One wonders what goes on in the minds of the architects of President Trump’s foreign policy. It seems as if they have all taken time to study the classic history books on the causes of the world wars — Margaret MacMillan’s “The War that Ended Peace,” or E.H. Carr’s “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” — and then said to themselves: That’s exactly where we want to take the world.
Mr. Trump, both in his first term and now during the first eleven months of his second, has made clear that the bipartisan post-Cold War consensus — by which the United States oversaw an economically integrated world order governed by common laws regulating property relations, trade and conflict — has outlived its usefulness. In its place the White House offers a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence.
This month, the White House issued its National Security Strategy report, which sought to codify this transition. The report hits all the notes associated with aggrieved America First nationalism: It denounces globalism, free trade and foreign aid, rejects nation-building, and calls on NATO members to spend a greater portion of their G.D.P. on defense spending. The United States, the report warns, will no longer “shoulder forever global burdens” that have no direct connection to its “national interest.”
The heart of the report is a pledge to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence.” In the past, militarists invoked the Monroe Doctrine largely out of habit, a recitation of a well-worn catchphrase. Here, though, it plays a more substantive role in defining what an America First future world order might look like.
For the uninitiated, the Monroe Doctrine is neither treaty nor law. It began life as a simple statement, issued by President James Monroe in 1823 recognizing the independence of Spanish American republics and warning Europe that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits for “future colonization.”
President James K. Polk, in 1845, was among the first to elevate the statement into writ, invoking “Mr. Monroe’s doctrine” in his push to take California from Mexico before the British. Polk would again cite Monroe when he annexed Texas. Subsequent presidents used the doctrine as an open police warrant, authorizing serial military occupations and U.S.-backed coups. By the late 19th century, Latin Americans had a new word to describe U.S. interventionism: Monroísmo.
That the Trump administration would turn to this old diplomatic shibboleth to define its foreign policy philosophy make sense. As the world order breaks into competing spheres of influence, each regional power needs to get its hinterlands under control: Moscow in the former Soviet republics, among other places; Beijing in the South China Sea and beyond.
And the United States in Latin America. “If you’re focused on America and America First, you start with your own hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said recently. And the Trump administration has, presiding in the last few months over a frenzy of activity, not just executing speedboat operatives alleged to be drug smugglers but also meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. The Pentagon is also carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela.
America First nationalists have long been the staunchest defenders of the Monroe Doctrine. After World War I, nationalists used it to push back against Woodrow Wilson’s proposed League of Nations. Join the league, Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned, and “the Monroe doctrine disappears,” and with it, national sovereignty. Lodge, who identified as an American Firster, said he refused to swear allegiance to the League’s “mongrel” flag.
Senators put forward a resolution ensuring that nothing in the League’s mandate would prevent the United States from using military force in Latin America and that the Monroe Doctrine would remain “wholly outside the jurisdiction of said League of Nations.”
Bowing to pressure, Wilson tried to neutralize opposition by inserting a clause into the League’s charter reaffirming the “validity” of “the Monroe Doctrine.” For naught. The Senate still voted against joining.
At this point, the United States lost its proprietary claim on the phrase. After Japan’s imperial army invaded Manchuria in 1931, Tokyo declared its own Monroe Doctrine. Britain invoked a “British Monroe Doctrine” to justify the continued existence of its empire. And Adolf Hitler responded to F.D.R.’s demand that he respect the sovereignty of Germany’s neighbors by pointing the U.S. president to his nation’s own Monroe Doctrine: “We Germans hold exactly the same doctrine for Europe, or at least for the region and the interest of the greater German Reich.” As the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine.
Mr. Trump’s renewal of the Monroe Doctrine comes at a similarly precarious moment in world politics. His national security strategy identifies Latin America not, as Monroe did in his 1823 statement, as part of a common community of New World nations but as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence and end migration.
“The United States,” the National Security Strategy report insists, “must be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” able to act “where and when” we need to secure U.S. interests. Mr. Trump’s “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine simply means that Latin America is to be locked down, and Latin Americans locked out.
Washington has no intention of withdrawing from its position of global primacy. In place of the now defunct liberal international order, the White House is implicitly globalizing the Monroe Doctrine, claiming for the United States the right to unilaterally respond to perceived threats not just within its hemisphere but anywhere on Earth (China excluded).
That claim is not new — it was the centerpiece of the global war on terror. But to insist on it with no accountability, under no outside jurisdiction, free of multilateral entailments and obligations means that the United States intends to deal with the rest of the world as it deals with Latin America, to seize, sanction and kill with impunity.
In 1919, Ismael Montes, a Bolivian diplomat, lamented the fact that the treaty that formally ended World War I, by validating a bellicose version of the Monroe Doctrine, made future conflict inevitable. “The peace is not yet signed,” Montes said, “and one can already see the seeds of a new war.”
Today, the Trump administration is sowing the same seeds. Its ideal of a world organized around a multifront balance of power — with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, sowing division in Europe, threatening Latin America, with all countries, everywhere, angling for advantage — means there will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war. “We must be prepared,” as NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, recently said, “for the scale of war our parents and great-grandparents endured.”
Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale and the author, most recently, of “America, América: A New History of the New World.”
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