OPINION — In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney sent a diplomatic note to Britain that contained one of the most remarkable sentences in American foreign policy history: “The United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” The line was not a boast. It was a warning — directed at London during a boundary dispute in Venezuela, designed to end the conversation before it began. Britain, to the surprise of many, stood down. What Olney had asserted as doctrine, Elihu Root would spend the next two decades trying to discipline. As both Secretary of War and Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt, Root understood that a nation capable of issuing such a fiat faced a problem more dangerous than weakness: the temptation to use power simply because it could.
That project matters again. In January, the Trump administration carried out an operation that resulted in Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro being taken into U.S. custody and transferred to Florida to face federal narcoterrorism charges. The action was legally defensible under existing statutes and drew intense attention at home, dividing domestic opinion. It was also the kind of operation Root would have recognized as dangerous; not because it violated the law, but because it normalized the use of military force as an instrument of policy once legal justification could be established.
Root’s concern was not with Olney’s outcome. Britain had backed down, arbitration followed, and the crisis resolved without war. The problem was what Olney’s success licensed. A tool used effectively once becomes a template, and the lesson absorbed from 1895 was not that American power required discipline, but that assertion worked. Root understood this danger in part because he had helped institutionalize it. The Monroe Doctrine, as originally conceived in 1823, was framed as a barrier against European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. It was defensive in character. The Roosevelt Corollary, which Root helped construct in 1904, transformed that posture into an assertion of U.S. authority to intervene whenever Washington judged instability intolerable — Olney’s logic formalized and given permanent address. In practice, this produced a system of ongoing intervention that stopped short of formal empire while exercising many of its functions: military occupations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, repeated interventions in Nicaragua and Cuba, and coercive diplomacy justified in the language of order and stability.
Root spent the latter part of his career attempting to correct what he had helped build. He argued for international arbitration, multilateral institutions, and legal frameworks that would constrain American power even as the country grew stronger. In 1914, before the American Society of International Law, he offered a deliberately narrow redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine — not a declaration of hemispheric sovereignty, but a statement that certain foreign acts would be regarded as injurious to American peace and safety. The contrast with Olney was implicit but unmistakable. Root never named him. He didn’t need to. He simply offered a different reading of the same doctrine — more disciplined, more defensible over time — and let the contrast speak. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912 for that broader project. But his warning proved easier to admire than to heed. Over time, his diagnosis of American dominance flattened into justification and extended well beyond its original hemispheric frame.
I recognize the appeal of that logic because I once believed in it. In my twenties, working in Washington on national security issues at the end of the Cold War and into the early 2000s, I believed that the freedoms we enjoyed in the United States were a privilege that should not be exclusive, and that American power could and should be used to defend and extend the political conditions that made those freedoms possible. I sometimes imagined an America less burdened by the expectation that every use of power required a moral narrative alongside it — more openly transactional, less apologetic. I was a neocon before it mattered, and perhaps even MAGA before it was born. Iraq forced a reckoning, in part because it revealed how easily power justified by necessity could outrun foresight, legitimacy, and responsibility for what followed.
In the Maduro case, the debate in Washington quickly narrowed to whether the seizure could be defended legally. That question is necessary, but incomplete. The rule of law is the foundation of democratic authority, yet legality alone cannot carry the weight of wise judgment. A government can act within the law and still act unwisely, weakening the norms it depends on once power alone is no longer sufficient. American power should be used to confront injustice, and non-military tools are often preferable to force. The question is not whether to act, but how routinely power is applied once legality becomes its own justification.
The Maduro episode is unlikely to be the last application of this logic. Attention inside the administration has already shifted toward Cuba, where Washington is applying pressure through fuel interdiction, secondary sanctions, and emergency authorities framed as enforcement rather than intervention. These measures are calibrated, legally grounded, and short of war. They represent controlled intervention rather than unconstrained power.
That distinction matters — but it does not resolve the underlying risk. The Caracas operation involved the direct use of military force against a sitting head of state. Cuba involves economic pressure and interdiction. Root would have recognized the difference. He also would have understood how the former creates permission structures that make escalation from the latter more likely. The logic that validates measured coercion in Cuba is the same logic that justified seizing Maduro. Each action establishes precedent for the next. The question is not whether any single measure crosses a line, but whether the accumulation of incremental steps creates a system in which restraint becomes optional rather than structural.
There is a deeper tension at work. If the United States treats spheres of influence as an acceptable norm in its own hemisphere, it becomes harder to reject similar claims elsewhere. Vladimir Putin’s arguments about near-abroad authority rest on a logic the United States weakens when it asserts special prerogatives rooted in power rather than principle. The cases are not morally equivalent. Putin’s interventions in Ukraine and Georgia involve territorial conquest and the erasure of sovereignty in ways American actions in the hemisphere do not. But the structure of the argument is similar enough that adversaries will exploit the parallel and allies will notice the inconsistency.
Root understood that sovereignty without discipline invites decay. The question before us is not whether America can act this way. Clearly, it can. The question is whether doing so strengthens the order it claims to lead or erodes it through accumulated precedent. Power exercised without restraint rarely remains exceptional.
Root’s warning was never about weakness. It was about the difference between authority and dominance, between leadership that endures and power that exhausts itself. A century later, we are testing that distinction again.
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