Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy reasserts the Monroe Doctrine and spells out what America First means for the world. “Dominate the Americas, respect China, undermine Europe, ignore India, retreat from the Middle East, don’t give a damn for Africa. These are the true headlines of the new US National Security Strategy released this week,” says former Norwegian peace negotiator and Minister of International Development, Erik Solheim.
And Solheim is largely on the mark. The National Security Strategy is certainly remarkable in its blunt and peculiar view of the world – and its unapologetic assessment of how President Donald Trump intends to shape it in America’s interests. The candour is most apparent in dealing with the Americas and Europe.
The Monroe Doctrine, dating back to 1823, proclaimed the Americas as an exclusive US sphere of influence. In recent years, though, it has been implied rather than explicitly invoked. But Trump’s National Security Strategy spells it out unambiguously, stating that: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere…” The US will prevent competitors positioning forces “or other threatening capabilities…in our Hemisphere”.
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The National Security Strategy labels this strategy “the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, a broad hint to the historians on how Trump would like it to be named. Yet the National Security Strategy also departs from what it says has been America’s post-Cold War goal of “permanent American domination of the entire world” by stating that the US should not try to impose itself – and particularly its liberal order – on other regions like the Middle East, Asia or Africa. The National Security Strategy is extremely direct, even insulting, to Europe, predicting that it is heading for “civilisational erasure” unless the US steps in to help it change course.
It blames this on the European Union suffocating creative business with regulations, and undermining national sovereignty, European nations undermining political liberty, migration policies creating strife and changing the character of nations, plus “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”. The National Security Strategy welcomes “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” and says the US will support them, “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
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