The Monroe Doctrine: The Trump Corollary (2025-2026)
The Trump Corollary is a 21st-century reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, formally introduced in the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). It asserts that the United States must be politically, militarily, and economically preeminent in the Western Hemisphere to ensure its own security and prosperity.
Historical Evolution
The Trump Corollary is the latest iteration of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which originally aimed to prevent European colonization in the Americas.
- Roosevelt Corollary (1904): Positioned the U.S. as an "international police power" to intervene in cases of chronic wrongdoing in Latin America.
- Trump Corollary (2025): Shifts the focus from "policing" to "preeminence," declaring that the U.S. will use lethal force where necessary to replace failed law enforcement strategies against cartels and hostile regimes.
Core Tenets of the Corollary
Under the Trump administration, the doctrine is applied through four primary objectives:
- Denial of Foreign Incursion: Preventing non-hemispheric competitors (such as China or Russia) from owning critical infrastructure or positioning military assets in the Americas.
- Defeating Narco-States: Explicitly designating regimes like Maduro's as criminal enterprises that warrant direct military intervention rather than just economic sanctions.
- Economic Sovereignty: Prioritizing "Nearshoring" of manufacturing from Asia to North and South American allies that are aligned with U.S. principles.
- Border Integrity: Treating the security of neighboring states as a direct extension of the U.S. southern border.
The Venezuela Application
The January 3, 2026, strike on Caracas is seen by historians as the first "kinetic" application of the Trump Corollary, signaling to the world that the U.S. will no longer rely solely on international institutions to manage hemispheric threats.