The Patriot Post® · Trump Reveals His 'Donroe Doctrine'

In the White House’s recently published National Security Strategy, President Donald Trump lays out his foreign policy goals as an expression of his America First agenda.

It plays into his popular campaign slogan Make America Great Again, as Trump advocates reestablishing the old Monroe Doctrine, asserting America as the dominant regional authority over the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, Trump outlines his plan to reassert America’s global leadership.

As Trump declares in his NatSec introduction, “This document is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth. In the years ahead, we will continue to develop every dimension of our national strength — and we will make America safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before.”

The document unpacks how America went astray after the end of the Cold War. Essentially, it boils down to America’s leadership, guided by foreign policy elites, assuming that the U.S. was in a position of permanent dominance and should therefore insert itself directly and indirectly into the affairs of other countries. Thus, America assumed global burdens the American people had no interest in shouldering.

The foreign policy focus shifted from an America-first guiding principle to an America-as-a-world-regulatory-entity approach. America has been both the world’s policeman and a global welfare provider. And all on the backs of the American people.

However, rather than this approach serving to ingratiate the world to America, it produced growing resentments and a spreading anti-Americanism, as these countries saw America as operating to undercut and undermine their own cultural and individual state values.

What Trump is advocating, and has arguably proven, is that a different foreign policy focus must be established that not only asserts America’s leadership but also avoids the pitfalls of seeking to police and transform the world in our image.

The document asks three fundamental questions: “1) What should the United States want? 2) What are our available means to get it? and 3) How can we connect ends and means into a viable National Security Strategy?”

Trump breaks the first question into two, focusing on what America wants “overall” and what we want “from the world.” After listing the obvious things such as safety, independence, economic growth, and technological development, the document notes the restoration of “American spiritual and cultural health.” In a sense, Americans must believe in America again.

And from the world, Trump focuses on reestablishing the Monroe Doctrine, under which the rest of the world recognizes America’s authority in the Western Hemisphere. Here, the document introduces the “Trump Corollary” where governments in the region cooperate with the U.S. to fight to eliminate cartel narco-terrorists and other transnational criminal organizations; create “a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains,” and “ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.”

It’s clear that Trump has both China and Russia in view, as nations that have been meddling in the Western Hemisphere. For example, China has sought to gain a foothold in Central and South America to advance its own geopolitical interests, such as Beijing’s efforts to gain control over the Panama Canal.

The document addresses the second question of how America will get what it wants. Here, Trump highlights America’s economic position as the world’s leading economy; our technological prowess, our military power, our geographic advantage and abundant resources, and our global alliances all as advantages for exerting our power. As the document states, “The goal of this strategy is to tie together all these world-leading assets, and others, to strengthen American power and preeminence and make our country even greater than it ever has been.”

The “how” the goals are realized is where the lion’s share of Trump’s Nat Sec focuses. Here are laid out details outlining foreign policy principles and priorities. These amount to the MAGA blueprint for foreign policy, hitting on many of the same themes as Trump’s domestic agenda, including ending illegal immigration, embracing meritocracy, and balanced fair trade deals.

When the Monroe Doctrine was first established two centuries ago, the geopolitical threat America faced was from Spain. Today, the threat comes primarily from China. What Trump is doing is clearly telling the rest of the world, This is our neck of the woods, don’t mess with us. It’s a refreshing return to a focused American foreign policy.