Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limited All rights reserved. Vera Bergengruen, The Wall Street Journal 7 min read 23 Oct 2025, 07:23 IST Trump’s new focus on the Americas relies on economic leverage as well as the threat of violence. (Bloomberg) Summary From attacking drug boats to pressuring Venezuela’s leader, the president is putting the Western Hemisphere at the center of his foreign policy. Once a relic of 19th-century American diplomacy, the Monroe Doctrine is back. Two centuries after President James Monroe warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas, his namesake doctrine is emerging on influencer TikToks and podcasts, in corporate pitches and White House corridors, as President Trump recasts it as a blueprint for American dominance in the region. Since returning to the Oval Office in January pledging to “take back” the Panama Canal and make Canada the 51st state, Trump has applied extraordinary pressure on countries across the region to align with his security agenda. In what some Trump officials have called the “Donroe Doctrine,” an age-old warning has become a battle plan. The president has deployed sweeping counterterrorism powers against Latin American cartels and criminal gangs, launched airstrikes against alleged drug boats that have killed dozens, approved covert CIA operations and mounted the largest military buildup the region has seen in decades. Where Monroe sought to keep European powers out of the region, Trump has turned the doctrine inward — treating the hemisphere as an extension of the American homeland, where Washington will act unilaterally to exterminate perceived enemies. Loyalty is rewarded, and defiance can carry a price. The White House moved quickly to punish dissident leaders, yanking visas and imposing sanctions from Bogotá to Brasília. It has combined a show of force in the Caribbean with a campaign to suppress Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, hoping to oust him from power. “We are restoring the necessary focus to defeat threats in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump told hundreds of generals and admirals gathered at Quantico last month. That message quickly reshaped Washington’s national security priorities. After decades of what defense officials call “Southern blindness,” the U.S. Southern Command suddenly finds itself on the front lines, with renewed resources and a vastly expanded mission. Half of the countries that Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited were in the region. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, calling “the Americas first,” oversaw the deployment of F-35 jets, Navy warships and Marine Expeditionary Forces to the Caribbean. “It’s really amazing how quickly the administration has moved,” said Steve Bannon, an influential Trump ally, ticking off the rapidly growing list of countries targeted in the region. “It’s breathtaking how wide it was, the scale of it and the intensity of it down to kinetic warfare.” While it may seem strange to voters who elected Trump on his promises to stay out of foreign entanglements to encourage this new front, the MAGA faithful see the logic in deeper engagement with the Western Hemisphere. In a recent Economist/YouGov survey, 74% of Republicans and 82% of Trump voters approved of the Caribbean boat strikes in 2024. “It’s a lot more sellable to the America First base than the stuff in the Middle East,” Bannon says. “Monroe 2.0 wasn’t in the lexicon. And now people have gone back and they’re saying, ‘Yeah, definitely, I agree with that. Love it.'” This isn’t new for Trump. In his first term, his top aides invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify a tougher stance toward Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, and to warn China and Russia to stay out of the hemisphere. But this time, “Monroe 2.0” has become a popular rallying cry across the conservative ecosystem. “At least I’m glad we’re finally using military force in our own hemisphere against people who would have done harm to the American homeland,” popular conservative activist Charlie Kirk said on his podcast on September 3, a week before he was killed. Kirk said the drug vessels in the Caribbean targeted by Trump’s deadly strikes pose a greater threat to Americans’ security than Russian soldiers. The Pentagon’s upcoming National Defense Strategy is expected to confirm this shift, elevating homeland defense and Latin America as key national security priorities and moving critical resources closer to home, US officials say. US security firms and contractors from Palantir to Blackwater founder Erik Prince have followed the administration’s lead by invoking hemispheric security as they set up deals from Ecuador to Haiti that align with Trump’s new war on terror. Prince, who has worked with Haiti to target gangs with drones, lamented the “eradication of the Monroe Doctrine” in a podcast earlier this year, arguing “what happens in the Western Hemisphere is America’s business.” Trump has rewarded right-wing leaders in the region whose agendas mirror his own. He enlisted El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele to accept more than 250 American deportees into the country’s notorious maximum-security prison in exchange for $6 million. Trump later received Bukele, who has been accused of human rights abuses in his crackdown on the country’s gangs, at the White House and praised him as an example for other nations in the hemisphere. Trump’s new focus on the Americas relies on economic leverage as well as the threat of violence. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hailed a $20 billion currency swap to stabilize Argentina’s economy as an “economic Monroe Doctrine.” Trump has expressly linked the aid to President Javier Milei’s political future. “If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Trump said, signaling a larger effort to cultivate sympathetic governments in the region. “It’s not going to make a big difference for our country, but it will in terms of South America,” Trump said of the bailout. “If Argentina does well, other people will follow.” Critical analysts and former officials say that explicitly conditioning US aid on ideological alignment could undermine US credibility as a partner in the region. “If we invoke the Monroe Doctrine, it’s the biggest narrative gift we can give to China,” said Leland Lazarus, a former special assistant to the head of the US Southern Command and an expert on Sino-Latin American relations. “When Latin American and Caribbean partners hear this, they think this is the return of imperialism, of US military intervention. It could actually push countries further into China’s hands.” Critics warn that Trump’s punitive approach is short-sighted in a region with growing economic dependence on Beijing and where resistance runs deep to US policies that recall the long history of US intervention. “2025 is not 1823,” said Jorge Heine, a veteran Chilean ambassador. “This policy is all sticks and no carrots, and focused on US domestic politics, while China is the number one trading partner of South America.” Some leaders in the region have criticized what they see as Trump’s revival of US imperialism. “This is nothing more than a new way of applying Monroeism, which once again claims that the Americas belong to the North Americans, creating conditions for a new moment of neocolonialism,” Bolivian President Luis Arce said at the UN General Assembly last month. After Colombian President Gustavo Petro said a US strike on alleged drug traffickers had killed a Colombian fisherman, Trump labeled him an “illegal drug lord”. He cut off all US aid to Columbia, one of Washington’s closest counternarcotics partners, jeopardizing decades of security cooperation. Trump also imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods, in what he saw as retaliation for the country’s prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro. The move sparked a WTO challenge and threats of retaliation, hampering one of the US’s largest trading relationships in the region and raising costs for American consumers. For its part, the Trump administration says its approach is already producing results. After visits from Rubio and Hegseth, Panama announced it would withdraw from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. White House officials touted a drop in migrants and drugs entering the US at the southern border. Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has pushed to host a US base, with a referendum to lift his country’s ban on foreign military installations. Amid Trump’s escalating military campaign in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic and Guyana praised the strikes and positioned themselves as close US security partners. “Trump is returning to what America’s historical policy was, even before it was a great power,” said Joseph Ledford, a historian at the conservative Hoover Institution who recently testified before Congress. “The United States is now prepared to use force and have a military presence in Latin America again.” Trump put his “Donroe Doctrine” more bluntly. Addressing Maduro’s efforts to calm him down, the president warned: “He doesn’t want to fly around with the United States.” As US warships pile up off the coast of Venezuela, few in the region doubt that he means it. 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Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’ aims to dominate the Americas
