What Teddy Roosevelt has to do with Trump's moves in Venezuela and Greenland

What Teddy Roosevelt has to do with Trump's moves in Venezuela and Greenland President Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy of "speak softly and carry a big stick" prioritized diplomacy first, with military force as a last resort. William Allen Rogers hide caption toggle caption The Monroe Doctrine. Big Stick policy. Gunboat diplomacy. Until recently, the terms were relegated mostly to the pages of dusty history books. But President Trump is leaning heavily on his own understanding of these concepts to justify his attack on Venezuela , his bullying tactics aimed at acquiring Greenland and his latest threats to strike Iran . At a news conference this month, Trump said U.S. troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro because his actions amounted to a "gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries ... to the Monroe Doctrine." "And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot.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,'" he said. What is the Monroe Doctrine? In 1823, President James Monroe cautioned Europe in his address to Congress , declaring that "any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of" the Western Hemisphere would be seen as "dangerous to our peace and safety." A painting of James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, who served from 1817 to 1825. The doctrine named after him has served as a justification for U.S. intervention in Latin America and elsewhere. National Archives/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Monroe's declaration came at a time when Spain was struggling to hang on to its North American possessions - areas on the continent that included parts of Florida and vast areas of the present-day U.S. Southwest. The Monroe Doctrine "emerged from a geopolitical context in which the United States was a rising power, staking a claim to the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence," says Jay Sexton, director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. At its inception, the doctrine "simply stated what European powers could not do in the Western Hemisphere" but was deliberately open-ended, allowing "later Americans [to] redeploy it or reimagine it for a new context," adds Sexton, who is author of The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America . In fact, eight decades later, President Theodore Roosevelt reimagined the Monroe Doctrine as a more muscular policy - in part as a response to Britain, Germany and Italy's naval blockade of Venezuelan ports over that country's failure to pay on foreign debts. In his 1904 annual message to Congress , Roosevelt argued that "chronic wrongdoing" on the world stage required "intervention by some civilized nation." "In the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power," he said. "Roosevelt strongly believed that the real advances...

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