In 1914, addressing the University of Buenos Aires, President Theodore Roosevelt called the Monroe Doctrine a policy “which the United States promulgated, partly as a matter of policy in its own interest, partly as a matter of policy in the interest of all the republics of the New World.” Earlier this week, the State Department posted a five-minute video to its official account on Twitter tracing a straight line from James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress through the Spanish-American War, the Roosevelt Corollary, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, arriving finally at the abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Caracas this past January. The video presents Donald Trump as the doctrine’s “latest defender.”

Dispensing with two centuries of diplomatic euphemism, the video concludes that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” Rather than a defense of hemispheric independence that just so happens to benefit the United States, the Monroe Doctrine today is presented openly as a tool of American dominance.

This is not entirely surprising — the pretense of goodwill has never been central to the MAGA project. But for most of its history, the Monroe Doctrine required a certain interpretive work to be understood as an instrument of US hegemony. Defenders could point to its origins as a warning against European recolonization, a solidaristic shield extended over shaky, newly independent republics. Critics had to trace how the shield became a cudgel.