Why America’s backyard is a frontline

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL January 4, 2026

The US was never meant to build an empire. An alternative history imagines it couldn’t

A 1913 cartoon in Puck magazine by Udo Keppler portrays the United States’ paternalistic behaviour towards South America. Uncle Sam’s legs serve as the poles of a magnet that pulls in others in the hemisphere because of the Monroe Doctrine. Look closely and the Hispanic men’s hats bear the name of each country. Public domain

Happy 2026.

This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.

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The Big Story:

Four words sum up Donald Trump’s rambling justification for the United States’ audacious and legally dubious kidnap and toppling of Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro: Oil. The Monroe Doctrine.

Some say the greedy focus on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves stems from America’s imperialist worldview, which is enshrined in the two-century-old Monroe Doctrine. In actual fact, Trump’s brazen display of US power reverses the Doctrine’s basic principle — no further colonisation of “free and independent” countries in the Americas.

But then the Monroe Doctrine has mostly been observed in the breach, as our first book explains, via a quote from 19th century Cuban national hero José Martí:

He explodes its [the Doctrine’s] justification of protecting democracy in the New World, calling the United States ‘‘a nation beginning to regard freedom — the perennial and universal hope of mankind — as its right, and to invoke it for purposes of depriving other nations of it’’.