Trump’s World: The new Monroe Doctrine

‘Under our new NSS, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again,’ declared Donald Trump in the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s capture in Caracas on 3 January. This military intervention in Venezuela confirmed the doctrinal shift and revealed its immediate spatial consequences: whereas the Monroe Doctrine (1823) sought to deter external interference in the Americas, the new ‘Donroe’ Doctrine asserts the US right to control its own hemisphere as an extension of its strategic territory. To exercise its power, the United States combines well-established instruments of coercion – tariffs and military intervention – with more specific threats, extending as far as annexation.

In what is termed their ‘home region’, the Trump administration has been keen to use geography to ‘make America great again’. On his very first day back in the Oval Office, Trump issued a statement that the Gulf of Mexico would hence be known as the Gulf of America, and the highest Alaskan peak would be renamed Mount McKinley, after a late-nineteenth-century president known for his imperialist foreign policy.

But Trump wishes to redraw the map by changing borders too. The initial target of the renewed Monroe Doctrine was Panama, when he announced that the United States would need to take the eponymous canal ‘back’ during his presidential campaign. Canada drew fire too, with Trump repeatedly claiming that the country would become the ‘51st state of the United States’, while simultaneously imposing prohibitive tariffs on Ottawa. Panama controls a major maritime axis, connecting America’s eastern and western seaboards, and Canada constitutes the northern strategic depth of the United States.

To the south, Mexico has so far escaped the threat of annexation, but it has faced a comparable level of commercial warfare. While tensions have temporarily subsided, President Trump regularly threatens military intervention on Mexican territory, claiming that drug cartels pose an existential threat. Drug trafficking has long been instrumentalized to justify US military involvement across the continent, providing the administration with images and narratives that can be mobilized domestically as evidence of a fight against what is framed as a national security threat, alongside immigration. Since August 2025, Washington has deployed a large fleet in the Caribbean and regularly bombs boats suspected to be carrying drugs. The presence of this fleet looms large over Cuba and its Moscow-friendly regime, against which Trump uttered lengthy invectives in the wake of the Venezuelan intervention.

The latest victim of Trump’s focus has been Greenland. Since the beginning of 2026, President Trump has intensified his rhetoric about his need to own Greenland, despite its omission from the NSS. The proposition that the US would buy the island was first voiced in 2019 to widespread European bemusement, but the subsequent threats to its sovereign status have gone on to unsettle the Atlantic Alliance. From a geographical perspective, Greenland is not a peripheral territory but a spatial node linking North America, Europe and the Arctic; control of it would enable the monitoring and control of passages between the North Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean.

President Trump appears largely unconcerned by the prospect of weakening – or even dismantling – the historic military alliance binding the United States to its European partners. He divides the world into enemies and friends, the latter defined not by shared history or common interests, but solely by ideological proximity. Argentina offers the most revealing example: the Trump administration granted a $20 billion swap line to the government of Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed libertarian and admirer of Elon Musk, which was in urgent need of liquidity. Ecuador, a country suddenly confronted with extreme cartel-related violence, is now seeking to attract the US military to its territory, while Trinidad and Tobago has become a key American ally by providing support for the intervention in Venezuela. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and Trinidad’s Kamla Persad-Bissessar have made a point of displaying their loyalty to Trump, seeking to evade his displeasure. Yet this has not prevented Trump from claiming sweeping authority over their domestic and foreign policies.

Although this map reflects Donald Trump’s growing appetite for control of the American continent, the US claim to a ‘sphere of influence’ should perhaps not be interpreted as a concession to the other great powers, such as China or Russia. The US intervention in Iran reminds us that America’s power projection is far from confined to its own hemisphere. At the same time, Donald Trump’s administration has taken a much less confrontational stance towards China, while accommodating many of Russia’s demands in its war with Ukraine. How these tensions will play out remains an open question.