Trump has turned influence into conquest and forced South America to respond accordingly - and resistance is becoming unavoidable. Right, so Trump has just made conquest official again. Not invasion-by-invasion, not deniable pressure, but a written claim that all of South America will be subordinate to US authority, its governments conditional on that, its resources pre-tagged for the US, its borders negotiable by Trump’s leave. Venezuela wasn’t a mistake or a one-off, it was the proof of concept, the test, the moment Washington stopped pretending this was about law enforcement or democracy and started acting like take over was the point. Once a US president puts doctrine behind that, once oil is named, once leaders are removed, and military force is normalised across borders, every country in the hemisphere has to adjust or be caught flat-footed. That adjustment is already under way, because submission under these terms isn’t stability, it’s exposure. This isn’t a flare-up. It’s the moment an old 150 year old imperial system gets resurrected and made explicit and Venezuela is just the start. Right, so Donald Trump has announced a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and ordered the United States to reassert pre-eminence across South America through military force, resource control, and enforced alignment. This is the policy now apparently being implemented. We should have seen this coming actually. Trump’s National Security Strategy, published in November of last year, names the Western Hemisphere as the primary security priority of the United States and commits Washington to assert and enforce a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Enforcement is not diplomacy. It is coercion with a timetable attached to it. South America is not framed as a set of sovereign states with interests to balance. It is framed as an internal zone to be managed, secured, and disciplined. Everything else follows from that.