Want to Understand the 'Donroe Doctrine'? Look to Trump’s Gaza Plan
Trump has laid the groundwork for 'taking over' and 'owning' Gaza in a deal that will enrich his family and associates. Undoubtedly, similar plans are in the works now for Venezuela and beyond.
Reflecting his penchant for self-promotion and his marketing wiles, it’s no surprise that President Donald Trump proclaimed his brazen, unauthorized, and illegal military attack on Venezuela earlier this month – resulting in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to stand trial in New York on narco-terrorism charges – as the opening salvo in his self-styled “Donroe Doctrine.”
This updated version of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine – promulgated by President James Monroe to assert exclusive US colonial and imperial domination over the Western Hemisphere to the exclusion of European powers – builds on more than two centuries of the United States throwing its preponderant weight around the Caribbean, Latin America, and South America through wars, military occupations, annexations, sanctions, CIA-backed coups, and regime change operations to achieve hemispheric preeminence.
One of the principal forces driving colonialism and imperialism as a worldwide phenomenon over the last half-millennium has been the extraction of natural resources and the creation of markets for exports benefiting the metropole’s economy, its corporate interests, and even the personal pocketbooks of its rulers.
As an example of the latter, perhaps most notoriously, Belgian King Leopold II considered himself the private owner and sovereign over the so-called Congo Free State for more than two decades before Congo became a formal Belgian colony amid an international outcry over the genocidal violence inflicted on indigenous populations to compel forced labor to extract rubber and ivory for the king’s personal gain.
The “Donroe Doctrine” repackages such unabashed 19th-century personal exploitation of countries in a more modern but no less exploitative 21st-century crony capitalism framework. “They took all of our oil from not that long ago. And we want it back,” Trump declared last month as the US interdicted Venezuelan oil tankers and continued its deadly strikes on alleged drug boats. Reversing several waves of Venezuelan nationalizations of US oil companies’ stakes in the country with the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves appears to be a primary motivation in Trump’s expressed desire to “run” Venezuela, along with securing access to Venezuela’s rare-earth minerals.
Trump’s consultations with oil executives prior to his abduction of Maduro call to mind previous examples of regime change collaboration between the US government and corporate interests – notably, the interactions between the United Fruit Company and the CIA, which led to the Eisenhower administration’s overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.
However, one does not need to travel so far back historically to grasp the genesis of the “Donroe Doctrine,” which lies not in the Western Hemisphere but in the Middle East, specifically in Gaza, part of Palestine occupied by Israel since 1967 and whose population has been subjected to a US-backed Israeli genocide for the past two years.
‘Own’ Gaza
Since the start of his second term, Trump has notified the delivery of and sought congressional approval for around $19 billion of taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel, the same types of weapons – helicopter gunships, missiles, bulldozers, and assault vehicles – which Israel has used in violation of both domestic and international law to starve, injure, and kill Palestinians, and flatten Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland of tons of rubble and unexploded ordnance.
Trump, in turn, used Israel’s devastation of Gaza with US weapons as a pretext for proposing a preposterous Venezuela-style seizure of Palestinian land. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing arrest by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, Trump announced nearly a year ago that the United States would “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.” The United States would “level the site” and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” However, Gaza would not become a Riviera for Palestinian survivors of Israel’s genocide; instead, under Trump’s plan, they all would be ethnically cleansed from their homeland, forcibly relocated to neighboring countries.
Trump eventually walked back his formal proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in his 20-point Gaza plan of last October, which stated that Palestinians would not be forcibly relocated outside their homeland. Nevertheless, Palestinians still face the prospect of being compelled to leave Gaza due to the untenable conditions there – conditions perpetuated and exacerbated by Israel’s ongoing military occupation over more than half of Gaza, its continual destruction of Palestinian homes, and its deregistration and expulsion of NGOs providing humanitarian relief – a prospect which Trump greeted as a “great opportunity” in a December press conference held with Netanyahu. And even if Palestinians remain in Gaza, it is clear that Gaza still will not be reconstituted for the benefit of Palestinian survivors of Israel’s genocide but for profiteers of disaster capitalism.
As noted by Nur Arafeh and Mandy Turner, several proposals which have been put forward by the Israeli government and by pro-Israel academics and think tanks, and which have influenced the Trump administration’s Gaza plan all “make possible the introduction of three principal mechanisms that enable disaster capitalism: the establishment of a governance structure that denies Palestinians political agency and control over their future; a process of land grabbing, resource extraction, and reconstruction profiteering; and the imposition of security arrangements to enforce the conditions necessary for sustained political and economic control by Israel and its allies.”
Standing at the nexus of these US plans for Gaza and the crony capitalists poised to cash in are Trump’s son-in-law and international troubleshooter, Jared Kushner, and his special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Both Kushner and Witkoff have extensive real estate and investment entanglements with Gulf Arab countries, creating undoubted conflicts of interest as they commingle US foreign policy and their personal portfolios.
Predictably, Kushner and Witkoff were the primary drivers of a Trump administration $112 billion economic blueprint for Gaza, dubbed “Project Sunrise.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the 32-page PowerPoint slide deck seeks to transform “Gaza’s rubble into a futuristic coastal destination” featuring “Beachside luxury resorts. High-speed rail. AI-optimized smart grids.” Undoubtedly, Kushner and Witkoff stand to profit handsomely both directly and indirectly through contracts won by their investment groups and their clients to implement this plan.
Kushner and Witkoff were subsequently appointed by Trump to both the executive board and the subsidiary Gaza executive board of his so-called “Board of Peace,” whose composition was announced last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The board, chaired by Trump himself, gives the president virtually unchecked control over Gaza’s economic future, along with a potential vehicle to circumvent and subvert the UN Security Council. Kushner’s presentation of a slide deck of a “master plan” for Gaza, replete with glitzy skyscraper hotels and devoid of any Palestinian input, doubles down on his vision of disaster capitalism profiteering.
To displaced Palestinian survivors of Israel’s genocide sheltering in inadequate tents and dangerously unstable bombed-out buildings, whose quotidian quest for survival remains perilous as Israel continues to deny Palestinians access to food, drinking water, sanitation, electricity, medical supplies, and durable temporary housing through its ongoing blockade of Gaza, the plan’s “steps to take Gaza residents from tents to penthouses and from poverty to prosperity” must seem a cruel hoax and mockery of their suffering.
These plans are likely to be foisted on Palestinian survivors of Israel’s genocide without any meaningful input from those impacted. The second phase of Trump’s Gaza plan subsumes an unelected, appointed technocratic body of apolitical Palestinians who will be responsible for running the day-to-day affairs of Gaza at the dictation of a so-called “Board of Peace” to be chaired by Trump himself. Through this board, Trump has arrogated to himself the right not only to oversee Gaza’s governance, but to control its economic future while enforcing the arrangement through his overall command of a proposed international military force. Worst of all, the Security Council solemnized this blatant denial of Palestinian self-determination by adopting a resolution approving Trump’s Gaza Plan.
Thus, Trump has laid the groundwork for “taking over” and “owning” Gaza in a sweetheart deal that will enrich his family members and associates. Undoubtedly, similar plans are in the works now for Venezuela as Trump seeks to extend his “ownership” of yet another people’s land and resources through his “Donroe Doctrine.”
Josh Ruebner is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University’s Justice and Peace Studies Program and the author of Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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Who is going to build all that and who will pay for it ( US Taxpayers?), who will police it and who will gain from the billions spent? No doubt those held captive ( my word for slavery) will be the Palestinians who will be expected to build and staff this resort city. But ask how they will live, where will they get healthcare and where will their schools and clinics be, their art and culture fostered during and after this project is finished? Better yet, imagine yourself vacationing there, sleeping above the rubble and burial grounds of the thousands killed in this genocide, served by survivors who will vie with you for valuable water resources, scarce in their tents, but filling your hotel swimming pool. South Gaza, that now houses the remaining 2 million Palastinian people may be a tent camp. What kind of monsters think of such development and what kind of monsters visit such a place? A better solution. Clear the land to rebuild Palestinian State Schools, hospitals and businesses and give the illegal settlements, built by Israel, to the Palestinian people to live, with excellent public transport from settlements, into Gaza for work, healthcare and Higher Education and training Centers, cultural centers, and government offices, sports centers and media centers. Which place would get your tourist dollars?
The Security Council voted for this? France and the UK think this is okay? Seriously?