The Crude Imperialism of the 'Trump Corollary'

Instead of acting as a sort of regional policeman, it is more accurate to say that Trump has made the U.S. into the regional brigand.

The Trump administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS) last week. There is limited value in trying to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy by looking at strategy documents when the president largely just makes things up as he goes and often makes policy decisions for arbitrary and irrational reasons. The only real value that the NSS has this year is that it tells us how the administration is justifying the president’s ad hoc interventions around the world. For the Western Hemisphere, this means dressing up the president’s militarism and meddling as the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”

This is how the administration presents their crude pursuit of dominance:

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. 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.

Like many others before them, the Trump administration is warping and abusing what the Monroe Doctrine was to suit their own purposes. Crude imperialists that they are, Trump and his officials assume that the U.S. has a license to dominate the affairs of the hemisphere and can dictate how our neighbors conduct their foreign relations and trade. Walter Russell Mead is naturally a fan:

Like its Rooseveltian forerunner, the Trump Corollary asserts a U.S. right of intervention or, in Roosevelt’s words, “police power” in the hemisphere when local governments fail in their duties to keep hostile influences in check, to prevent migrant surges or to curb drug cartels.

The Roosevelt Corollary was a horrible idea. It is in keeping with Trump’s enthusiasm for the worst parts of the Gilded Age that he wants to introduce a new version of it. Roosevelt’s imperialist meddling in the affairs of our neighbors paved the way for decades of unjust and destructive interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. The Roosevelt Corollary is a cursed relic of an ugly period in American history. The U.S. rightly repudiated it almost a century ago, and Americans should want nothing to do with it now. It speaks volumes about Trump and his cheerleaders that they are consciously modeling their policy on this.

The “Trump Corollary” is in some respects even worse than its predecessor. Roosevelt was asserting an interventionist role for the U.S., but it was not as explicitly rapacious as Trump’s version. Roosevelt described his policy as something that the U.S. would do only in extreme cases. Trump is going out of his way to make the U.S. a predatory rogue state and outlaw just because he can.

Instead of acting as a sort of regional policeman, it is more accurate to say that Trump has made the U.S. into the regional brigand. As the regional brigand, he will threaten to seize territory (Panama), he will murder (boat attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific), and he will threaten to topple governments that he doesn’t like (Venezuela). He will also threaten to launch attacks on the territory of any other country in the region as he sees fit. Propagandists can try to dress this up as something else, but it is simply naked domination for its own sake.

The “Trump Corollay” section promises that there will be more murder sprees, which they describe as “[t]argeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.” Of course none of it is “necessary” or legal, but none of that matters to this administration. The murder spree of the last three months appears to be serving as the model for future military interventions in the region. As Van Jackson notes, “The US national security state is prepping itself for a new generation of forever wars. At least the troops won’t have to travel to the opposite side of the world in order to die for America’s billionaires and politicians.”

The “Trump Corollary” also means intimidating other states into falling in line with the U.S. They write, “We want other nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.” It isn’t hard to guess what forms this discouragement will take. Regional governments can expect to be punished if they make the “wrong” choices in their foreign and trade policies, and they will be put under intense pressure to align themselves with the U.S.

The administration tries to put a positive spin on their pursuit of domination:

The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world.

When the choice is between distant states that can’t and don’t intervene in their affairs and a U.S. overlord that actively meddles and dictates terms, it is easy to see why many will choose “countries on the other side of the world.” According to this strategy document, making that choice will carry stiff penalties. The “sovereign countries” will be treated well only if they effectively cede their sovereignty and do whatever Washington tells them.

The big lie in all of this is that the administration wants to “protect our Hemisphere.” In reality, the Trump administration wants to lord it over the hemisphere and threaten our neighbors to extract concessions from them. The administration is offering protection to the rest of the hemisphere in the same way that a mobster offers protection. As long as our neighbors give in to extortionate U.S. demands, they will probably be left alone, but any governments that resist or refuse those demands will be subjected to punitive measures.

The “Trump Corollary” is nothing but crude imperialism, and Americans should reject it.