In the early days of 2025, the New York Post splashed President Donald Trump, smirking before an annotated classroom map of the Western Hemisphere, across a front page spanned by the headline: “The Donroe Doctrine.” On the map, Trump had laid claim to Canada as the “51st state,” recast Greenland as “our land,” rebranded the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and reasserted U.S. control over the Panama Canal.
The year of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’
As President Donald Trump’s second term heads toward its second year, his doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, once seen as impractical, is taking real shape.
December 31, 2025 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/31/year-donroe-doctrine/
(Illustration
by Zachary Balcoff/The Washington Post; Matt McClain, Sarah L.
Voisin/The Washington Post; Ariana Cubillos/AP; iStock)
7 min
Column by Ishaan Tharoor
The tabloid was gesturing to the precedent established in 1823 by President James Monroe, who proclaimed the young American republic’s opposition to future European interference and colonization in its hemisphere — what is known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Before his return to office, Trump’s ambitions for the region seemed perplexing, even quixotic. His bullying of Canada triggered a backlash that doomed conservatives north of the border in parliamentary elections they had expected to win. His expansionist desire for Greenland put relations with Denmark, which maintains sovereignty over the Arctic territory, in a tricky spot for no obvious benefit, and prefigured a year of tensions with the European Union.
But to the south, the Donroe Doctrine has come into clearer focus. In the Caribbean, the biggest U.S. military deployment in decades casts a shadow across Venezuela and the autocratic regime of President Nicolás Maduro. U.S. forces have targeted alleged drug cartels operating in the region amid the growing suspicion among analysts that Trump’s White House is bent on a regime-changing mission.
Elsewhere, Trump has exerted an overweening influence, putting his thumb on the scales of domestic politics across Latin America by backing particular candidates in elections from Honduras to Chile, while finding controversial reasons to sanction left-wing governments. He doled out a $20 billion bailout for Argentina that preceded victories in midterm elections for the party and allies of President Javier Milei, a libertarian firebrand and Trump ally. Parallel to the first year of Trump’s second term, a wave of right-wing politicians in Trump’s mold have come to the fore in the region.
In its National Security Strategy released a few weeks ago, the White House invoked the Monroe Doctrine by name, as well as the Roosevelt Corollary — the latter an addition to the former put forward in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who said the United States would not only ward against European meddling in the hemisphere but act as a kind of “international police power” to intervene in countries beset by incompetent governance, instability or debt. The corollary justified U.S. military interventions and occupations in the early 20th century in countries such as Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua.
This year, the White House spelled out what it calls the “Trump Corollary,” reasserting Washington’s primacy in the neighborhood and warning against the designs of outside powers, namely China. “We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere,” the document said.
Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, a leading British think tank, described the Trump corollary as “a baldly partisan effort to remake the region” in the guise of Trumpism, offering inducements to leaders who are not just “sympathetic to the U.S., but Trump personally.”
It also marks a departure in spirit and purpose from previous Republican and Democratic administrations. “This isn’t about supporting democracy, free markets, or tying together the region in a network of free trade agreements,” Sabatini told me. “It’s about ownership — very much similar ways to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin views his near abroad.”
It may help the Trump administration that Latin America’s evolving politics, shaped by widespread concerns over gang violence and cartel control, seem more in line with a Trump agenda. “Today’s Latin America is a region where the tone and substance of some political events would not seem out of place in Texas or Nebraska; where mainstream political leaders speak glowingly of fiscal discipline and police crackdowns; and where demands for social justice seem to have been superseded, at least for now, by invective against narcoterrorists and socialist dictators,” Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, wrote in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs.
Trump’s Latin America policy is a “logical extension of everything MAGA,” Sabatini said, pointing to the ways in which the White House has melded domestic grandstanding over immigration and narco-trafficking with its turn back to the hemisphere, away from the Biden administration’s attempts to focus U.S. strategy on the challenge of China. News reports, including a recent piece in the New York Times, cite evidence that influential Trump adviser Stephen Miller sees a conflict over Venezuela as a pretext to summon an 18th-century act that could allow for mass deportations of Venezuelans in the United States.
“This is much more sellable to the America First base than the stuff in the Middle East,” Trump ally and former adviser Stephen K. Bannon recently told the Wall Street Journal, referring to the contours of the Donroe Doctrine. “Monroe 2.0 was not in the lexicon. And now people have gone back and they’re saying, ‘Yeah, definitely, I agree with that. Love that.’”
Trump can play the pragmatic peacemaker and transactional dealmaker elsewhere, but “wants to tell the story that the real threats to the United States come from an ‘invasion’ of immigrants and drugs,” Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me.
“He has imported some of pathologies of the war on terror to the United States’ own hemisphere,” Wertheim said. “Trump’s brutal deportation policies, blatant election meddling, lawless boat strikes and creeping regime-change moves against Venezuela amount to a new, highly coercive and militarized approach to the Americas.”
One of the ironies of the Donroe Doctrine is that Latin America sees the least amount of terrorism in the world, suggested Jorge Heine, a veteran Chilean diplomat. But the White House is mustering a security argument to reassert a right to dominance in a region that has struggled to recover the economic dynamism of more than a decade ago.
“It’s very legitimate for the U.S. to say we would like to keep our primacy,” Heine told me. “But the way to do that is by competing,” by helping “build better ports, dams and so on” and taking a more proactive stake in the development of Latin America. China, the biggest trading partner of most countries in South America, has done that and even many governments aligned with Trump will not be able to shift away from Chinese influence.
“The notion that you can hark back to 1823 is totally unrealistic. This is not something you can unspool from one day to the next,” said Heine, who is the author of the new book “The Non-Aligned World: Striking Out in an Era of Great Power Competition.” “The horse has left the barn. You can’t get China out of Latin America.”
Instead, Trump’s more crude approach risks alienating many in the region in the long term. “What this ‘strategy’ does make clear is that the only war that the Trump administration wants to fight is a culture war,” wrote Kori Schake, a former official in the George W. Bush administration. “And it sees the United States’ adversaries as partners in that war, but it does not see how much U.S. power relies on the voluntary assistance of other countries.”