What is the Donroe Doctrine?

“We have entered the era of the Donroe Doctrine,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper in the aftermath of the US abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The term, referencing Donald Trump’s upgrade of a foreign policy doctrine of old, signals this US president’s clear intent to enforce US interests in the Western Hemisphere – a strategy that could have significant implications around the world.

What is the Donroe Doctrine?

It’s a Trumpian twist on the Monroe Doctrine, a US foreign policy principle established in 1823 during the presidency of James Monroe. It warned that “the American continents” must not be “considered as subjects for colonisation” and European powers must not interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere that America now designated as a US sphere of interest.

The Monroe Doctrine was broadened in 1904 by Theodore Roosevelt to sanction US interference in any Latin American country “plagued by wrongdoing or impotence”. Frequently criticised as a form of imperialism, the doctrine was nonetheless invoked by a number of subsequent US presidents to justify intervention in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua. It lay behind Washington’s efforts to oust Fidel Castro in Cuba, and its role in the coups that overthrew Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 and Chilean leader Salvador Allende in 1973. It was also invoked during the Second World War to make Greenland a de facto US protectorate after Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany.

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In 2013, Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”, signalling a more collaborative relationship with other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

What’s new about the Donroe Doctrine?

In its new national security strategy, published in November 2025, the Trump administration plainly declared an intention “to reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine and restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere”. But it also added a "Trump Corollary” to the doctrine, describing US aims to “expand our network in the region” and roll back “foreign influence”.

Recent months have seen US strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean, tighter control of migration flows, and the seizure of strategic assets. “The parameters of US national security” now appear “effectively inseparable from advancing US economic interests globally”, said Pablo Uchoa, an international politics expert at the UCL Institute of the Americas, on The Conversation. This “vision of geopolitics” justifies the aggressive pursuit of any resources the US thinks are “beneficial to its interests, from Greenland’s minerals and strategic position to the Panama canal and Venezuelan oil”.

“Donroe Doctrine” is not an official White House term (it seems to have been coined by the New York Post) but Trump “appears to have taken a liking” to it, “as with most things that bear his name”. There is no proper detail behind the idea, John Bolton, Trump’s first-term security adviser and now a harsh foreign policy critic, told The Atlantic. “No matter what he does, there is no grand conceptual framework; it’s whatever suits him at the moment.”

What does it mean for world politics?

With the US “dominating the Western Hemisphere” and China “asserting primacy across the Asia-Pacific”, a world “carved into spheres of influence” could “benefit Beijing”, said The New York Times. It could keep US military forces away from Asia and would certainly “undercut Washington’s criticism of Beijing” when China elbows its way across the South China Sea to menace Taiwan.

“The absence of conspicuous military support for Maduro” from either Moscow or Beijing suggests that neither object to a doctrine “that appears to entitle powerful countries with the right of having spheres of influence”, said Uchoa on The Conversation.

What does that means for the non-superpowers in the Western Hemisphere? Six key areas have already been identified as potential targets for “further American expansion, intervention or annexation”, said CBS News: Greenland, Iran, Cuba, Colombia, Canada and the Panama Canal.