The ‘Donroe Doctrine’ Divide
The administration’s Western Hemisphere strategy continues to divide the realism and restraint community.
What does it mean for the United States to pursue its national interests in the Western Hemisphere? The Trump administration has made a renewed focus on the American near abroad a centerpiece of its foreign policy, declaring in its 2025 National Security Strategy that it intends to “enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” That means ensuring that the “Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed” enough to prevent mass migration to the U.S., halt drug trafficking, and push out hostile foreign influences (i.e., China).
Refocusing American foreign policy closer to home has long been a goal among “realists and restrainers,” a community that has gained significant influence in recent years pushing back against the establishment consensus in Washington. But the administration’s aggressive implementation of the Trump corollary has created a serious dispute within the community about how to best secure the national interest of the U.S. in its own hemisphere.
On Thursday, the Quincy Institute and the Conservative Partnership Institute hosted a debate on the subject. The event brought together Quincy’s George Beebe, the Heritage Foundation’s Daniel McCarthy (who is a board member at The American Conservative), Defense Priorities’ Jennifer Kavanagh, and the CATO Institute’s Katherine Thompson to discuss “The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: Will It Advance U.S. Interests?” The conversation provided an illuminating look at the heart of the controversy growing over the Trump administration’s approach to the Western Hemisphere.
Most of the debate had little to do with the Trump corollary or the “Donroe Doctrine” itself: All the disputants agreed that, as formulated, the policy offers little that could be objectionable. The U.S. obviously has an interest in seeing its immediate neighbors well-governed and sufficiently able to prevent the mass displacement of their citizenry and to tamp down on crime and drug trafficking. Likewise, preventing hostile foreign powers, especially China, from establishing sufficient control over any area in the region to threaten the U.S. would be a top priority for any administration.
How those goals have been conceptualized and pursued by the Trump administration, however, remains divisive. The raid on Venezuela that captured Nicolás Maduro was a stunning military success, for example, but is such intervention compatible with a desire for a more restrained foreign policy, especially if similar results could have been accomplished diplomatically? The administration’s crackdown on Cuba carries the potential of further such intervention in the near future.
For McCarthy, who offered the most comprehensive defense of the administration’s aggressive implementation, the answer was that power, used decisively, can create political conditions conducive to future restraint. The Donroe Doctrine’s policy of expressing “our unimpeded will in the interests of the United States” in the Western Hemisphere allows the U.S. to shape the region for the benefit of American citizens. Ensuring that regimes in the region are cooperative with American priorities is a vital part of such a political reordering, because many of the objectives the U.S. is pursuing, like halting drug trafficking and reducing illegal immigration, are best accomplished at the source of the problem rather than at the U.S. southern border.
According to McCarthy, the Venezuela raid was successful not just because it deposed Maduro and secured a more cooperative government under Delcy Rodríguez. More importantly, it “sent a signal” to other governments in the region that they too need to fall in line with American demands or risk suffering similar fates. This allows the U.S. to secure cooperation even with typically recalcitrant countries at a significantly lower cost in time and resources than would otherwise be possible.
The principal objection raised to this assertion was that the militarized approach the administration has taken to the region has, in fact, created no progress towards the stated goal of creating a stable and cooperative system conducive to American interests. Kavanagh argued that the removal of Maduro, for example, has produced no material improvement in American national security, and it is not clear that facilitating investment in Venezuelan oil fields is preferable to greater investment in the American energy industry. Moreover, the message being sent to other countries in the region may be that they should counterbalance American power and increase their integration with China in order to avoid being at the mercy of the U.S.
Drawing on her research, Kavanagh concluded that military interventions are almost always a net negative for accomplishing political objectives. Rather than taking a primarily military posture towards intervention in the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. should lean on economic investment, diplomacy, and law enforcement partnership to pursue its interests in the region, a model more similar to the current Chinese method of international engagement.
Beebe attempted a more limited defense than McCarthy of the value of military intervention from a realist perspective. In Beebe’s view, great power competition requires the full spectrum of capabilities, including economic, diplomatic, and military power. Proper implementation depends on balancing the use of those capacities, and coercion against cooperation, to best achieve our desired objectives.
While Beebe conceded that military interventions often destroy order, rather than producing it, he argued that the Venezuelan intervention has been more successful than not: Predictions that the U.S. would fail to topple the regime by air and would then be forced into a costly ground war have been completely disproven, and installing a more cooperative new government has lessened our dependence on energy outside America’s near abroad, the value of which the current situation in the Middle East demonstrates. Furthermore, the Venezuela operation did send a message to a hostile Cuba, which now seems willing to make a deal with the U.S.—a situation that would not be possible otherwise. Limited but decisive military intervention can thus increase the efficacy of diplomatic engagement in the future.
But even if the Trump administration is interested in using the full spectrum of American capabilities, Katherine Thompson said, it is in a very poor position to do so. The Trump administration’s written policies, including the Donroe doctrine, are vague—more “vibes” than serious strategy. The administration has yet to lay out its plans in sufficient detail to secure the funding and organization necessary to implement a coherent Western Hemisphere program. SOUTHCOM remains the least-funded combatant command, little attention has been given to securing congressional appropriations for economic and diplomatic initiatives in the region, and the interagency coordination needed to implement a complete strategy remains largely absent.
Instead, Western Hemisphere policy has remained largely top-down, individual programs—like the Venezuela and Cuba campaigns—that are poorly integrated into any overall structure and whose long-term objectives aren’t clear. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, has promised that the U.S. will eventually move Venezuela to a democratic system; is the U.S. going to be engaged in democracy-building in Latin America? If that is the case, it will require significant programming—programming which is currently nonexistent.
Greenland supplied the evening’s limiting case. While the participants had significantly diverging views about the value of the Trump administration’s ongoing interventions in Latin America, the panel was unanimous in condemning its aggressive approach to Greenland. The U.S. already has significant latitude to operate in Greenland, and the panel as a whole agreed that any additional access could be achieved on the basis of negotiation with Europe—negotiations that were needlessly complicated by introducing the threat of force.
The Trump administration’s actions in the Western Hemisphere will continue to provoke controversy among realists and restrainers over whether coercion and military intervention supplement cooperation and diplomatic engagement or undermine it and create incentives for counterbalancing. The ongoing interventions in Venezuela and Cuba are likely to provide very public test cases for the arguments laid out Thursday, as well as determine the future of the “Donroe Doctrine.”
The post The ‘Donroe Doctrine’ Divide appeared first on The American Conservative.
