New York Times

Trump and the ‘Donroe Doctrine’
Even before it deployed a giant aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, the Trump administration had already paid a lot of attention to America’s neighbors in the Western Hemisphere.

President Trump started his second term vowing to seize the Panama Canal, annex Greenland and make Canada the 51st state. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico, rechristening it the Gulf of America.

Over the summer, he used American economic might to punish Brazil with tariffs and sanctions for prosecuting his ally, the former president Jair Bolsonaro. This fall, he threw another ally, President Javier Milei of Argentina, a $20 billion economic lifeline.

But now, in what’s probably the administration’s most conspicuous intervention so far, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has arrived within striking distance of Venezuela. Fifteen thousand American troops now sit in the region as the administration contemplates whether to take military action against the country.

Latin America has been at the receiving end of interventions from U.S. presidents before. But as my colleague Jack Nicas, our Mexico City bureau chief, writes in his very good analysis, what we’re seeing right now is “a sharp shift of decades of U.S. foreign policy” — a pivot to the Western Hemisphere.

Some foreign policy analysts told Jack they believed Trump would like to divide the world so that the U.S., China and Russia each dominate their own spheres of influence. Trump, they said, considers the Western Hemisphere part of America’s domain.

‘Our hemisphere’

Some call this new U.S. focus “the Donroe Doctrine,” Jack explained — a sort of Trumpian twist on a 19th-century idea. (The term appeared on a January cover of The New York Post.)

In 1823, President James Monroe wanted to stop European powers from meddling in the Americas. The idea had a corollary — that the U.S. would not interfere in Europe. This became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

In 2025, America’s main rival in the world is China, which has built up enormous political and economic power in Latin America over the past decades. China has invested in mining of strategic resources like lithium in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. It is the largest buyer of Venezuelan oil. It is building factories for electric vehicles in Brazil. Russia also has a presence in Latin America, primarily in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

U.S. officials have begun talking in Monroe-Doctrine-esque language recently, Jack points out.

“The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood — and we will protect it,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Thursday.

U.S. interest in the region isn’t hard to understand. Ample natural resources, strategic security positions and lucrative markets are all in play.

What’s less clear is whether the Monroe-era corollary about spheres of influence still applies. If America is refocused on the Western Hemisphere, does that also imply that it’s willing to stay out of Russia’s and China’s neighborhoods? That would have significant implications for, among other places, Ukraine and Taiwan