is indisputably an anachronism.

The Monroe Doctrine was formulated by the early American President James Monroe to promote regional stability at a time when many European colonies in the Caribbean and South America were declaring their independence. It was intended to prevent European powers from re-colonizing parts of the Americas, by presenting the United States as a kind of police force for countries in (very broadly speaking) their "backyard". It effectively unilaterally asserted the whole of the Western Hemisphere as America's rightful "sphere of influence". At the time, many newly-independent Latin-American nations welcomed Munroe's declaration as affirming their own freedoms, even though Munroe himself saw it as merely stamping out any threats to US "peace and safety", however improbable those were.

The Roosevelt Corollary expanded this vision of the US as an "international police force", and would servedl as a pretext for any number of inexcusable American interventions, occupations and "gunboat diplomacy". 

The Trump Corollary, that prioritizes American-led efforts to combat mass migration, drug-trafficking, and the "hostile" ownership of key assets, moves even further from the original Monroe Doctrine, which itself was largely indefensible, effectively serving as an excuse or justification for American imperialism, skd good old-fashioned bullying. 

Mr. Trump essentially considers the whole of the Western Hemisphere to be de facto under American control. No amount of referencing of historical documents can possibly make that true or right.