If there is a slogan that could be attached to the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, it is simple: Make America a Regional Power Again. The document begins by lambasting decades of American foreign policy that saw the United States as a global hegemon, tending to its interests around the world, promoting globalism, embracing global institutions and shouldering global burdens.
Instead we are told that the United States should define its interest much more narrowly. While the NSS concedes a few interests in Europe and Asia, it says America’s fundamental interest should be in its neighborhood, the Western Hemisphere, where it invokes the Monroe Doctrine and a “Trump Corollary” — which sounds a lot like the Roosevelt Corollary announced by President Teddy Roosevelt. Marco Rubio recently explained that “America First” means first paying attention to the region we live in.
It all sounds logical, but it isn’t. The U.S. is the most powerful country in history, and that power has actually grown in the last three decades, as its companies and technologies dominate the globe. It cannot limit itself to what is going on in its own backyard without massive consequences, both for itself and the world.
It’s important to understand the era when President James Monroe declared his eponymous doctrine in 1823. The U.S. was a small agricultural republic of about 10 million people and 24 states, mostly east of the Mississippi River. Its share of global GDP was 2.6 percent, about a tenth of what it is today. It had armed forces so small that it did not rank in the world’s top 15 in terms of military personnel.
Monroe was recognizing the independence of several Latin American countries that had broken free of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and warning Europe’s great powers not to intervene to recolonize them. He was advocating a doctrine of anti-colonialism and anti-interventionism.
It seems absurd to limit the U.S. to that perspective today, when it is an international behemoth with interests spanning the world. Prioritizing America’s backyard makes Washington focus on one of the least important areas of the world economically. America’s trade with all of Latin America besides Mexico amounted to around $450 billion in 2024. Its trade with the European Union was more than three times that number, at $1.5 trillion, and its trade with Asia was more than $2 trillion. (Canada and Mexico do trade massively with the U.S., but those three economies are now so intertwined that they count in some ways as a single North American economy.)
When formulating the containment strategy that won the Cold War, diplomat George Kennan argued that there were five centers of economic power in the world — the U.S., Britain, Germany and Western Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan. Kennan thought the U.S. had to ensure that the other three non-Soviet centers stayed friendly to Washington. Today, one would tweak that list — adding China and lumping Britain and Germany into a European whole — but the basic strategy would be the same: Keep the major centers of economic power friendly. The National Security Strategy instead yokes American strategy to a peripheral part of the global economy.
One caveat: The NSS is a disjointed document, patching together sections that are seemingly written by different authors. It frequently contradicts itself and espouses banalities. “President Trump’s foreign policy,” it notes, “is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘hawkish,’ and restrained without being ‘dovish.’” Whatever that means. There are sections that seem more willing to play an international role, but the main thrust is as I describe it.
What the Trump administration is proposing is not so different from what the isolationists proposed in the 1920s and 1930s: Stay out of European affairs and crack down on immigration. Indeed, then as now, skepticism of American engagement in the world went hand in hand with anti-immigration sentiment, as nativists worried that these aliens would not be able to assimilate and enacted massive restrictions on immigration. (The people who were unassimilable then were the Irish, Italians, Southern Europeans and Jews — all people who seem to have assimilated quite nicely.) The Trump NSS is obsessed with immigration as a national security threat and comes close to arguing that the gravest threat that the United States faces today is migration into its own country and migration into Europe, which it says poses the prospect of “civilizational erasure.”
The global situation today is much like the 1920s. The U.S. is the only country in the world with the capacity to keep the international system stable. Its withdrawal from the world will create power vacuums, which other, less responsible powers will fill. A century ago, America refused to shoulder its burden and the international system collapsed, leading to World War II. Today, there are many other stabilizing forces in the world, but an America that looks mainly after its backyard will leave the world rudderless, unstable and chaotic. Let’s hope we will not have to learn that lesson again.
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