A “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is the centerpiece of the administration’s National Security Strategy and its National Defense Strategy. Promising to defend U.S. interests in the region, it pledges to do so by itself with “speed, power, and precision” if necessary. This “Donroe Doctrine” justifies intervening in Venezuela, seeking to annex Greenland, and putting pressure on Colombia, Cuba, and even Panama. Many see a similar strategic logic as animating Russian and Chinese efforts to take steps to assert control over their own “near abroads,” which further tarnishes it and also tars other theories of great-power politics with guilt by association.
To be sure, the president’s advisor Stephen Miller was not totally off-base in arguing that the original Monroe Doctrine embodied some uncomfortable “iron laws” of geopolitics: Great powers consistently endeavor to keep other great powers from ensconcing themselves nearby. The logic for this is clearly laid out in economist Kenneth Boulding’s “loss of strength gradient”: the further you have to project a given increment of military power, the weaker it becomes. Conversely, the closer an adversary can come, the greater his ability to use power against you. But we ought not to blame the Monroe Doctrine for President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive approach in our hemisphere.
First, in its original articulation it was largely “passive,” mandating only that extra-hemispheric powers stay out, or if they already were in, they restrict themselves to their current holdings. President James Monroe simply declared in 1823 that “we should consider any attempt on [European powers’] part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” Almost every American president opposed the activities of potential adversaries close to home in the Western Hemisphere, and it is clear that Monroe’s eponymous doctrine has shaped American policy in the Western Hemisphere, explicitly or implicitly, since then.
Admittedly, Manifest Destiny, the domestic corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, justified the taking of plenty of territory that Native Americans and other peoples already occupied, often brutally. But there is an important difference between the two: Manifest Destiny was all about what would happen to territory slated to actually become part of the new United States. While there was some overlap—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California—with other parts of the Western Hemisphere, its “otherness” was ironically a barrier to our incorporating most of it into the United States.