Detrimental Outside Influence

In December 1823, President James Monroe used his annual message to Congress to outline what would later become known as the Monroe Doctrine. ‘The American continents’, he said, were no longerto be subject to the ‘interposition’ of European powers. Attempts by Europeans to ‘extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere’ would be looked on unkindly by the United States.

For most of the 19th century the US lacked the capacity to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. Instead the task fell to Britain and the Royal Navy, which had a complementary interest in keeping out Spain and Portugal. That changed in December 1904, when Theodore Roosevelt – insulted by a Pan-European blockade of Venezuela in 1902-3 – asserted a US right to ‘international police power’ in the Americas. For more than a century the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine has underwritten US-sponsored coups d’état, invasions and stratagems in Latin America.

Last week, the US published its new National Security Strategy (one is produced each presidential term; this is Trump’s second). ‘After years of neglect,’ the document says, ‘the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine.’ It added a ‘Trump Corollary’: the US will ‘deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere’.

The text is short and the language blunt. Like past declarative strategic documents, some of it is a collection of du jour foreign policy positions; American national security clerks refer to this as the Christmas ornament problem. But it is brasher in its ornamentation than its predecessors, including the 2017 strategy from Trump’s first term. The formal revival of the Monroe Doctrine is a flourish.

American leaders have for many years used the drug trade as a convenient justification for the exercise of US power in Latin America. The 2025 National Security Strategy goes further. To ensure hemispheric pre-eminence, it says, the US must ‘enlist’ existing allies and, perhaps more ominously, ‘expand’. The National Security Council is to ‘identify strategic points and resources in the Western hemisphere with a view to their protection’. There is glaring irony in the idea that the US will protect Latin America from ‘detrimental outside influence’.

The idea for a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine can be traced to James Holmes, the chair of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College, who used the term in January in the National Interest. Holmes discussed how Latin American governments might seek close relationships with Beijing: ‘covenants guaranteeing mercantile access could morph into something altogether more sinister.’

Holmes called for a Trump Corollary to head off Chinese influence in the Americas. That is presumably what the new NSS means when it calls for preventing ‘threatening capabilities’ from being installed in the Western hemisphere. Holmes had no direct input to the document and told me he was ‘a little shocked’ that the US government had formally resuscitated the Monroe Doctrine. His vision, he said, was for a strategy based on ‘consent from fellow American governments’.

Projecting power in Latin America is an established preoccupation of Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio. And it has been on Trump’s mind since his first term, when he talked about the Monroe Doctrine at the UN General Assembly. In December 2024, Trump began agitating about the Panama Canal, and floated the idea of annexing Greenland and Canada. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. In January, the US announced a ‘naval policing mission’ in the Caribbean, codenamed Operation Southern Spear.

In November, the Pentagon recalled a full carrier strike group from the Mediterranean and sent it to the waters off Venezuela. US military forces have conducted airstrikes in the Caribbean on more than twenty boats of unknown character (officials claim they were all the vehicles of drug runners). ‘The Western hemisphere is America’s neighbourhood,’ said the soi-disant secretary of war, Peter Hegseth.

Away from Latin America, the language about China is softer than the Biden administration used in 2022. Trump’s text even speaks of ‘a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing’. But it also calls for the US to marshal its allies on the Indo-Pacific ‘battleground’ and demand military commitments from Japan and South Korea. US military forces are to still to be used for ‘denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain’.

The new national security strategy follows its predecessors in paying lip service to the declining importance of the Middle East while also listing reasons for its enduring strategic significance. The US, it asserts, ‘will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable’.

Where Europe is concerned, much of the strategy is consistent with past rhetoric from Trump and Vance. They are tired of using the war in Ukraine to bleed Russia – a policy they associate with the Democrats – and instead demand an ‘expeditious cessation of hostilities’. European states are prevailed on to build up their military forces (while remaining subservient to the US). To this is added a crude list of complaints about climate policy and ‘civilisational erasure’. Western Europe is said to be at risk from migration, lack of regard for traditional families and a loss of ‘civilisational self-confidence’. Parts of the text read like an ethnonationalist phrasebook.

Its authors are keen to present their work as a break with precedent. Past US governments are criticised for seeking ‘permanent American domination of the entire world’ and making ‘misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade”’. Under Trump’s rectification campaign, foreign policy is to be pragmatic, realistic, principled, muscular and restrained. No more shouldering of ‘global burdens’, whatever those were, or ‘propping up the entire world order like Atlas’.

Peter Feaver, who served on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, told me that the new strategy has the virtue of being a faithful reflection of Trump’s beliefs – more so than the version published in his first term. For better or worse, Feaver said, ‘it seems to capture how the Trump administration genuinely thinks the world operates.’

But is Donald Trump Thought that much of an innovation? Elsewhere the strategy insists the US must maintain military superiority and energy dominance, and ensure that no potential challengers can ‘hold America at risk’. It even calls for ‘unrivalled “soft power”’.

In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents. But there is plenty of dissembling. Trump’s government, which has bombed Iran, conducted drone assassinations in northern Syria, bombed Yemen and waged a global trade war is said to have a ‘predisposition to non-interventionism’.

For Latin America, the official revival of the Monroe Doctrine is an immediate concern. As the NSS was being published, the US government was engaged in an attempt to topple the government of Venezuela. In October, it used its special drawing rights at the IMF to prop up Javier Milei’s government in Argentina. Last week, the US intervened in presidential elections in Honduras by proffering the release of a past Honduran president from jail in West Virginia.

The Trump Corollary is said to be a ‘potent restoration of American power’. On the anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine this year, the White House issued a proclamation celebrating trade deals with El Salvador, Argentina, Ecuador and Guatemala, and the restoration of ‘privileged access through the Panama Canal’. The US, it said, would always decide destiny in ‘our hemisphere’.