Venezuela (thread 6), Episode 3: Henry Cabot Lodge: When Empire Felt Like Duty

Let’s pick up the Venezuela thread with Henry Cabot Lodge — the senator who treated intervention as a responsibility, not a choice. He believed American power had to be used to preserve order in the hemisphere, even if that meant putting stability above lofty talk about democracy.

To Lodge, protecting trade, resources, and strategic influence justified firm action; intervention was maintenance of an international order, messy but, in his view, necessary.