Venezuela, Canada and the “Donroe Doctrine”

In the season 10 premiere of the Courage My Friends podcast series, we are pleased to welcome back journalist, author and director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, Vijay Prashad and professor of International Relations at St. Thomas University, Shaun Narine. 

We discuss the recent US military attack on Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (the so-called “Donroe Doctrine”) and what this means for Canada, and how all of this is connected to the decline of US hegemony, the rise of Asia and the West’s shift into hyper-imperialism.

Speaking on the US National Security Strategy or the “Donroe Doctrine”, Narine says:

“They're actually saying, look, the Western Hemisphere is ours … And I think in a lot of ways, the Venezuela situation was an easy sort of first pass at asserting this …’Let's go in. Let's take out Maduro. And let's send the message to the entire region”... And of course, the message was received.And if I'm reading this correctly, and from Canada, they're making good on the threat that no country in the Western Hemisphere can do anything that the United States finds to be objectionable.”

On hyper-imperialism, Prashad explains:

“The United States and its European partners … hollowed out the manufacturing. Hollowed out science and technology. Hollowed out the universities … and find suddenly the center of gravity of the world economy shifting to Asia … They've lost the source of power they used to have over raw materials, over finance, over science and technology. But two sources of power remain. One of them is military power … The other source of power is the power of information … And they use it pretty effectively to try to dampen other powers. But there are contradictions.”

About today’s guests: 

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. His most recent book, with Grieve Chelwa, is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (Johannesburg: Inkani Books, 2026). Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and chief correspondent for Globetrotter. He is an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi), at Inkani Books (Johannesburg), and at La Trocha (Chile). He has appeared in two films – Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

Shaun Narine is a professor of International Relations at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. He specializes in studying institutions in the Asia Pacific but has also written and commented on Canadian and US foreign policy and great power politics, including the rise of China.                                 

Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute or here. 

Image: Vijay Prashad, Shaun Narine  / Used with permission.

Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased. 

Intro Voices: Ashley Booth (Podcast Announcer); Bob Luker (Tommy) 

Courage My Friends Podcast Organizing Committee: Chandra Budhu, Ashley Booth, Resh Budhu. 

Produced by: Resh Budhu, The Tommy Douglas Institute of Labour and Social Justice and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca. 

Host: Resh Budhu.