It’s been generations since the Monroe Doctrine was a major part of the American political discourse, but the foreign policy has taken on a surprising significance in recent weeks.
In early December, for example, the White House unveiled a highly controversial National Security Strategy, which explicitly referenced the 200-year-old policy: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
Soon after, Donald Trump tapped Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry to serve as the administration’s special envoy to Greenland, which was weird for all sorts of reasons. Asked about his unexpected side gig, the Republican governor said, in reference to Greenland, “They’re in the Western Hemisphere, fits inside the Monroe Doctrine, and we’re gonna bring them some great Cajun food.”
But after Trump deployed U.S. forces to bomb Venezuela and capture Nicolás Maduro, the relevance of the doctrine took a massive leap.
“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot,” the incumbent president said. As part of some kind of attempted play on his first name, the Republican added, “They now call it the ‘Donroe’ Doctrine.”
Trump went on to say of the Monroe Doctrine, “We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore. Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
A day later, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, the president said Venezuela is “in our area,” which seemed to imply that it falls under his vision of the “Donroe Doctrine.”
He concluded, “The Monroe Doctrine was very important when it was done and other presidents, a lot of them, they lost sight of it. I didn’t. I didn’t lose sight.”
I won’t pretend to know who put these thoughts in his head, but it’s worth pausing to understand what the centuries-old policy was all about. The Associated Press summarized:
Articulated in Monroe’s 1823 address to Congress, it was intended to ward off European colonization or other interference in independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. In return, the U.S. also agreed to stay out of European wars and internal affairs.
At the time, many Latin American countries had just gained independence from European empires. Monroe wanted both to prevent Europe from reclaiming control and to assert U.S. influence in the hemisphere.
A USA Today report noted that the policy “has been increasingly criticized by academics and policy makers for being used to justify interventions in Latin America.”
Trump is now leaning on the Monroe Doctrine — or rather, his own particular interpretation of the policy — to justify imperialistic ambitions from Greenland to South America.
“The effort carries significant risks,” a Washington Post analysis explained. “Washington could get pulled into the nation-building invasions that Trump has long sworn to avoid if the Venezuelan military or people are unwilling to go along with his plans. It also makes it harder for the United States to argue to Russia and China that they should steer clear of their neighbors. And it may reshape global affairs more broadly, as smaller nations that were long dependent on Washington’s guarantees for global trade and stability hedge their bets by building ties elsewhere.”
For that matter, the idea that this in any way reflects the kind of foreign policy restraint many voters thought they’d get from Trump has obviously been rendered ridiculous.
But as relevant as these angles are, it’s equally important for the political world to appreciate the fact that the world bears little resemblance to the one Americans saw in 1823. For Trump to try to shoehorn his misguided ambitions into a centuries-old model isn’t just absurd — it’s also a recipe for failure.
