The standard toolkit of the Donroe Doctrine has involved throwing diplomatic and political support behind right-wing candidates in Andean countries, including Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, offering them military cooperation, favorable bilateral trade deals, and investment via development banks in exchange for “market-friendly” reforms upon taking power.

In the case of Bolivia, President Rodrigo Paz has rolled back decades of economic and social progress that was made under two decades of socialist rule. Since coming to power under the mandate of “capitalism for all,” Paz has slashed fuel subsidies, opened soybean commodities for export, negotiated IMF loans, and undermined labor protections. He has also sought to facilitate transnational mining investment in — and extraction from — Bolivia’s extraordinarily abundant and notoriously capital-intensive lithium reserves.

In addition, Paz is threatening one of the world’s most robust legal defenses against imperialism by “Supreme Decree.” For nearly two decades, the Bolivian Constitution has explicitly stipulated that business lawsuits must be settled within sovereign jurisdiction; if Paz gradually undermines the spirit of that clause by approving individual “strategic investments” that play by ISDS-style rules, he will have succeeded in aligning La Paz, Caracas, and Quito — while leaving Bogotá isolated in its defense of economic sovereignty.

When coercion fails, the “Donroe Doctrine” resorts to violence, as it did most spectacularly in the January invasion of Venezuela. “Operation Absolute Resolve,” which killed at least eighty people in service of illegally abducting President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores on dubious drug trafficking charges, was an unprecedented use of military force in South America. It also served as a crucial precondition for reforms to the country’s oil and mining sectors, as well as a warning to the rest of the region to fall in line — or else.

The Trump administration has continued this playbook by bombing the Colombian border region in joint operations with Ecuadorian forces. By funneling military support and political capital into Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s escalating “drug war,” the Pentagon is replicating the failures of a decades-long approach that fails to address the economic roots of the problem, and instead exacerbates them.

Simultaneously, Noboa is trying to manufacture an economic crisis in Colombia ahead of its upcoming elections. By imposing 100 percent tariffs on Colombian goods starting May 1, Noboa is severing a vital trade artery that leads directly through southwest Colombia, a crucial base of support for the country’s left-wing Historic Pact coalition. President Petro recently accused members of the opposition of colluding with Noboa to exacerbate this crisis; Álvaro Uribe, leading figure of the Colombian right, reportedly visited Ecuador mere days before new tariffs were announced.

Just off the coast of this border region, the US military has recently expanded its strikes on alleged “drug smuggling” boats. This policy of extrajudicial killing, which has also targeted the Caribbean, has left at least 180 dead. The resulting instability of all of these policies provides ammunition to the argument that transnational capital needs more “legal certainty” through ISDS-style arbitration to operate in the region.

Expanding ISDS-style arbitration does more than merely secure favorable contracts for energy and mining capital. It also fractures solidarity within the Andean Community, thus ensuring the Andes continue to play a subordinate role within the global value chain and “outlawing” both resource nationalism and high-value industrialization.

Yet for all the sweeping ambitions of the Donroe Doctrine, the US imperial project is far from invincible.

In March, President Gustavo Petro took the historic and defiant step of initiating Colombia’s withdrawal from ISDS systems like the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). He did so at the encouragement of hundreds of economists that bridge both mainstream and heterodox schools. At the time of his announcement, Colombia had upward of $14 billion at risk in court cases that developing countries nearly always lose.

By rejecting arbitration, Petro has safeguarded Colombia’s national resources and its path to a sovereign green energy transition. He also pointed out the double standard underlying ISDS courts in which countries in the Global North can reject them whereas many countries in the Global South must acquiesce to their jurisdiction as a precondition for securing loans. In his announcement, he argued that if several other countries have already “exited this type of arbitration, including the United States, I don’t see why Colombia shouldn’t do the same.”

This builds on Petro’s track record of challenging the geopolitical dictates of both the United States and Europe, which include his repeated condemnations of the aforementioned “War on Drugs,” his refusal to ship Colombian weapons to Ukraine, his pursuit of economic integration with the BRICS block, and, notably, his severing of diplomatic ties with Israel.

By leaving ISDS courts and pursuing a nonaligned foreign policy, Petro has also shown regional leaders that holding the line on economic sovereignty is possible, even under direct military threat. This explains why the Trump administration remains fixated on undermining him.

This struggle is playing out against a shifting global backdrop that is undermining the long-term solvency of the US empire. Trump’s illegal war on Iran is poised to drive up inflation globally, accelerating the trend of central banks abandoning the dollar. While lawyers in the Trump administration review Bolivia’s constitution, thinking of clever ways to pry open the Andes for the World Bank, soldiers in the Persian Gulf are attempting to shore up US financial dominance with bombs, ironically threatening future investments.

Thus, while ISDS arbitration remains formidable in theory, the broader geopolitical reality is far more complex. The United States is pushing Venezuela toward extraterritorial courts to levy notional fines that it may soon lack the unilateral military and economic supremacy to enforce.

Trapped between an oil supply crisis in the Middle East and the endless global demand for critical minerals, transnational capital is now destined to return to Venezuela. The Bolivarian Revolution was, at its core, a resource nationalist project rooted in the belief that nature’s free gifts could serve as a bridge to prosperity and sustainable development. Having gutted every meaningful protection in the Venezuelan Constitution, the Legislature has now fully subordinated the state’s raison d’être to the “de-risking” needs of transnational energy and mining capital. This has accomplished a bizarre-but-functional result after years of US coup attempts and sanctions — winning the war against the Bolivarian State by way of the Bolivarian State.