The Trump administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS) last week. There is limited value in trying to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy by looking at strategy documents when the president largely just makes things up as he goes and often makes policy decisions for arbitrary and irrational reasons. The only real value that the NSS has this year is that it tells us how the administration is justifying the president’s ad hoc interventions around the world. For the Western Hemisphere, this means dressing up the president’s militarism and meddling as the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”
This is how the administration presents their crude pursuit of dominance:
After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We 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.
Like many others before them, the Trump administration is warping and abusing what the Monroe Doctrine was to suit their own purposes. Crude imperialists that they are, Trump and his officials assume that the U.S. has a license to dominate the affairs of the hemisphere and can dictate how our neighbors conduct their foreign relations and trade. Walter Russell Mead is naturally a fan:
Like its Rooseveltian forerunner, the Trump Corollary asserts a U.S. right of intervention or, in Roosevelt’s words, “police power” in the hemisphere when local governments fail in their duties to keep hostile influences in check, to prevent migrant surges or to curb drug cartels.
The Roosevelt Corollary was a horrible idea. It is in keeping with Trump’s enthusiasm for the worst parts of the Gilded Age that he wants to introduce a new version of it. Roosevelt’s imperialist meddling in the affairs of our neighbors paved the way for decades of unjust and destructive interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. The Roosevelt Corollary is a cursed relic of an ugly period in American history. The U.S. rightly repudiated it almost a century ago, and Americans should want nothing to do with it now. It speaks volumes about Trump and his cheerleaders that they are consciously modeling their policy on this.
The “Trump Corollary” is in some respects even worse than its predecessor. Roosevelt was asserting an interventionist role for the U.S., but it was not as explicitly rapacious as Trump’s version. Roosevelt described his policy as something that the U.S. would do only in extreme cases. Trump is going out of his way to make the U.S. a predatory rogue state and outlaw just because he can.
Instead of acting as a sort of regional policeman, it is more accurate to say that Trump has made the U.S. into the regional brigand. As the regional brigand, he will threaten to seize territory (Panama), he will murder (boat attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific), and he will threaten to topple governments that he doesn’t like (Venezuela). He will also threaten to launch attacks on the territory of any other country in the region as he sees fit. Propagandists can try to dress this up as something else, but it is simply naked domination for its own sake.
