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Foreign Affairs The ‘Trump Corollary’: What Has the President Added to Monroe? Monroe wanted to keep European powers out. Trump may want to keep Latin American countries down. (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images) In December 1823, James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, articulated what has been named the Monroe doctrine, which would mature into an essential principle of American foreign policy. One of Monroe’s predecessors and America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, said it set the nation’s “compass.” A series of subsequent presidents would add corollaries that made the doctrine more muscular and suited it to the needs of the day. The latest president to add a corollary is number 47: Donald Trump. Monroe never actually formalized a doctrine. Rather, the “Monroe doctrine” was ambiguously embedded in five sentences of his 1823 “Annual Message” or State of the Union Address. Monroe begins by distinguishing between the events in Europe to which Americans are “interested spectators” and events “in this hemisphere” with which “we are of necessity more immediately connected.” He then places a protective fence around the Americas to keep European powers out. By the time of the Annual Message, most of the new Spanish-American nations of the New World had declared their independence. Monroe said that it is “a principle…  that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” And the U.S., under the new doctrine, wouldn’t oppose only recolonization by European powers, but also less aggressive forms of influence. Monroe declared “that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety” and that “we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” Monroe then concluded that it was “impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness.” That, with all its ambiguity, is the entirety of the Monroe doctrine. Spanish-American nations welcomed Monroe’s pronouncement as a fraternal pledge. In the recently published America, América: A New History of the New World, Greg Grandin quotes Simón Bolívar, the founding father of Latin American independence and unity, as celebrating that “The United States of the North have solemnly declared that they would view any measures taken by continental European powers against America and in favor of Spain as a hostile act against themselves.” Seen this way, Monroe’s doctrine amounted to a sort of Western hemispheric Article 5. But America’s southern neighbors would quickly find out how wrong they were, as a who’s who of U.S. presidents would invoke the Monroe doctrine to justify all manner of interference, embargo, coup, or war. Theodore Roosevelt would be the first to append a corollary, stating clearly for the first time that America claimed the right to intervene in Latin America to enforce the doctrine. Lyndon Johnson would add another one, asserting America’s right to intervene in the domestic affairs of nations in its hemisphere to ensure that no communist government be established. Kennedy invoked the Monroe doctrine to justify illegal U.S. intervention in Cuba, claiming, “The Monroe Doctrine means… that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere.” On the 202nd anniversary of the Monroe doctrine, Trump became the latest president to add a corollary. In his announcement of the new “Trump Corollary,” Trump set the historical context for his policy. But he was wrong, as William LeoGrande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, pointed out to me, when he asserted in his December 2, 2025 Presidential Message on the Anniversary of the Monroe doctrine that the Monroe doctrine is “a bold policy that… confidently asserts United States leadership in the Western Hemisphere.”  “It does no such thing,” LeoGrande explains. “It simply asserts that a European effort at recolonization would pose a threat to the U.S.” Trump misrepresents the Monroe doctrine to suit the more aggressive needs of the day. For all of the fanfare and bravado of the announcement, the Trump corollary is never clearly defined. The entire corollary is expressed in 19 words: “That the American people—not foreign nations nor globalist institutions—will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere.” Trump says that his announcement “reaffirms” the promise of the Monroe doctrine and “reasserts” the policy. But, though he says that the Monroe doctrine is “reinvigorated by [his] Trump Corollary,” he never says how it is reinvigorated or what his corollary adds or changes. The corollary seems to be a more aggressive restatement of the original. The doctrine has always been used to justify aggression and intervention in Latin America, but, like so much of what Trump does, the corollary has the brazenness to say out loud what previous presidents have kept clandestine.  “In the past,” Grandin told me,  policymakers invoked the Monroe doctrine as a doctrine of collective interest, or mutual hemispheric defense, even if they did so hypocritically. Trump, as usual, says the quiet part out loud, his so-called corollary openly admitting the doctrine is an instrument used to ensure U.S. hemispheric dominance. If the corollary is in any way transformational, it is in its aggressiveness. The Monroe doctrine, though it is ambiguous and notoriously difficult to pin down, seems to set its parameters around European interference in our hemisphere. The Trump corollary seems to make no distinction between European nations and Latin American nations. It says that no “foreign nations” or “global institutions” will stand in the way of America controlling our “own destiny in our hemisphere.” Washington, evidently, now claims the right to act militarily in Latin American countries to advance its geopolitical and economic interests in the hemisphere. This more aggressive, interventionist reading is supported by the discussion of the Western Hemisphere and the Trump corollary in the White House’s recently released 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). The NSS explicitly says that the U.S. will “assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine… to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect… our access to key geographies throughout the region.” It does not limit itself to preventing European nations from recolonizing or allying with Latin American countries, but promises to deny “non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.” The document thereby asserts the right, not only to security preeminence, but self-serving commercial preeminence. It does not bode well that one of the few concrete examples the NSS gives for how the “United States must reconsider our military presence in the Western Hemisphere” is the “obvious” one to “defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.” The NSS aims to reverse the “major inroads” that “[n]on-Hemispheric competitors have made… into our Hemisphere… economically.” It stresses that “[t]he United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” The Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine is brief and ill defined, but we know enough to see that advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint should be worried. It seems to be best interpreted as a more muscular and aggressive expression of the original doctrine, bringing hemispheric dominance more to the fore.  The danger for Latin American countries, and especially, at this moment, Venezuela, is that the updated Monroe doctrine can be used as a justification not only for barring non-hemispheric countries from interfering in the Western Hemisphere, but for U.S. intervention in Latin American countries that get in America’s way. The post The ‘Trump Corollary’: What Has the President Added to Monroe? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs European Alarmism Could Fuel a U.S. Backlash to NATO Rep. Thomas Massie has already proposed withdrawing from the alliance. Credit: Drop of Light When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warns, as he did last week, that the alliance must prepare “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,” he is not merely outlining a defense posture. He intends to commit more American blood and treasure, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. taxpayer, for an endless war in Europe against Russia. But Rutte could, ultimately, help bring about the opposite: an American backlash to NATO that sees a reduction of U.S. commitment to the Western alliance. This chorus of alarm led by Rutte has been amplified by Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who recently declared that Vladimir Putin “won’t stop” in Ukraine and directly compared the Russian president to Adolf Hitler. Such moral absolutism is not a strategy but a rhetorical accelerant, transforming a complex geopolitical conflict into a metaphysical crusade against evil and foreclosing any off-ramp but total victory or total defeat. To be clear, dismissing these concerns does not require minimizing the Russian threat. Moscow’s actions in Ukraine are brutal and illegal. However, a sober assessment must separate capability from intention, and military reality from political hyperbole. The blunt fact is that NATO’s conventional military capabilities are overwhelmingly superior to Russia’s across nearly every metric—from aggregate defense spending and technological sophistication to air power and naval reach. Russia’s war in Ukraine has revealed profound weaknesses in its armed forces. The only sphere of parity is the nuclear one, a domain where mutually assured destruction has guaranteed stability, however tense, for decades.  Furthermore, there exists no credible intelligence or evidence that Russia is preparing to attack the NATO alliance. Its ambitions, however dangerous, appear limited to Ukraine, not existential from a European point of view. As Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven has argued, the idea of a “deliberate, premeditated Russian attack on Nato ‘within five years’ is simply nonsense.” From a rational-actor perspective, it defies Moscow’s stated interests and capabilities. “Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO?” a Russian official emphasized to Lieven. “What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!” As Lieven notes, geostrategically, any such attack would shatter Russia’s political goal of dividing the West and would indeed wind up “reuniting the West in opposition.” Militarily, it would pit Russia against an alliance with a combined GDP more than 20 times larger, in an era when the defense holds a crushing advantage, as proven in Ukraine. Politically, Putin has hesitated to demand full societal sacrifice for a war in Ukraine that many Russians deem vital for their country’s security; launching a war of choice against NATO would be politically suicidal. The calls by Rutte and Merz are therefore not a calibrated response to a clear and present military danger, but a preemptive mobilization against a phantom menace of total war—one that conveniently justifies a continuation and escalation of American support for Europe’s security. Viewed cynically, their rhetoric amounts to a crass political maneuver—a familiar ritual wherein Euro-Atlantic elites inflate threats to justify their own relevance, secure budgets, and cement a permanent state of war. But repeating such incendiary nonsense is not cost-free: Bellicose rhetoric, if repeated often enough, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By constantly invoking the specters of Hitler and total war, these leaders risk constructing the very reality they claim only to be preparing for, locking the continent into a doom loop of escalation where diplomacy is deemed appeasement and compromise is treason. From an American perspective, the tone-deafness is staggering. Having grown accustomed to a security relationship where American power underwrites their stability, European politicians like Rutte and Merz profoundly underestimate the negative reaction they trigger when they casually invoke the sacrifice of a next generation of Americans to stop the “new Hitler.” They speak of “our” preparedness and “our” values, but the unspoken subtext is always clear: The heaviest lifting, the gravest losses, will once again be America’s to bear. This perceived entitlement logically fosters growing resentment in America. It has found concrete, principled expression in Representative Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) newly introduced bill to withdraw the United States from NATO. His proposal is a direct political and philosophical rebuttal to the rhetoric personified by Rutte, Merz, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, and other hawkish European politicians. When European leaders casually telegraph a return to 20th-century-scale warfare and paint conflict in apocalyptic, non-negotiable terms, is it any wonder that a growing number of Americans, consulting both their national interest and the wisdom of the Founders, ask, “Why are we signing up for this?” Massie’s bill is the evidence of that shifting mood. It is the logical endpoint of a foreign-policy restrainer’s reconsideration of the status quo. His argument is simple and echoes the wisdom of George Washington: “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” The legislation seeks to restrict U.S. funds for NATO’s budget, acknowledge that wealthy Europe can defend itself, and formally withdraw from an alliance whose purpose, Massie says, is no longer consistent with the national security interests of the United States. The neoconservative and liberal-interventionist establishment will dismiss Massie as an outlier. They shouldn’t. He is a canary in the coal mine, signaling a buildup of pragmatic and principled dissent on foreign policy orthodoxy. His stance is a warning shot across the bow of a transatlantic project that has morphed from a defensive pact into an engine for expansion and conflict.  Now, every time a European leader like Merz plays the Hitler card to score domestic points or a functionary like Rutte prophesies apocalyptic war, they will inadvertently fuel the case for Massie’s bill. They make Washington’s 18th-century warnings seem not like historical artifacts, but like urgent, contemporary counsel. The path forward is not to shout down Massie and other restrainers, but to understand the legitimate grievances they channel. A sustainable transatlantic relationship cannot be built on a foundation of another American generational sacrifice treated as an inexhaustible reservoir for European moral certitude. It requires European allies who take their own defense seriously—in deeds, not just euros—and a diplomatic corps that seeks deescalation and political solutions with the same vigor it presently deploys misleading historical analogies. Rutte’s vision of refighting our grandparents’ war and Merz’s reduction of Putin to Hitler are failures of statecraft. Massie’s bill is the sobering rebuttal. Ahead lies the urgent task of forging a truly interest-based American strategy: one that engages with the world through strength and diplomacy, but refuses to be drafted into foreign nightmares by officials for whom “preparedness” is a career strategy, moral posturing a substitute for policy, and war an abstraction to be fought by others. The post European Alarmism Could Fuel a U.S. Backlash to NATO appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Trump Shouldn’t Give Ukraine NATO-Like Guarantees It’s a bad idea that undermines diplomacy and U.S. interests—which may be the point. (Photo by TOM BRENNER/AFP via Getty Images) God helps those who help themselves. Now more than ever, Ukrainians should heed that timeless wisdom.  A growing number of experts say the best way for Ukraine to safeguard its security after the war with Russia ends is to acquire the military capabilities needed “to deter future attacks and defend itself if deterrence fails,” as Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities put it in a study published Monday. But news reports this week suggest the Trump administration is offering Kiev something that seems better in theory but may prove counterproductive in practice: a U.S. pledge to defend Ukraine if Russia ever invades again. One can imagine versions of such a “security guarantee” that would compel the U.S. to give Ukraine little more than moral support. But Kiev is pushing for a guarantee with a lot more bite than that. The Trump administration should avoid promising to fight a direct war with Russia in defense of Ukraine, argue advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint. Mark Episkopos of the Quincy Institute says that such a promise would lack credibility. “The past 3.5 years have been an ongoing test of whether the West will go to war against Russia over Ukraine, and the answer has been a resounding no,” Episkopos told The American Conservative.  The dangers of such a lack of credibility are complex. Most obviously, a non-credible security guarantee would fail to deter Russia. Yet if Russia, doubting the credibility of a U.S. guarantee, attacked Ukraine again, America would feel pressure to defend its client rather than lose face—possibly leading to a direct conflict between two nuclear superpowers that neither of them expected to fight. And if Washington didn’t come to Ukraine’s defense, all of America’s alliance commitments would come into doubt. It’s surprising that President Donald Trump appears poised to extend America’s superpower shield over Ukraine. After all, Trump has slashed U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort and threatened to cut the flow of weapons and intelligence. He has dismissed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a manipulative ingrate. And he has repeatedly blasted Joe Biden for spending billions to support Ukraine. What explains the change in approach? Politics has a lot to do with it. Due to various factors, Trump’s notorious fixation on getting a deal—any deal—has heightened in the case of Russia–Ukraine. On the campaign trail, Trump said he’d resolve the war within one day of returning to the White House. Eleven months into his second term, Trump’s political incentives to get a quick deal are only growing. Russian victory would be a political fiasco for Trump on par with the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, from which Biden’s approval ratings never recovered. The White House also has a strategic rationale for trying to achieve peace diplomatically, as it laid out in the recently published National Security Strategy. The document says the war has exacerbated animosities between Russia and Europe and that a negotiated settlement is needed to restore “conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.” Trump’s desperation for an agreement gives Kiev and European capitals leverage, since they can obstruct the peace process if he doesn’t accommodate their more hardline demands. Of course, by drawing closer to their position, the White House moves further away from Moscow’s—and likely also from any potential deal. But in recent days, the Ukrainian and European teams have played their hand well. Over the weekend, Trump dispatched negotiators to meet with them in Berlin. Speaking to reporters in the White House on Monday, Trump said an agreement was “closer than ever.” One reason for the optimism may be that Zelensky, ahead of talks with the U.S. delegation on Sunday, acknowledged that Ukraine won’t be joining NATO anytime soon. The Guardian said the statement “marks a big shift for Ukraine.” Since Russia launched its war in part to prevent Ukraine’s accession to the alliance, Zelensky’s comment struck many as a promising sign. But there was a catch. If Ukraine won’t be joining the alliance, Zelensky said, Kiev will need “Article 5-like guarantees for us from the U.S.,” referring to the NATO treaty’s collective defense clause, which treats aggression against one as an attack on all. Extending that protection to Ukraine would give it a major benefit of the alliance without making it a formal member. Influential MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor, vehemently oppose giving Ukraine such guarantees. They argue it’s not in America’s interest to acquire yet another faraway security dependent—in this case, one that could drag the U.S. into a catastrophic war. Indeed, Bannon himself has been warning the White House since at least February that Zelensky will demand security guarantees which threaten U.S. interests. Evidently, those warnings were ignored by the delegation Trump sent to Berlin. One leading Russia hawk who attended the talks, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, told reporters, For the first time I heard from the mouths of American negotiators… that America would engage in security guarantees for Ukraine in such a way that the Russians would have no doubt that the American response would be military if the Russians attacked Ukraine again. Moreover, European leaders released a joint statement after the talks praising “the strong convergence between the United States, Ukraine and Europe,” including a decision by Washington to “provide robust security guarantees.” If Washington and Kiev truly achieved a “strong convergence” on the issue, America First conservatives should be worried. Zelensky clearly aims to entangle the U.S. in a military alliance that doesn’t serve its own interests. Not only would such an alliance be a nightmare scenario for MAGA and the United States, but Zelensky’s effort to bring it about is bad news for Ukrainians.  Moscow opposes any military partnership between the West and Ukraine, so it likely would reject the security guarantees and other measures described by the European leaders. “This seems like a message from Mars,” Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation wrote on X, reacting to the joint statement. “It is unrealistic to expect that Russia will agree to most (any?) of this.” That may be the point. Many analysts, including the Russian-born journalist Leonid Ragozin—a committed liberal and no fan of Vladimir Putin—say Europe is trying to sabotage Trump’s diplomatic efforts. “The European strategy so far has been to alter the US-proposed peace plan in such a way that it becomes completely unacceptable to Russia,” Ragozin wrote this week in Al Jazeera. Offering security guarantees to Kiev may win applause in European capitals, but it doesn’t bring Moscow any closer to ending its war in Ukraine. Trump will have better luck if he pushes instead for “armed non-alignment,” the model of Ukrainian security that Kavanagh elaborated in the aforementioned study. U.S. negotiators should familiarize themselves with the report, which details the military capabilities Ukraine needs to deter—but not threaten—Russia. That’s not as flashy as American security guarantees, nor as attractive to Zelensky. But it’s both more credible and more likely to gain acceptance from Moscow. It also happens to be in the best interests of the nation President Trump leads. The post Trump Shouldn’t Give Ukraine NATO-Like Guarantees appeared first on The American Conservative.

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