How President Trump can revive the Monroe Doctrine

Part 1 of a series

President Trump can make his special mark on restoring the Monroe Doctrine with more than just a set of policy statements. He should update and adapt the two-century-old Monroe Doctrine, modernizing it with a Trump Corollary to guide strategic thinking and action. The nation needs an actual Corollary to address present realities in the neglected Western Hemisphere consistently with the American founding.

This article is the first in a multi-part series by Dr. J. Michael Waller to lay out a proposed Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and to document the basic philosophical guidelines and logic to change how America thinks about use of – and restraint with – its national power.

Declared as a philosophical and practical frame of reference to guide thinking, a Trump Corollary will shape US national security and foreign policy strategy for generations.

This article, Part 1, lays out a generalized historical backdrop.

Since World War I and the rise of Wilsonian progressivism, the United States has lost sight of its most pressing interests in its own neighborhood. From Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, the security of the Americas is of paramount importance to our national well-being.

President Trump pledged in his first term to adhere to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to “reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs,” but his State Department didn’t get very far.

Indications are that Trump will restore the Monroe Doctrine with a robust strategy in his second term.

Reviving the Monroe Doctrine is vital because it was a doctrine from America’s last Founding Fathers, built on principles laid down by George Washington. It was a defensive doctrine that avoided entangling alliances and exercised strategic restraint. Extending the Monroe Doctrine with a Trump Corollary will maintain those principles while making the doctrine more relevant to a drastically changed world.

What the Monroe Doctrine was all about: Sovereignty

The Monroe Doctrine is widely interpreted as a blueprint for US military intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean. That interpretation is wrong. The doctrine was a defensive principle. Monroe declared it to protect the sovereignty not only of the United States, but of all the newly independent republics of Latin America that had broken from the empires of Europe.

Monroe and his principal architect, secretary of state John Quincy Adams, built the doctrine firmly on American founding principles. As the fifth president of the United States, Monroe was the last of the Founding Fathers to occupy the White House.

Adams drew from his years as a young American diplomat for his father, future President John Adams, during the American Revolution. Between 1794 and 1811, he served as a senior diplomat under Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe. He was the chief American negotiator to end the War of 1812 and demilitarize the Great Lakes. He established the successful, unfortified border with Canada.

Drawing in part on Washington’s Farewell Address, issued just 27 years earlier, the Monroe Doctrine rested on three main points:

• Separate spheres of influence. The monarchical, autocratic, and imperialist systems of the Old World were distinct from the independent new republics of the New World. Thus there would be two separate spheres of influence: One in Europe for the Europeans, and one in the Americas for the North, Central, and South American republics.
• Sovereignty of the new republics. The US would permit no further European colonization of the Americas, or recolonization of the new republics. It would consider any European violation of the sovereignty of any republic in the hemisphere, or any potential US territory, to be a dangerous or hostile act against the United States.
• Non-intervention. The US would not interfere in European politics and wars. It would stay out of the internal affairs of existing European colonies in the Americas.

Thus the Monroe Doctrine laid out a grand strategy rooted in non-intervention and the defense of American interests, a means of keeping out European imperial powers, and not as a framework for the United States as the hemispheric imperium.

Underlying these original points was the American Revolution principle to weaken, undermine, and break apart the predatory European state-run schemes of mercantilism.

Mercantilism is the imperial practice of regime-controlled trading within an individual empire to benefit the empire at the expense of the colonies. The American people had suffered from mercantilism under the British, and so did their Latin American and Caribbean neighbors under the French and Spanish. As long as there was a Monroe Doctrine, there would be no new mercantilism, or any reversion to mercantilism in the hemisphere.

From Argentina to Mexico, republics declared or won their independence from Spain between 1810 and 1821. New World independence broke mercantilism in the Americas and opened up huge new trading opportunities for the United States. Under the Monroe Doctrine, the republics of the Americas would be free of mercantilism and could trade freely if they wished.

Despite the grand guidance of the Monroe Doctrine, the US had little military ability to enforce its ideals at the time. Its approach to Europe and to spheres of influence was passive, as a State Department history observes, but it was principled, in solidarity with the sovereignty of freshly independent neighboring republics.

Not a philosophy for American hegemony

In his final book, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams (Encounter, 2022), the late strategist and scholar Angelo Codevilla exposed the fraudulent argument of the Monroe Doctrine as the driver of an American imperialism.

Indeed, the year before the Doctrine, El Salvador’s congress formally passed a resolution for the US to annex the country to avoid an invasion by what was then the Mexican Empire, but Monroe did not entertain the idea and the Mexican threat soon passed.

The Monroe Doctrine is confused with the push for American territorial expansionism, which predated the Monroe administration, with Texas independence of 1836 and the Mexican-American War of 1845, with the Spanish-American War of 1898, and with the early 20^th century interventionism that President Theodore Roosevelt justified in his 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Since before independence, Americans envisioned expansion, with the formation of new states and territories. The 13 original states expanded to 16 by 1796. Then came Ohio in 1803, the year Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from France doubled the size of the United States.

By the time of the Monroe Doctrine, 22 states formed the Union and the US acquired Spanish territories populated by American settlers: West Florida (parts of present Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle) under Madison in 1810, and East Florida (the rest of present-day Florida) under Monroe in 1819-21.

Adams negotiated with Spain to secure those lands after Spain failed to safeguard the rights of the legal American settlers in the Florida territories, and failed to stop cross-border attacks into the United States. He led successful efforts to demilitarize the Great Lakes to keep out the British Navy, set the US border with Canada along the 49^th parallel from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains. (What is now Canada remained part of the British realm and did not fall under the Monroe Doctrine.) Adams created a joint occupation of the Oregon Territories with Britain until a favorable and permanent solution could be found, leading to the states and borders we have today.

Adams established the transcontinental boundary from coast to coast to prepare for American territorial expansion westward. South of the border, he devised a strategy to recognize the new, independent Latin American republics – indirectly helping break up the Spanish empire – without antagonizing Spain against US interests.

The Monroe Doctrine emerged to prevent foreign empires from intervening in the sovereign affairs of sovereign republics south of our border. As Monroe’s secretary of State, Adams adhered to founding principles to craft the Monroe Doctrine to:

• Discourage European interference in the new Western Hemisphere republics, while avoiding US involvement in those republics’ internal affairs.
• Maintain US neutrality toward European political and military affairs. Adams, as Codevilla notes, persuaded Monroe to remove language critical of European actions in Greece and Spain, and to focus only on hemispheric issues that directly affected American interests due to their proximity.
• Seek defensive and lawful use of military force only to safeguard US sovereignty, security, and safety in this hemisphere. Adams had supported the annexation of Florida because Spain would not protect the rights of legal American settlers in its domain and failed to stop cross-border raids into the United States.
• Oppose building military power as a symbol of American power and greatness, and to oppose the use of the military to spread American ideals to other countries. No foreign entanglements, no endless wars, no military engagement beyond dire necessity. Pure America First statecraft.

Warping over time

Adherence to the Monroe Doctrine principles would change as the European empires continued to deteriorate, and as American economic growth and advances in technology made the US more confident and assertive, and with a more robust ability to project military power.

The Roosevelt Corollary was the most influential of many changes to putting the Monroe Doctrine into practice, and by the early 1960s, when the Kennedy Administration permitted the Soviets to use Cuba as a staging base, the US had effectively abandoned the founding principle. Even so, the Doctrine remained an ideal until the Obama Administration, when Secretary of State John Kerry, in a 2013 speech to the Organization of American States, announced that the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”

That year, a new mercantilist system invaded the hemisphere. But not from Europe. It was the Belt and Road Initiative of Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

(Part 2 will lay out a proposed Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.)