The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
The shade of Theodore Roosevelt is grinning. President Donald Trump has been holding forth about matters of geopolitical import. Some of his remarks reflect his tongue-in-cheek style. Not for nothing has the president earned the title of galactic overlord among trolls. There is no political constituency either north or south of the border for making Canada the fifty-first U.S. state. Nor is there any constituency for changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” And I say that as someone who grew up alongside the Gulf. The historic name of that body of water offends no one—least of all residents of states abutting the Gulf of Mexico.
He is jesting. One hopes.
His musings about Greenland and the Panama Canal are a more serious matter. He broached a purchase of Greenland from Denmark while declining to rule out a military seizure of the island. There would be strategic logic to such a move. Greenland fronts on the Arctic, an emerging theater of strategic competition, while abutting the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, Russia’s access to the North Atlantic. It abounds in critical minerals. China has been nosing around for mining rights along with its other activities as a self-proclaimed “near-Arctic” state. And then there’s the Panama Canal. Shutting the canal in times of war would compel U.S. maritime forces to default to much longer, more time-consuming, more arduous voyages to swing between the oceans. U.S. control would hold that prospect at bay.
Control of the two sites would the bolster strategic defense of the Americas.
Such worries are nothing new. In fact, some shrewd commentators have detected a Roosevelt-esque strain in Trump’s words. Not by name. But they connect Trump’s remarks to the Monroe Doctrine, an enduring theme in U.S. foreign policy ever since President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams codified it in 1823. Now, it’s worth pointing out that there is no such thing as “the” Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine underwent at least three phases during the century after 1823 as political and strategic circumstances changed and U.S. national power waxed. The first is what I long ago took to calling the “free-rider” phase, which spanned from the days of Monroe and Adams until the first serious U.S. Navy battle fleet took to the seas—until, say, around 1890. (Congress ordered keels laid for the Navy’s first steam-propelled, armored, big-gun cruisers in 1883.)
Why free-rider? Because America didn’t enforce its own doctrine! It let others do it. The erstwhile mother country and enemy, Great Britain, had reasons of its own for keeping rival empires from reconquering Latin American republics that had thrown off European rule in a spate of revolutions. A confluence of British power—the chief implement being the Royal Navy, mistress of the seas—with British and U.S. interests made London a silent partner in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine. The United States free-rode on British-supplied maritime security for most of a century, simply because it could. Why divert resources needed to subdue a continent and develop an industrial economy into a large standing military if you don’t need one?
Trump’s words have little to do with the free-rider paradigm, the OG Monroe Doctrine. No one today could act as external guarantor of the integrity of the Americas, allowing the United States to resume free-riding. Other seafaring states that could conceivably amass sufficient sea power, China and Russia in particular, are precisely the Eastern predators that need to be kept from encroaching on sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere.
I call the next phase in the Monroe Doctrine the “strongman” phase. It was mercifully short-lived, spanning Grover Cleveland’s second presidency in the 1890s. In 1895, war seemed to loom between Venezuela and Great Britain, the imperial overlord of Guyana at the time. Natural resources were to blame for the fracas. The border between the two countries was ill-defined, precious minerals were discovered in the contested borderland, and both contenders hankered for the riches natural resources promise. (Sounds ripped from the headlines, doesn’t it?) So, they squared off for a fight.
The Cleveland administration fretted about the prospect of war not because the United States had a direct stake in the quarrel, but because Britain would doubtless prevail in a border war—and in the process wrest strategically located real estate from an American republic and breach the Monroe Doctrine. Washington resolved to intervene diplomatically because it could. The U.S. Navy was beginning to make its weight felt in regional waters, underwriting American demands with armed force. Indeed, Cleveland’s secretary of state, Richard Olney, told British prime minister and foreign secretary Lord Salisbury that America was now “practically sovereign” through the Western Hemisphere. That’s quite a statement. Sovereigns make the rules that apply within their borders. In effect, Olney informed Salisbury that Washington now made the rules governing half the Earth when it chose to do so. It had the armed might to enforce its will. And London bowed to local U.S. superiority, agreeing to allow American mediators to settle the border dispute.
Is Trump heir to the strongman of the 1890s, entitled to dictate what Latin American and European governments do in the Western Hemisphere? I doubt it. Trump doesn’t strike me as a Genghis Khan or Napoleon, intent on suzerainty over vast geographic spaces. Nevertheless, the strongman era does hand us a measuring stick to judge what the Trump administration does, if anything, vis-à-vis Greenland and Panama, or for that matter Canada and the Gulf of Mexico.
The third phase of the Monroe Doctrine was the “constabulary” phase, instituted by President Roosevelt in 1904. Roosevelt played a major part in interpreting, reinterpreting, and applying the Monroe Doctrine during his presidency. He affixed a “corollary” to the doctrine in 1904 that asserted the United States’ right to intervene in Latin American affairs—chiefly to forestall European navies from seizing territory in the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico and then constructing bases athwart vital sea lanes. What precipitated his move, in large part, was a 1902 European naval blockade of Venezuela. Roosevelt, fearing the European fleet would seize Venezuelan territory, dispatched virtually the entire U.S. Navy battle fleet to the Caribbean in secrecy, there to shadow the Europeans and deter a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Such a violation, he believed, would imperil maritime security in the United States’ near abroad.
Roosevelt and kindred navalists like Alfred Thayer Mahan, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Howard Taft were acutely aware that the Panama Canal would open in the next decade or so; that the canal would furnish mercantile and naval shipping a new interoceanic gateway, slashing the length of voyages between Atlantic and Pacific ports; and thus that the sea lanes leading to and from the canal would assume tremendous importance for all seafaring states. That being the case, officialdom in European capitals would covet naval bases adjoining those routes. Not just regional but European navies would seek control of vital sea routes in the Gulf and Caribbean.
Worse from Washington’s standpoint, they had a built-in excuse to seize ground on which to build bases. Caribbean governments of the day had a habit of taking out loans from European banks and then falling into revolution or misrule. Either way, the loans often went unpaid. The bankers appealed to their own governments for help, and if diplomatic intercession bore no fruit, they would send the navy to occupy the customhouse in the defaulting American state. The intervening power would apportion tariff revenue to the bank until the debt was repaid.
The Roosevelt administration found this intolerable, not because Washington objected to foreign debts being repaid but because forcible debt repayment would leave a European power in possession of territory in the Americas—territory it might not relinquish. Such encroachments happened time and again in Asia and Africa during the age of imperialism. And it might happen along the United States’ southern rampart. To prevent such a turn of events, Roosevelt explained to Congress in 1904 that the U.S. government reserved the right to deploy “an international police power,” intervening in Latin American affairs to confound European occupation of territory in the Caribbean basin. Should a Latin American government prove unable or unwilling to keep its international commitments, he stated, the United States would step in preemptively to settle that government’s debts—and deny Europeans any pretext for occupying Caribbean shores.
There’s a third benchmark for the Trump II presidency. Will Trump declare himself constable of the Americas? Now this seems plausible. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed a U.S. right to proscribe external intervention when it feared landgrabbers were about to entrench themselves in the Western Hemisphere. He spoke softly while brandishing a big stick in the form of the U.S. Navy battle fleet. But he used the big stick sparingly. In fact, no shots were fired during the 1904 debt crisis in Santo Domingo, the present-day Dominican Republic, which precipitated and supplied a test case for the Roosevelt Corollary. A warship took station in the harbor, constituting a deterrent to European intervention, while a U.S.-appointed customs agent apportioned revenue between the Dominican government and its creditors.
Roosevelt took great pride in being a constable who never resorted to violent force.
In the spirit of Roosevelt, Trump could assert a right to intervene diplomatically, or perhaps even militarily, to prevent some extraregional red team from ensconcing itself in Greenland, Panama, or elsewhere in the Americas. Presumably, Roosevelt would approve. It’s important to note, however, that today’s circumstances differ in one drastic way from the age of Roosevelt, Cleveland, or Monroe. The first three phases of the Monroe Doctrine involved defending American states confronting extraregional aggression, an unwelcome act. No society relishes the prospect of foreign bullying or subjugation. But here’s the wrinkle for Trump: what if a government in the Western Hemisphere welcomes an outsider onto its sovereign territory?
By what right would Washington deny a willing American state its sovereign rights?
It’s hard to say. Such contingencies, moreover, are far from hypothetical. They have happened. In recent years, China has pursued commercial access to seaports all around the world’s rimlands, often garnering notable success. Not long ago, for example, Xi Jinping traveled to South America to inaugurate a Chinese-bankrolled container port at Chauncey, along the Peruvian seacoast. China made inroads in the Western Hemisphere not by bombast, or by sending the People’s Liberation Army Navy to collect debts, but by appealing to the self-interest of a Latin American state. Xi wooed Peruvian leaders, promising to further the two countries’ well-being through seagoing trade and commerce.
Prosperity confers leverage on its bringer. Beijing might attempt to parley commercial into military access at some future time, as imperial powers have throughout history. But then again, it might not. What-ifs make a flimsy basis for demanding that Western Hemisphere governments deny foreigners control of their harbors—especially when such access profits them.
The nature of the current strategic competition, then, suggests that Trump will need to craft a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine radically different from Roosevelt’s. It will depend on consent from fellow American governments. U.S. diplomats will need to convince their regional counterparts that intentions can change on a dime. In other words, China is not a partner pursuing agreements for mutual, apolitical economic gain. It is pursuing power—including forward-deployed military power. Covenants guaranteeing mercantile access could morph into something altogether more sinister at the discretion—or even the whim—of Beijing. In short, Washington must persuade governments throughout the Americas that the risks of intimacy with China outweigh the benefits. And to go with diplomatic outreach, the dealmaker-in-chief must offer them economic, diplomatic, and military inducements to bandwagon with the United States.
Imagine that. Far from being blustering or coercive, a Trump Corollary could give rise to a hemispheric-defense effort that manages hostile outsiders’ access to the Americas while advancing the common weal. Let’s make it so.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the author of Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations (University of Nebraska Press). The views voiced here are his alone.