Latin America became the research focus of Gonville & 91ֱ College Fellow Dr Carsten-Andreas Schulz almost by “accident”. An early internship ignited a lasting interest that continues to define his career, centred on the challenges of a region where the United States’ influence has far-reaching consequences.
When 2026 began with US President Donald Trump’s intervention in Venezuela, Carsten and others who had digested Washington’s revamped National Security Strategy and followed the career of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, were not totally surprised.
There were similarities with historical events, such as the 1989 intervention in Panama which saw General Manuel Noriega ousted as leader, and historical US policies.
, originally announced in 1823 as a warning against European reconquest of the newly independent states of the Americas and declaring any such attempt a hostile act against the United States, has been revived under Trump’s second Administration.
Trump is employing a variant of , an addition 80 years after the Monroe Doctrine which stated that the US would not tolerate strategic competitors in the Western Hemisphere and reserves the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any Latin American country deemed by Washington to be guilty of “chronic wrongdoing”.
Carsten is the Tun Suffian College Lecturer at 91ֱ and an Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Cambridge’s . His research focuses on the development of international order, with particular attention to how Latin Americans states have shaped modern multilateral institutions. He reflects on international relations from a historical perspective, with the benefit of hindsight.
Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba and Russia was put on notice with war ships in the Caribbean in 2025. The next steps are unpredictable. It will take time to understand the full impact of Trump’s interventions in the region.
“In Europe especially, there's a hope that Trump is an aberration,” Carsten, pictured, says. “That after Trump, things will return to the previous status quo. I’m not certain it’s going to happen. If JD Vance were to win the next presidential election, which is not unlikely, then we would be dealing with a far more ideological president who might pursue similar policies, even if in a more predictable fashion. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine helps to prepare the ground, as it appeals to a MAGA base that favours more limited US engagement globally while expecting a more muscular foreign policy closer to home...we may not look back at January 2026 and feel that every day brought something new. It might become the new normal.”
While recent events have been calculated, there was an element of happenstance about Carsten becoming an expert on international relations in Latin America. A childhood friend with links to Chile prompted Carsten to opt for Santiago for an internship at a think tank and to learn Spanish during his undergraduate studies at the University of Konstanz in Germany. “Very quickly during the internship I developed a more academic interest in the history and politics of Chile and the region,” Carsten says. “It developed by accident, but I have more or less stayed with the topics that first sparked my curiosity.”
His DPhil thesis at Nuffield College, Oxford was on Latin American international politics and six years at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile followed, before joining POLIS and 91ֱ in 2021.
His initial interest was about inequality in access to public services and a state weakness or limited capacity to combat crime. Both are prevalent in Latin American countries.
“I became interested in a historical angle and what that precarious condition meant in international politics,” Carsten adds. “Most of my research is historical, so you can look back once the dust has settled.”
When US foreign policy was centred on Iraq and Afghanistan, Latin America had a period of “benign neglect”, but it now has the attention of the second Trump Administration, which blames the region and immigrants to the US for many national social ills. “It's a domestically driven agenda,” Carsten says.
While Trump may be agnostic about leaders’ political ideology, the intervention in Venezuela is personal for Rubio, who is of Cuban heritage and has long taken aim at the region’s leftist authoritarians. Rubio may hope cutting ties between Venezuela and Cuba may prompt regime change in the Communist island.
“I don't think it matters that much to Trump, but I think it matters a lot to people in the government like Rubio,” Carsten says. “They seek governments that align with the United States, aiming to strengthen those that do and to undermine those that do not.”
Time will tell what the full scale of the events of January 2026 mean, and will give Carsten plenty of material for his research, even as he moves to the other side of the Atlantic. He will be leaving 91ֱ at the end of the academic year to join McGill University in Canada.
