Red
Well-Known Member
This NY Times guest essay echoes a conclusion that I’ve settle on of late. Namely, Trump’s “vision” that the world is divided up among Strongmen, and he has made it clear that he and the United States should be seen as having a vested, and exclusive, interest over the entire Western hemisphere. JMO, but I think this interpretation of “political reality as Trump interprets it” is the ideology behind Canada as the 51st state, Greenland to America, the so called “war on drug traffickers” allegedly behind the attacks off Venezuela, and behind Trump telling the leader of Columbia that “you’re next”. It seems to be his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
And it’s behind Trump throwing Ukraine to Putin. Spheres of influence. Strongmen dividing up the globe. That seems to be where he’s coming from. And why it’s fairly easy to recognize Trump as the most un-American president in history, who has no understanding of our history, or our traditions.
The heart of the report is a pledge to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence.” In the past, militarists invoked the Monroe Doctrine largely out of habit, a recitation of a well-worn catchphrase. Here, though, it plays a more substantive role in defining what an America First future world order might look like.
For the uninitiated, the Monroe Doctrine is neither treaty nor law. It began life as a simple statement, issued by President James Monroe in 1823 recognizing the independence of Spanish American republics and warning Europe that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits for “future colonization.”
That the Trump administration would turn to this old diplomatic shibboleth to define its foreign policy philosophy make sense. As the world order breaks into competing spheres of influence, each regional power needs to get its hinterlands under control: Moscow in the former Soviet republics, among other places; Beijing in the South China Sea and beyond.
And the United States in Latin America. “If you’re focused on America and America First, you start with your own hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said recently. And the Trump administration has, presiding in the last few months over a frenzy of activity, not just executing speedboat operatives alleged to be drug smugglers but also meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. The Pentagon is also carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela.
America First nationalists have long been the staunchest defenders of the Monroe Doctrine. After World War I, nationalists used it to push back against Woodrow Wilson’s proposed League of Nations. Join the league, Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned, and “the Monroe doctrine disappears,” and with it, national sovereignty. Lodge, who identified as an American Firster, said he refused to swear allegiance to the League’s “mongrel” flag.
Mr. Trump’s renewal of the Monroe Doctrine comes at a similarly precarious moment in world politics. His national security strategy identifies Latin America not, as Monroe did in his 1823 statement, as part of a common community of New World nations but as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence and end migration.
“The United States,” the National Security Strategy report insists, “must be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” able to act “where and when” we need to secure U.S. interests. Mr. Trump’s “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine simply means that Latin America is to be locked down, and Latin Americans locked out.
And it’s behind Trump throwing Ukraine to Putin. Spheres of influence. Strongmen dividing up the globe. That seems to be where he’s coming from. And why it’s fairly easy to recognize Trump as the most un-American president in history, who has no understanding of our history, or our traditions.
The heart of the report is a pledge to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence.” In the past, militarists invoked the Monroe Doctrine largely out of habit, a recitation of a well-worn catchphrase. Here, though, it plays a more substantive role in defining what an America First future world order might look like.
For the uninitiated, the Monroe Doctrine is neither treaty nor law. It began life as a simple statement, issued by President James Monroe in 1823 recognizing the independence of Spanish American republics and warning Europe that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits for “future colonization.”
That the Trump administration would turn to this old diplomatic shibboleth to define its foreign policy philosophy make sense. As the world order breaks into competing spheres of influence, each regional power needs to get its hinterlands under control: Moscow in the former Soviet republics, among other places; Beijing in the South China Sea and beyond.
And the United States in Latin America. “If you’re focused on America and America First, you start with your own hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said recently. And the Trump administration has, presiding in the last few months over a frenzy of activity, not just executing speedboat operatives alleged to be drug smugglers but also meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. The Pentagon is also carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela.
America First nationalists have long been the staunchest defenders of the Monroe Doctrine. After World War I, nationalists used it to push back against Woodrow Wilson’s proposed League of Nations. Join the league, Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned, and “the Monroe doctrine disappears,” and with it, national sovereignty. Lodge, who identified as an American Firster, said he refused to swear allegiance to the League’s “mongrel” flag.
Mr. Trump’s renewal of the Monroe Doctrine comes at a similarly precarious moment in world politics. His national security strategy identifies Latin America not, as Monroe did in his 1823 statement, as part of a common community of New World nations but as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence and end migration.
“The United States,” the National Security Strategy report insists, “must be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” able to act “where and when” we need to secure U.S. interests. Mr. Trump’s “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine simply means that Latin America is to be locked down, and Latin Americans locked out.
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