Suddenly, Greenland doesn’t seem so outlandish. Not since before the end of the Cold War has the United States so forcefully and directly intervened in the Western Hemisphere. Amassing an armada to blockade Venezuela before bombing the country and kidnapping its president. Threatening the president of Colombia with a similar fate. Suggesting action against Mexico as well, while intimating that it’s the end of days for the Cuban government—and indeed any government that doesn’t toe Washington’s line. The US government couldn’t be clearer about its intentions, which White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller outlined in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday:
We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.
The audacity is shocking, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. And it is certainly not unprecedented. The first Trump administration made no secret of its desire to shore up what it, and almost every US government of the last 200 years, considers to be its property and primary “sphere of influence”. So in 2019, national security adviser John Bolton, while announcing sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, declared: “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”.
That policy, outlined in 1823 and later named after its originator, James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, was a warning to the European powers that the US would not tolerate them interfering in the region. It was a bold assertion by a pre-industrial state that had only recently gained independence: we claim an exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere.
Eighty years later, the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, named after Theodore Roosevelt, expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The president addressed the Congress in 1904, declaring that the United States would not only oppose European influence, but directly intervene into the affairs of regional states:
Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
This was a precedent setting doctrine for more than a century of overt and covert interventions into the Caribbean and Central and South America. Now, the White House is asserting the “Trump Corollary”, outlined in the latest national security strategy, issued in November. The document lists the “restoration of American power and priorities” as one of five “core, vital national interests”:
[T]he 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.
So much for all the ink spilled by foreign policy commentators about Trump’s purported “isolationism” and reluctance to deploy US power. The national security strategy at times reads like a white supremacist manifesto. Understandably, much of the commentary related to it has focused on its warnings about the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe and its attacks on European governments for facilitating decades of non-European people’s migration into the continent.
Yet, for all its departures from convention, the core goal of this administration is consistent with all other US governments: retaining US geopolitical pre-eminence. Indeed, ever since the first formal strategy document issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987, US governments have used the language of mobilising or employing “all facets of national power” to maintain US dominance of the world. This motif appeared in the grand strategy documents of presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Barack Obama’s 2010 national security strategy, Trump’s 2017 national security strategy and 2018 national defence strategy, and Joe Biden’s 2022 national security, national defence and national military strategies.
Key differences today are, first, that there is a belated recognition in Washington that a war against China in Asia is probably unwinnable; and, second, that the growth of Chinese industrial power and economic sophistication have been severely underestimated. Indeed, Trump’s and Biden’s attempts to use the tariff weapon have resulted only in Beijing increasing it’s industrial output and positive trade balance with the world, while precipitating a series of Chinese high-tech breakthroughs considered almost unthinkable just a decade ago.
The “Trump Corollary” is therefore refining US imperialism’s approach. China is now South America’s main trading partner; Beijing has invested billions of dollars in nearly two dozen seaports and the broader continental logistics network, firmly integrating several supply chains into its economic orbit. Plus there are increasing financial and military links. So US strategists are initiating what they consider a rearguard action to shore up their region as an exclusive US domain.
Last year, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino alleged that the US embassy threatened to revoke visas of Panamanian officials because of China’s close ties to the country. And after the US bailed out Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that President Javier Milei was “committed to getting China out” of the country. Now, the “Corollary” is in full view: a full-throated strategy not only of political interference, but of economic imperialism:
We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life. This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials … [And] establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations…
Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades.
Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.
All countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, then, have been put on notice that a new era of US imperialist meddling has begun. It’s here that Greenland again comes into focus, both as a resource rich territory—with significant deposits of rare earth elements, other minerals and metals, and offshore oil and gas—and as an island of military value.
In the interview with CNN’s Tapper, Miller, the White House aide, reiterated that the position of the Trump administration, going back to the president’s first term, is that Greenland should become part of the US and that there is no basis for Denmark’s territorial claim. Indeed, the formal position of the US government is that Greenland is a required territory for NATO’s operations in the arctic. Because the US is the only NATO signatory capable of projecting power in that area, Miller concluded, “obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States”.
There’s a precedent. During an April 1941 White House conference, Denmark’s ambassador to the US, Henrik de Kauffmann, told reporters: “Greenland [belongs] to the American continent”. The New York Times concurred, noting that the island “lies well within the Western Hemisphere on all standard maps”. A short time later, President Franklin Roosevelt declared: “We are applying to Denmark what might be called a carrying out of the Monroe Doctrine ... and we are protecting Greenland against any other European nation”.
This was all occasioned by Germany’s occupation of Denmark, beginning the previous year. Roosevelt turned Greenland into a US protectorate, establishing military bases and taking control of its minerals, using the territory as a base of operations when it later entered the Second World War.
So again, the “Trump Corollary” isn’t as radical a departure as many suggest. But it is nevertheless a major escalation. We have become accustomed to referring to postwar periods: the post-Second World War era, the post-Vietnam era, the post-Cold War era. But we have potentially entered a new and dangerous prewar era of intense superpower jockeying in which bloc politics returns to the fore.
