William W. Holland of Durham is a retired high school teacher of English and U.S. history.

From the day he took office, it has been clear that President Trump doesn’t view other nations as sovereign entities with governments ideally dedicated to serving the needs of their people. He sees them instead as cookie jars, their only value consisting of their material resources.

Their governments are to be respected only to the degree to which they are willing to part with those resources in ways that enrich the Trump family or wealthy corporatists willing to fund his quest for full-spectrum dominance.

Power to him simply consists of the ability to impose his will, either through “deals” or military might, on other people and extract from them whatever resources — rare earths in Ukraine, beachfront property in Gaza, oil in Venezuela, who knows what in Greenland — he views as critical to U.S. prosperity, the preferences and rights of their citizens be damned.

This odious perspective dominated U.S. foreign policy throughout much of the Cold War era, with disastrous consequences.

Case in point: In 1954, United Fruit Co. complained to the Eisenhower administration about land reform efforts initiated by Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz to distribute land not currently in use to poor Mayan peasants.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, proposed an antidote to these suspiciously leftist policies: Instead of direct military action by the U.S., they recommended recruiting a disaffected military officer named Carlos Castillo Armas to organize groups of soldiers in the jungles of neighboring El Salvador and Honduras.

When several small incursions were repulsed, the CIA set up a radio station to broadcast news of nonexistent battles that gave the impression of a powerful army advancing toward the Guatemalan capital. To reinforce that impression, the CIA commissioned two military planes to buzz the president’s palace. After both were shot down, their absence threatened to jeopardize the entire mission, and a decision had to be made about whether or not to replace them.

President Eisenhower summoned my father, Henry F. Holland, assistant secretary for Latin American affairs at the time, to give his advice on the matter.

Knowing that my dad was against replacing the planes, Ike summoned CIA chief Allen Dulles to make the counterargument. My father contended that replacing the planes would expose U.S. involvement with the insurrection and thereby reinforce the perception of our country as the “bully from the North,” violate every known precept of national sovereignty and ignite a civil war.

Dulles argued simply that the operation in Guatemala would have zero chance of success without the needed planes. Believing that covert operations were preferable to some sort of U.S. invasion, Ike gave his nod for replacing the planes. A wealthy private individual and former ambassador to Brazil named William Pawley financed the purchase on the condition that the CIA reimburse him at some future date.

The planes took off from an airfield in Nicaragua, then ruled by a rabidly anti-Communist dictator named Anastasio Somoza, and dropped a bomb on the palace grounds, thereby spooking Arbenz and precipitating his flight to Mexico.

Once installed as president, Carlos Castillo Armas oversaw the murder of roughly 4,000 Arbenz supporters and Communists — a small price to pay, it appeared, for eliminating a potential pro-Russian ally.

But that was only the beginning. Over the ensuing 36 years and successive military coups, one of which resulted in the death of Armas, over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or forcibly disappeared and 600 villages utterly destroyed. Overall, 83% were indigenous Maya, the perceived base of support for the rebels. The rest were labor union leaders, college professors, basically anyone who betrayed a hint of sympathy with rights of Mayan peasants or the average Guatemalan.

But Trump cares nothing for the lessons of history.

Colombia, Cuba, perhaps even Mexico are next in his sights. Are the American people really prepared to sustain the magnitude of his “Donroe Doctrine,” hemisphere-dominating agenda?