By Benas Gerdžiūnas, Austė Sargytė, LRT.lt.

America’s seizure of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader marks a new stage in geopolitics. Washington is declaring its return to a 19th-century doctrine of “spheres of influence”, a move that could embolden countries such as China and Russia to act more aggressively in their own neighbourhoods.

Events in Venezuela – when US forces seized leader Nicolás Maduro in a lightning military operation on January 3 – point to the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, which was also referenced in the American National Security Strategy published in November last year.

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe doctrine,” US President Donald Trump said on Saturday after the Venezuela operation, adding the first letter of his own name to its title.

In 1823, the fourth US president, James Monroe, declared that the world was divided into spheres of influence and that the Western Hemisphere – the Americas – fell within the US zone of dominance. After the doctrine was proclaimed, the United States took part in dozens of military conflicts and coups in the region.

“There’s a vision of the world where Russia is a great power with a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, China would also have its sphere of influence over the Middle East and East Asia. This [American] part of the world is the US space of activity,” Enrique Arias, a political scientist and director of the Bildner Centre for Western Hemisphere Studies at City University of New York, told LRT.lt.

Read more: LRT.LT