Trump Revives Monroe Doctrine in U.S. Relations with Western Hemisphere

The Washington Post

13:54 JST, March 1, 2025

Two days before Chilean lawmakers passed a long-debated package of social security reforms in late January, a group of U.S. investors unhappy with the legislation sent an ominous letter to President Gabriel Boric.

“As the Trump Administration begins its broad review of trade agreements, it’s important that these actions and their implications are fully understood by U.S. leaders,” wrote David Chavern, head of the American Council of Life Insurers, whose members have investments in Chilean pension funds. The proposed reform package, he said, “would adversely affect the confidence of investors.”

A clear reference to the 2004 U.S.-Chile free trade pact, the warning was “we’ll tell Trump … we’re sure he’ll be disappointed,” said a senior South American official.

President Donald Trump and his national security team have repeatedly stressed that his administration will pay new attention to the Western Hemisphere, concentrating on what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called “missed opportunities and neglected partners.”

But for many in the region, that focus during Trump’s first month in office has been a one-way street, reviving unpleasant memories of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which declared the hemisphere a U.S. sphere of influence to the exclusion of other powers, and the Manifest Destiny that claimed a God-given right to American territorial expansion.

Long-attuned to U.S. slights both perceived and real, few missed Trump’s throwaway line during his signing of executive orders just hours after his inauguration. Relations with Latin America “should be great,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “They need us much more than we need them. We don’t need them.”

“What is the point of saying that?” asked the senior South American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing unwanted attention to his country. “It’s destroying trust. … Instead of inviting us to a new vision, he doesn’t invite anybody. There are only threats.”

Despite the free trade agreement and a U.S. trade surplus with Santiago, Trump has already threatened tariffs on copper from Chile, the world’s largest producer and biggest supplier of U.S. imports of the strategic metal. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order launching an assessment of the “national security risks” of dependence on imported copper.

Trump has said he will impose 25 percent tariffs on the three largest exporters of steel to the United States – Brazil, as well as Canada and Mexico, two countries with which the United States also has a trade agreement negotiated by Trump during his first term. He has threatened tariffs against Colombia, also a free trade partner and close U.S. ally, if it did not sufficiently cooperate in accepting deported migrants.

Elsewhere in the hemisphere, Trump has publicly set his sites on U.S. ownership of Denmark-ruled Greenland and the Panama Canal, and said Canada would be better off as the 51st U.S. state.

During visits in early February to Central America and the Dominican Republic, his first overseas trip in office, Rubio hailed what he described as closed friendships while warning there would be consequences if the new administration’s policies were not adhered to. Many in the region depend heavily on now-frozen U.S. aid and remittances from their citizens in this country as well as trade.

Some spoke out, albeit mildly. While Honduras appreciates its neighborly U.S. ties, “countries normally will have to find an alternative if relations with the United States are troubled by decisions the United States takes,” Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina, whose country was not on Rubio’s travel schedule, said in a recent interview. “Anyone has to react to a 25 percent tariff.”

Just after Trump’s inauguration, Honduran President Xiomara Castro, whose relations with the Biden administration were often testy, said her government might “consider a change in our cooperation policies with the United States, especially in the military arena” if it went ahead with promised mass deportations that could affect hundreds of thousands of Hondurans. Honduras hosts up to 1,500 U.S. military troops and a joint task force at the Soto Cano Air Base, where they manage regional U.S. policy priorities such as narcotics trafficking, organized crime and migration, as well as disaster relief and training.

Reina noted that Honduras has regularly accepted its deported nationals, but expressed concern – as have others – about their treatment in recent weeks by the United States. “We understand that there is a change in policy” under Trump, Reina said. The United States “are sovereign and can take their own decisions. But the only thing that we expect is respect for human rights.”

To many of its southern neighbors, the history of relations with the United States has been one of benign neglect, peppered with occasional political interference and military occupation, covert intervention and promised major investments that have never fully materialized.

Trump and those in his orbit have often referenced the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration by President James Monroe that the United States would not allow any interference by foreign powers in the hemisphere. In a first-term speech at the United Nations in 2018, Trump called it “the formal policy of our country.”

In both of his inaugural speeches, Trump spoke of Manifest Destiny, referring to the United States in 2017 as a “frontier nation” and this year as “as growing nation – one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”

The term was coined in the mid-19th century in reference to westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean and purchasing, conquering or negotiating ownership of territory extending south to the Rio Grande and eventually north to Alaska. Trump has now made it a matter of policy that the United States has the right to exert its will over anywhere in the hemisphere he deems vital to U.S. national security.

Some have been encouraged by his choice of Rubio as the first Latino secretary of state. Rubio’s nominated deputy, Christopher Landau, was born in Spain, spent his childhood in South America and served as Trump’s first-term ambassador to Mexico. Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s special envoy to Latin America is, like Rubio, the child of Cuban immigrants.

“For many reasons, U.S. foreign policy has long focused on other regions while overlooking our own,” Rubio wrote in a recent opinion column in the Wall Street Journal. “That ends now,” he said, adding that “some countries are cooperating with us enthusiastically – others less so.”

Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump ally and onetime White House strategist, put it more bluntly in an interview, approvingly calling the approach “Monroe Doctrine 2.0 meets American fortress meets Manifest Destiny.”

In addition to migration issues and trade, cooperation has been defined by the administration as addressing what is broadly seen by U.S. foreign policy experts and lawmakers as the strategic threat of Beijing’s growing influence in the hemisphere. China is now South America’s top trading partner and has invested in mining, deep water ports and extensive infrastructure projects.

The United States long counted on Latin American countries to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than Beijing, even after Washington changed its own diplomatic recognition to China. Most of South America had shifted by the 1990s, leaving Central America and the Caribbean – where governments are particularly under U.S. sway – as stalwart supporters and recipients of aid from Taiwan. That began to change, first with Costa Rica in 2007 and Panama in 2017, followed in quick succession by the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and, in 2023, Honduras.

Today in the hemisphere, only Paraguay, Guatemala, Belize, Haiti and a few small Caribbean states remain with Taiwan.

The U.S. military has repeatedly warned of the growing Chinese presence. Although China has no military forces based in the hemisphere, its companies, many of them state-owned, have constructed – and to varying degrees control – ports in Mexico, Peru, Brazil and some Caribbean islands in addition to Panama.

“I can’t tell you how many hearings I’ve sat in with the general in charge of [the U.S. military’s] Southern Command ringing the alarm bells about Chinese influence in … South America and Latin America,” Trump national security adviser Michael Waltz, a former member of Congress, said in January during a pre-inauguration talk at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “We’re all wringing our hands in Congress about Chinese control of supply chains of pharmaceuticals and critical minerals.”

“Well, we’re going to take steps to take that on,” Waltz said. “That is going to be really a whole-of-government effort in terms of permitting, in terms of mining, terms of refining, but really looking at the Western Hemisphere as a source of the energy, the critical minerals, the food supply that we absolutely need.”

“We’re starting to see Trump’s vision take shape – one of reordering the world into spheres of influence,” said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow focused on U.S.-China competition at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. “This is America asserting itself in the Western Hemisphere, framed through the lens of countering Chinese and, to a certain extent, Russian influence.”

But such retrenchment could backfire, Singleton warned. “China has made it clear that it is playing for global stakes, not just regional dominance,” he said. “If we retreat into a sphere-of-influence mindset, we risk diminishing the United States as a global power. And that carries profound implications for our role in the world.”

Despite forward-leaning intentions, a succession of U.S. administrations and the American private sector have been unable or unwilling to match Chinese investment in Latin America, leaving Beijing to partner in development of resources such as the South America’s vast lithium deposits, as well as agriculture and infrastructure. Over the past two decades, China’s trade with the region rose twenty-six-fold, from $12 billion to $315 billion, with estimates that trade ties will more than double by 2035, according to a recent report by the Atlantic Council.

Working against any effort to present a unified Latin American front to Trump are deep political divisions among the countries in the hemisphere. Leftist leaders in Brazil and Colombia, for example, find little in common with their rightist counterparts in Argentina and Paraguay. In between are many that simply want to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble with the Americans.

A recent attempt by Honduras to organize a gathering of the 33 heads of state belonging to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC, to discuss Trump’s treatment of detained and deported migrants fell apart when most declined to attend.

The problem, said the senior South American official, is that “Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela scream and shout and say terrible things about the United States. We don’t want a meeting like that.” Putting Argentine President Javier Milei, the most fervent Trump acolyte in the hemisphere, beside Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “won’t work. They don’t want to sit together.”

But even Milei, whose country imports most of its industrial goods from China and sends much of its agricultural production there, apparently has his limits. “China is a very interesting trading partner, because they don’t make any demands,” he said in an interview last fall with Argentine television. “They just ask that you don’t bother them.”