The Trump administration’s invocation of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine should come as no surprise. The America First movement has been rightly interpreted to include the important task of securing “Fortress America” and its geographic sphere — the latest instance in a long history of repurposing the Monroe Doctrine to suit America’s shifting interests. Ever since the U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney proclaimed in 1895 that the United States’ “fiat is law” in the Americas, each reinterpretation has served less to establish Washington’s right to unilateral sovereignty over the Western Hemisphere than to legitimize it.¹

The question facing any administration that invokes Monroeism, therefore, is whether it possesses the political legitimacy to translate regional preeminence into hemispheric order. The original Monroe Doctrine was premised on a principle of spatial exclusion that the Trumpian version clearly channels. It treats the Western Hemisphere as a privileged strategic space in which external powers should not gain decisive influence. But as the German jurist Carl Schmitt put it, the Monroe Doctrine did not merely transform a sovereign political decision into a legal condition by way of spatial delimitation.² It gave geographic expression to a clash of political principles, constituting the Western Hemisphere as a distinct political order rooted in common institutional forms.

On this score, the Trump Corollary falls short. It fails to fully conceive of the hemisphere as a distinct political order, defaulting instead to the logic of transactionalism. This is a blind spot with strategic consequences: transactional hegemony is expensive to maintain and unable to answer the question that Monroeism has always had to answer. Why should the nations of this hemisphere accept American primacy as legitimate rather than merely tolerate it? Moreover, the administration’s posture plays into the hands of Americas chief hemispheric rival, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which conceives of transactionalism as a conduit for political alignment rather than a substitute for it. 

President Monroe’s original 1823 proclamation did more than warn foreign governments from meddling in America’s backyard. It advanced a parallel political claim. Monroe stated that “the political system of the allied [European] powers is essentially different … from that of America,” a difference that “proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments.” Monroe surmised that it would be “impossible” for European powers to “extend their political system to any portion” of the Western Hemisphere “without endangering our peace and happiness.”³ In other words, Monroe subtly portrayed the New World as a community of self-determined republican states opposed to Europe’s Old World monarchical-dynastic empires. John Quincy Adams himself argued in 1823 that “It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly” to European powers “than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”⁴ While British naval supremacy ensured that European powers took the declaration seriously, the doctrine’s legitimacy flowed from the political distinction it drew.

During the Cold War, American policymakers sought to replicate the Monroe Doctrine’s original political logic. The strategy of containment ultimately globalized what Monroe had conceived as a geographically bounded principle, recasting ideological incompatibility as a universal rather than hemispheric condition. Within the Western Hemisphere, however, the core premise held: Cold War policymakers treated Marxist-Leninist regimes aligned with Moscow as structurally incompatible with “the principles of the inter-American system.”⁵ They combined the tactical premise of spatial exclusion with a clear ideological basis upon which to preclude foreign powers from their hemisphere.

Trumpian Monroeism, on the other hand, lacks what Cold War–era Monroeism took for granted. The 2025 National Security Strategy gestures toward a rivalrous distinction, framing the choice for regional governments as one between “an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies” and “a parallel system in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world.”⁶ Yet the strategy declines to characterize this parallel system in political terms or to identify the governing authorities that represent it—there is no justification for why “countries on the other side of the world” are inherently incompatible with the American-led system. Instead, it refers vaguely to “Non-Hemispheric competitors” while priding itself on being “respectful” toward different “governing systems.”⁷

This anti-ideological posture may be defensible at the level of international politics. But it sits uneasily with the logic of Monroeism upon which the Trump Administration’s hemispheric policy rests. The 2025 NSS covers China, but the section on the Western Hemisphere only implicitly refers to China and never once refers to Beijing or names the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This immediately compromises the sense of political hierarchy that makes Monroeism intelligible — and strategically viable.  

Ideological Monroeism is an asymmetric advantage. Beijing cannot credibly offer the nations of the Western Hemisphere membership in a tradition of republican self-determination. Washington can, essentially for free. The argument for deploying the language of shared principle, even cynically, is that it reduces the costs of regional stability maintenance, which is the administration’s top priority. Political ideology is a force multiplier that makes coercion cheaper, alignment stickier, and defection costlier. The case for wielding it is strategic rather than moralistic.

The Administration acknowledges that many hemispheric governments are not ideologically aligned with Beijing and simply partner with it for pragmatic reasons. This is largely true. Beijing is not in the business of overt ideological crusading — it presents itself as a responsible stakeholder, a reliable partner, a disinterested friend of the nations of the world. But the CCP believes the proof is in the partnership: that sustained commercial engagement with it normalizes its conception of political legitimacy. Beijing’s studied apoliticism is itself a form of “smokeless” ideological warfare.⁸

China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping has consistently framed rivalry with the West as a systemic contest between competing forms of political legitimacy.⁹ Xi presents China’s model as a proof of concept that calls into question the universality of Western political norms and invites emulation abroad.¹⁰ CCP ideologues say the quiet part out loud. China’s most important political theorist, Politburo member Wang Huning, has argued that China’s political system must “demonstrate its superiority,” that Marxism-Leninism long ago “transcended the Western rule-based worldview,” and that if a country can “establish international norms that conform to those of its domestic society, then that country will have no need to change” and “all other countries will want to coordinate their activities within that system.”^11,12 For Beijing, political systems do not merely organize domestic authority. They shape the structure of the international system, even as Washington increasingly downplays the systemic nature of the competition.

The People’s Republic of China is a Leninist party-state. Its presence in the Western Hemisphere inevitably carries with it the institutional logic of its political system, regardless of the ideological predilections of its regional client states. Chinese loans, infrastructure projects, and market access are paired with diplomatic incentives, elite cultivation, and technology partnerships that deepen political dependence on Beijing. Through state-directed financing, party-to-party exchanges, and dense networks linking Chinese firms, ministries, and local political actors, the CCP seeks to “take center stage” in global affairs and socialize nations into what it calls a “community of common destiny.”¹³ Beijing’s mercantilist approach to economic statecraft functionally legitimizes Leninist party-state governance, hastening a Sinocentric international system that puts constitutional republicanism on the ideological backfoot.¹⁴

By depoliticizing the contest for hemispheric preeminence, the Administration undermines the strategic integrity of Trumpian Monroeism — and shifts competition onto terrain that advantages Beijing. The NSS centers “commercial diplomacy” as the organizing principle of hemispheric engagement.¹⁵ It leans heavily on America’s economic weight, noting that the U.S. market “provides leverage over countries that want access to our markets.”¹⁶ The strategy envisions “applying pressure” to secure access to strategic resources and offering hemispheric partners a “suite of inducements” designed to tilt the regional balance of economic opportunity in Washington’s favor.¹⁷ Yet the premise faces substantial practical challenges that play directly to Chinese strengths. 

China is already deeply economically embedded in the Americas. It is the leading trade partner for most South American economies — the principal export destination for Brazil, Chile, and Peru, with total regional trade exceeding $518 billion annually — and has financed and built critical port, rail, and telecommunications infrastructure across the hemisphere.¹⁸ Beijing has spent decades refining an approach that integrates commercial activity with national strategy. It can mobilize resources at scale without the constraints of legislative appropriations, deploy state-owned enterprises as instruments of policy, and absorb commercial losses that private firms operating under shareholder scrutiny would find difficult to sustain.

These institutional differences create asymmetries that stronger financial sanctions or streamlined licensing procedures will struggle to overcome. The administration’s confidence in its strategy is belied by its modest proposal to warn hemispheric governments of the “hidden costs” of Chinese assistance.¹⁹ Many developing nations in the Western Hemisphere have extensive experience engaging Beijing and are likely to weigh such cautions against their own development priorities and the tangible economic opportunities Beijing has already helped create. It is challenging to, in the same breath, assert hemispheric supremacy on purely economic grounds and then call out “hidden costs” as a reason to ignore the objectively more lucrative terms that China is often able to offer.

There is no doubt that the United States should more forcefully wield the gravitational pull of its economy to shape the terms of hemispheric engagement where possible. Decades of post-Cold War globalism have distracted American policymakers from conceiving of regional primacy as the baseline condition for selective engagement abroad. But Washington should recognize that America’s long-run regional dominance rests on sources of influence that extend beyond commercial and military power.

While coercive leverage underwrites American leadership, political vision ultimately sustains it. In its haste to dispense with postwar pieties, the Trump administration risks unilateral ideological disarmament. The administration’s own 2017 National Security Strategy described the Western Hemisphere as a coherent political community of “democratic states connected by shared values and economic interests,” built upon “democracy and the rule of law.”²⁰ That language did not commit Washington to democracy promotion or humanitarian intervention, but it signaled to regional political elites that American hemispheric primacy stands for something beyond self-interest.

The 2025 NSS, on the other hand, derides these “vague platitudes” as relics of neoconservatism.²¹ Yet in its reflexive hostility to the language of shared principle, the strategy risks collapsing the distinctions upon which Monroeism rests. The NSS section on the Trump Corollary centers almost exclusively on “bolstering the nation’s appeal” as the hemisphere’s economic “partner of choice.”²² The administration’s primary goal is for “partner nations to build up their domestic economies,” reasoning that “an economically stronger and more sophisticated Western Hemisphere becomes an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment.”²³

This objective is defensible. But commerce is no substitute for politics. In many respects, it is its antithesis — an irony that should not be lost on Trumpian critics of neoliberal globalism or on those who lament Europe’s failure to cohere as something beyond a customs union. Unless Washington advances a strong parallel claim about the principles that distinguish the inter-American system as a distinct political order, the United States risks reducing the hemisphere to a scorched marketplace.

There are tactical risks associated with the Administration’s approach. Partners appear less as members of a common order than as actuarial counterparties. Regional elites must increasingly confront the domestic audience costs of appearing to capitulate to Washington.²⁴ Governments that view Washington as one bidder among many are as likely to balance as to bandwagon. Transactional approaches to foreign policy often paradoxically raise transaction costs over time, encouraging hedging and resistance.²⁵ The recently established Shield of the Americas initiative, launched without the hemisphere’s three largest economies and most consequential security partners, is an early illustration of the problem.²⁶

Machiavelli observed that the conqueror who extracts tribute without incorporation plants the seeds of his own expulsion. “Rome,” he wrote in the Discourses on Livy, “did not secure her empire by force alone, but by communicating to her subjects a share in her privileges.”²⁷ America is not an empire in decline. It is an empire in denial. And powers that deny the political foundations of their dominance eventually find that power alone cannot sustain it.

The Monroe Doctrine has always been more than a spatial claim. Its legitimacy derives from the idea that the Western Hemisphere constitutes a distinct political order, not merely a geographic sphere. Trumpian Monroeism must synthesize America First nationalism with a binding conception of hemispheric political legitimacy — articulating why regional neighbors should see themselves as members of a shared political tradition accorded privileged status within an American-led order, and why that tradition distinguishes the inter-American system from the parallel order Beijing is building. Otherwise, the Trump Corollary will leave the hemisphere vulnerable to precisely the kind of systemic competition the Monroe Doctrine was originally meant to confront.

1. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Secretary of State Richard Olney to Ambassador Thomas Bayard, July 20, 1895,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1895. ↩︎
2. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 281–286. ↩︎
3. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, “Monroe Doctrine (1823),” Milestone Documents. ↩︎
4. John Quincy Adams, “Memorandum of a Cabinet Meeting, November 7, 1823,” in Foreign Relations of the United States: The Monroe Doctrine, 1823, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. ↩︎
5. Organization of American States, “Resolution VI: Exclusion of the Present Government of Cuba from Participation in the Inter-American System,” Eighth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Punta del Este, January 31, 1962. ↩︎
6. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, 2025), 18. ↩︎
7. The White House, National Security Strategy (2025), 4. ↩︎
8. Mike Gallagher, “Opening Remarks,” U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Hearing, “Discourse Power: The CCP’s Strategy to Shape the Global Information Space,” November 30, 2023. ↩︎
9. Liza Tobin, “Xi’s Vision for Transforming Global Governance: A Strategic Challenge for Washington and Its Allies,” Texas National Security Review 2, no. 1 (November 2018): 156–158. ↩︎
10. Xi Jinping, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” report delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, October 18, 2017, China Daily ↩︎
11. Wang Huning, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” translated by David Ownby, Reading the China Dream, accessed March 5, 2026. ↩︎
12. Wang Huning, “Cultural Expansion and Cultural Sovereignty: A Challenge to the Concept of Sovereignty,” translated by David Ownby, Reading the China Dream, accessed March 5, 2026. ↩︎
13. Matt Pottinger, “Beijing’s American Hustle,” Foreign Affairs 100, no. 5 (September/October 2021). ↩︎
14. Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). ↩︎
15. The White House, National Security Strategy (2025), 16. ↩︎
16. Ibid, 6. ↩︎
17. Ibid, 22. ↩︎
18. Council on Foreign Relations, “China’s Growing Influence in Latin America,” last modified June 6, 2025. ↩︎
19. The White House, National Security Strategy (2025), 18. ↩︎
20. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, 2017), 51. ↩︎
21. The White House, National Security Strategy (2025), 1. ↩︎
22. Ibid. ↩︎
23. Ibid, 16. ↩︎
24. James D. Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (1994): 577–592. ↩︎
25. Randall L. Schweller, “Unanswered Threats: A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing,” International Security 29, no. 2 (2004): 159–201; David A. Lake, “Anarchy, Hierarchy, and the Variety of International Relations,” International Organization 50, no. 1 (1996): 1–33. ↩︎
26. Orlando J. Pérez, “The Shield of the Americas Is the Trump Corollary’s Military Edge,” Just Security, March 16, 2026. ↩︎
27. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), II.4. ↩︎