The Trump Doctrine: the Terrifying World View Endangering Us All
The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy reads, beneath its bombast and rhetorical swagger, like a funeral notice — not only for the idea of an American-led liberal order, but for the entire modern project that followed the end of the Second World War. Among its most striking sections is not the perfunctory language about terrorism or border threats, nor the performative economic boosterism. It is the document’s unapologetic embrace of a twenty-first-century Monroe Doctrine, a framework that recasts American power not as the guarantor of an open, rules-based world but as a throwback lording over its own hemisphere.
In Trump’s NSS, the United States withdraws from its historic role and instead claims a fenced-off zone of influence in North and South America. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity — a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” the document states.
In saying this, the NSS implicitly demands that rival great powers grant Washington the same courtesy. This is not a peripheral shift or a semantic flourish but represents a profound ideological concession. The United States is formally accepting the same worldview that Russia and China have long insisted upon, that the world is carved into spheres, where large authoritarian powers dominate their neighbors, rewrite borders, and determine who may or may not be sovereign.
For years, the United States insisted that such a worldview was illegitimate, that it was dangerous, destabilizing, and ethically bankrupt. But by framing American foreign policy around a revived Monroe Doctrine, the Trump administration endorses the very logic Vladimir Putin and other despots have used to justify expansionism, coercion, and the slow suffocation of vulnerable democracies along their borders. It is the geopolitical equivalent of leaving the door ajar for the wolves and declaring that every household should now fend for itself.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-doctrine-the-terrifying
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