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.
Second, for much of the 19th century, the U.S. depended upon another power to enforce this exclusion: Great Britain. While in the 20th century, the United States and the United Kingdom may have developed a “special relationship” during the early years of the Monroe Doctrine, Britain was not an ally or even much of a friend; we fought two major wars with her (1776 and 1812), and she fished in the troubled waters of our Civil War. Ironically, Britannia ruling the waves in her own interest made it possible for a pip-squeak Uncle Sam to sail in mighty John Bull’s strategic wake as the Royal Navy kept other powers out of our backyard—just like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer getting all the other boys to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence.
Things changed dramatically at the turn of the 20th Century when the United States, feeling its oats as an emerging great power, started playing the great game of power politics more aggressively. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt added a “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that redrafted it into an activist strategic blueprint lashing U.S. national security to domestic problems in neighboring states—did they pay their bills, were they, in Woodrow Wilson’s later phrase, “elect[ing] good men”—and deputized Uncle Sam as the region’s policeman.
The application of TR’s “big stick” in the hemisphere transformed U.S. vital interests well beyond simply denying another great power a toehold nearby to making all sorts of domestic features of our neighbors our business. It is a short step from that to believing that in many cases indirect or even direct control of our near abroad was essential to our national security, and maybe also advancing some other political and economic interests. The Monroe Doctrine as amended by Theodore Roosevelt has thus also been something of an embarrassment for U.S. leaders, and many members of the American public, leading Franklin Delano Roosevelt rhetorically, at least, to replace it with the “Good Neighbor Policy” in 1933.
This perspective has two important implications: First, the “Donroe Doctrine” is not really an updating of Monroe’s original strategic vision. Rather, it overturns FDR’s Good Neighbor policy by taking TR’s big (beautiful?) stick, pumped up on steroids, back out of the closet to micromanage and even annex territory outside of the United States in the Western Hemisphere.
Second, if we concede that the United States does have a vital interest in the security of the Western Hemisphere, the original Monroe Doctrine, unadulterated by later commanders-in-chief, could undergird a less objectionable framework for hemispheric defense. Under it, we do not need to directly control the entire hemisphere to be secure, just keep out potential adversaries. Domestic conflict or economic mismanagement by our neighbors is cause for pity, regret, or helpful neighborly advice, but not outside military action.
Finally, other powers, even those with whom we do not have warm relations, can still help us advance our hemispheric security interests. In addition to our “frenemy” Great Britain’s central role in the 19th century, keep in mind that we were on the winning side of the Second World War and the Cold War with Greenland (undeniably an important strategic asset) under the suzerainty of Denmark—until recently an ally and close friend. Good (and even not-so-good) neighbors are fully compatible with the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. national security.
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