The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: Trump’s power play in Latin America
Long neglected in Washington, the region is key to some of the president’s priorities, including halting illegal migration and limiting Chinese influence
Michael Stott in Rio de Janeiro
It is the biggest show of US military power in the Caribbean in decades: a naval task force capable of unleashing hundreds of Tomahawk missiles, squads of helicopter-borne special forces and waves of air strikes.
President Donald Trump’s show of military power, deployed to wage war on cartels smuggling drugs by boat into the US, is also exerting pressure on Venezuela, a key regional ally of China and Russia.
But the spectacle also points to a more fundamental shift in US foreign policy, analysts say, as Trump seeks to place the US at the centre of the western hemisphere.
“This is America reshaping and refocusing its resources to establish a safer neighbourhood for itself and its partners,” says one Trump administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“It’s a recommitment of resources to our backyard.”
Latin America — a region long neglected as Washington pursued the war on terror in the Middle East and superpower competition in Asia — is key to some of Trump’s most cherished priorities: halting illegal migration, securing the southern land border, curbing the flow of narcotics into the US and rolling back Chinese influence.
Trump also wants to mould the region’s political future, rewarding allies such as Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, while punishing foes such as Brazil’s leftwing leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The US president’s determination to reassert America in its near abroad echoes a policy first laid out two centuries ago by one of his predecessors, President James Monroe.
Monroe warned European powers in 1823 to stay out of the western hemisphere, which was to be a zone of US influence.
His idea became the Monroe Doctrine and was given teeth by a later president, Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1904 authorised US military intervention in Latin America to protect US interests.
This was the era of gunboat diplomacy, the practice of using naval power to intimidate another state, now revived by Trump.
Trump has not given a second-term speech laying out a specific policy for the Americas.
But he said in 2018 that the US was committed in the western hemisphere to “maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers”.
A White House directive in January says that “the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first”.
Some experts say Trump is in effect pursuing his own 21st-century Monroe Doctrine, pulling back from the world to focus on the Americas, a continent culturally akin to the US and rich in terms of natural resources and trade opportunities.
“It’s amazing how many echoes you see today of gunboat diplomacy and the Roosevelt Corollary and the Monroe Doctrine, and they’re all back to some degree,” says Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of the New York-based publication Americas Quarterly.
“What we’re seeing today is a light version of the gunboat diplomacy of a century ago, because of the post-Iraq reality that boots on the ground will not be tolerated by the Maga base.”
Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme at the Washington think-tank CSIS, says that Trump’s vision is for the US to be the “undisputable, pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere”.
“We are a global superpower,” Berg says.
“And how can a global superpower not pay attention to its own region?”
Before being sworn in for his second term, Trump mused about occupying Greenland, annexing Canada as the 51st US state, taking back the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The New York Post summed up his vision in a front-page headline as “The Donroe Doctrine” — an epithet that tickled the president-elect’s fancy enough for him to post the newspaper cover on Truth Social.
Thomas Barnett, a US military geo-strategist and author of America’s New Map, says global imperatives such as migration and climate change and the need to secure supply chains are shaping Trump’s thinking.
“What has Donald Trump identified as the number one problem for America? Immigration pressures,” he says.
“If you’re able to shift your perspective from looking at the world horizontally east-west and start thinking more about north-south, then I think [Trump’s] emergence . . . can be a lot more easily understood.”
Trump’s first appointments when he took office reinforced the idea that the Americas were a priority.
He chose as secretary of state Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban migrants who spoke fluent Spanish.
Rubio’s deputy Christopher Landau is another Spanish speaker who spent part of his childhood in Latin America.
Rubio’s first trip abroad was not to Europe or Asia but to Panama and Central America, a signal of the White House’s new priorities.
Trump was the first president in 80 years to oppose the deployment of US troops in Europe, notes Matias Spektor, an international relations expert at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, calling him “the president of retrenchment”.
Trump believes that “spheres of influence are positive in the world because they bring stability”, Spektor says, “so Trump recognises that Putin has a legitimate claim to a sphere of influence on his near abroad and Xi Jinping too.
That means the US needs the Monroe Doctrine back in Latin America.”
Panama’s ownership of the canal originally built by the US in the early 20th century and its strategic location as the crossroads of the Americas put it on Trump’s radar early on.
CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong company, had its concession to operate two ports at either end of the canal renewed in 2021.
But after a barrage of Trump threats about taking back the canal, Panama’s comptroller-general’s office has filed two suits with the supreme court to nullify the agreement, arguing that it is unconstitutional.
Trump also wielded the big stick in February with Mexico, threatening 25 per cent tariffs unless it curbed illegal migrant crossings and combated fentanyl traffickers.
With more than 80 per cent of her country’s exports dependent on the US market, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s leftwing president, had little choice but to comply.
“Mexico and Central America are married to the United States,” says Christopher da Cunha Bueno Garman, managing director for the Americas at Eurasia Group.
“They have nine kids.
There’s no divorce, right?”
The volley of threats, coupled with Trump’s tendency to jump from one issue to another, has led some to question whether there was a coherent strategy for Latin America.
“There is an attempt to help allies and to undermine leftist administrations, there is an objective to reduce China’s footprint in the region,” says Garman.
“But those objectives are pursued in a tactical and not a consistent manner.”
But 10 months into his presidency, the contours of Trump’s Americas policy are becoming clearer.
The US president has turned Richard Nixon’s metaphorical war on drugs into a literal one, ordering the military to blow speedboats carrying drugs out of the water.
So far at least 21 vessels have been destroyed, killing more than 80 people.
“We’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump told reporters last month.
“They’re just going to be, like, dead.”
While the “kill first and ask questions later” policy has alarmed human rights advocates and led scholars to question its legality, recent polling shows Americans are evenly divided over it.
In Latin America, where cartels have dramatically expanded their influence and citizens are clamouring for a law-and-order crackdown, few leaders have criticised Trump’s policy.
The US president has ordered the military to blow speedboats carrying drugs out of the water © The White House/ReutersReining in illegal migration is another Trump priority.
He halted one of the biggest mass migrations in American history by closing the US land border with Mexico to illegal entrants.
He has ordered sweeping raids to deport those inside the US illegally.
Trump has also carved the hemisphere into allies and foes.
Argentina’s Milei, an ideological soulmate, was bailed out with a $20bn US credit line and purchases of pesos in October when markets turned on the Argentine currency before a key midterm election.
Leftist adversaries, on the other hand, have been punished.
Brazil was hit with 50 per cent tariffs after Lula defied pressure to halt the trial of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro on charges of plotting a coup.
Trump has piled pressure on Venezuela’s revolutionary socialist leader, Nicolás Maduro, with the military task force, calling him an illegitimate leader and suggesting that Maduro’s days are numbered.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, describes the US military deployment as part of a “pivot to hemispheric defence”, and its objectives as “North America from the Arctic to the Panama Canal, clearing out the [Chinese] PLA Navy’s lake in the Caribbean, including the Bahamas, and working with allies in Latin America, Argentina and others”.
For Latin Americans, who long complained of being Washington’s “forgotten continent”, Trump’s new focus is unsettling.
Governments on the left complain privately of US bullying and American imperialism. Liberals are horrified by Trump’s willingness to trample on human rights laws with migrants and the dangerous precedents they say he sets with the unilateral use of force against drug boats.
One of the few nations which has stood up to Trump has been Brazil.
After Lula’s government refused to intervene in Bolsonaro’s trial, the former president was duly convicted and sentenced.
Polling showed a bounce for Lula, who responded to Trump’s threats with a nationalist campaign on social media.
Then Trump shifted, indicating a willingness to talk to Lula and the two men met for the first time.
“Even if there is this new Monroe Doctrine, they have understood that Brazil is a special case, that we are different,” says Celso Amorim, Lula’s top foreign policy adviser.
Nonetheless, Amorim says Brazil remains very unhappy about the attacks on drug boats and the military threats against Venezuela.
“Nobody really knows who these alleged traffickers are,” he says.
“The evidence against them needs to be shown.”
Polling shows Latin Americans now view the US much more negatively.
“Since Donald Trump came to power, far fewer Latin Americans believe that the United States will have a positive influence on world affairs in the next decade,” says Jean-Christophe Salles, CEO of pollster Ipsos for Latin America.
“I certainly have picked up on a quiet increase in anti-Americanism,” says one former senior US official who travels in the region.
“It’s not explicit on the streets.
It is more unsettled: people may agree with the hard line on drugs and immigration, but do they appreciate tariffs being imposed arbitrarily or interference in the exercise of democracy in their countries?
In Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro has fired up his leftist base by attacking Trump over everything from Gaza to sending troops into American cities, the private sector lobbied the White House to avoid triggering a nationalist backlash like the one in Brazil.
“Petro wanted tariffs on Colombia because he despises the private sector,” says Colombian-born Republican senator Bernie Moreno, who met Trump to discuss Latin America last month.
The meeting drew scrutiny after a White House aide was photographed holding a dossier prepared by the senator with photos of Petro and Maduro in orange prison jumpsuits under the headline
“The Trump Doctrine for Colombia and the Western Hemisphere”.
“My vision is for from the tip of Argentina to the tip of Canada, a western hemispheric alliance that the world has never seen,” Moreno tells the FT.
“We really have everything we need here.
And we have these two great oceans in between [us and the world].
And we can be a basically a completely self-sufficient western hemisphere . . . with America as a leader.”
Venezuela, he says, is “an opportunity right now like we’ve never had”.
Long the US’s biggest foe in Latin America, Venezuela and its long-ruling revolutionary socialist leader represent the biggest hard power test yet of Trump’s new “Americas first” foreign policy.
The US president has been careful not to define his end goal, a strategy that experts say affords him the opportunity to define victory on his own terms.
Yet the risks Trump is running are also much higher.
His Maga base objects to foreign military interventions and any US military casualties could prove disastrous.
Trump has described Maduro’s regime as an illegitimate narco-dictatorship and Washington has offered a $50mn reward for Maduro’s capture.
Some experts believe that rather than pursuing the risky option of regime change, Trump may prefer to use the naval task force to launch a barrage of missiles at land targets in Venezuela, strike a deal with a weakened Maduro or his successor, declare victory and move on.
Hal Brands, a global affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, says any effort to remove Maduro would probably require a lot of military force and could lead to a messy aftermath.
“My guess is that if he does end up using force against Venezuela, it will be in a way where he feels he can start and end it on his own terms,” he says.
Questions also remain about whether the US president can build durable alliances by offering carrots as well as sticks to the region’s growing band of conservative leaders, including those in Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina and El Salvador.
Trump did bail out Milei and this month announced a trade deal with Argentina and other allies.
So far, though, few countries in the region have benefited economically from aligning with Trump.
El Salvador’s self-styled “coolest dictator in the world”, Nayib Bukele, a close White House ally, received just $4.67mn after sealing a deal under which Trump could send deportees to a newly built maximum security jail in El Salvador.
“They can get short-term victories like they’ve got in Panama,” says CSIS’s Berg of Trump’s team.
“But in order to get the long-term victory, they need to have an economic game that competes with the Chinese and gets more US, European, Asian, Middle Eastern money in there . . . I just don’t see anything trending in that direction.”
Some believe that Trump is simply not interested in building durable alliances in the region.
“It’s a mistake to say that he’s interested in Latin America,” says one former Trump administration official.
“He’s interested in issues that it just so happens are in Latin America”.
A regional ambassador in Washington agrees, saying that Latin America “is the stage for a lot of things which are playing out but this has much more to do with winning points on US domestic policies.
I don’t see how you can extract a doctrine from that.”
But Brands of Johns Hopkins points out that “most doctrines are less formal and less coherently articulated than we retrospectively remember them as being”.
“The Trump administration has been pretty clear . . . that it views the reassertion of US power and the re-prioritisation of the western hemisphere as being important strategic objectives,” he says.
Trump administration officials say the focus on the western hemisphere is a natural corollary of the president’s domestic priorities and that it is here to stay.
Reports from Washington say Trump’s forthcoming National Security and National Defence strategies, due within weeks, will give the Americas a higher priority, implying a bigger share of US intelligence and military resources.
“We are the ones ultimately affected by runaway governments in the western hemisphere capitals,” says the Trump administration official.
“We are the ultimate destination for humans, capital, narcotics and so on.
[Trump’s] is a corrective action that should have occurred long before.
Now we’re setting up for the next 50 years, at least.”
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