The First World War marked the beginning of a shift in U.S. foreign policy away from the vision of the founding fathers toward more engagement with other world powers.
Initially, the United States saw the war as yet another European conflict that it should not have gotten entangled in. Since its founding, the U.S. had kept out of Europe’s messy map of alliances and rivalries and had kept European powers out of the Western Hemisphere.
This approach was the brainchild of the founding generation. In his farewell address, George Washington warned that the young nation would suffer if it established alliances that entangled it with other nations, especially in Europe. To plunge into European squabbles, he said, would be “unwise” and against the interests of the U.S.
“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none or a very remote relation,” Washington said. “Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
Avoiding engagement in Europe thus became the lodestar of U.S. policy for more than a century. It kept the U.S. out of the various revolutions in France throughout the 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars, the Italian Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and numerous other conflicts that engulfed the continent throughout the 1800s.
Less than 30 years after Washington delivered his farewell address, James Monroe, the last of the founding fathers to hold the presidency, articulated the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the U.S. would oppose European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and would consider any act of imperialism on the American continent to be an act of hostility toward U.S. interests.
This posture toward new European colonial efforts in the Western Hemisphere largely kept the great empires of the time on their own side of the Atlantic and helped pave the way for the independence of Central and South America.
However, when the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917, it decisively broke with the foreign policy of the founders. Instead of allowing European squabbles to remain European, the U.S. intervention and former President Woodrow Wilson’s subsequent role in the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations signaled that the U.S. would remain in splendid isolation no more. For Wilson, this was crucial because it allowed America to export its way of life. As he put it, the nation went to war to “make the world safe for democracy.”
However, this new approach was not easily accepted at home. After Wilson left office, isolationism took hold again, lasting until the U.S. entered the Second World War in December 1941. The end of that conflict and the beginning of the Cold War ended U.S. isolationism for good. However, the Warsaw Pact’s defeat in the Cold War in 1991 also largely ended the Monroe Doctrine, which had helped guide pushback against the Soviet Union’s efforts to expand communism to the Western Hemisphere.
As the U.S. sought to build closer relations with China and allow this isolated communist state to integrate into the global economy, China has displayed no gratitude and has, rather, returned the favor by expanding its malignant influence on the American continent. As it has emerged as an economic and military superpower, China has increased its interventions and its economic and political engagement with Latin America in a way that the U.S. would not have tolerated during the Cold War days or before 1917.
A Monroe Doctrine for 2025
Since President-elect Donald Trump won the election in November, however, he has telegraphed a new approach to foreign policy, and it is one that hearkens back to the founding generation while recognizing the changes that have taken place in the world over the past century, including acknowledging the fact that the U.S. is the preeminent superpower and cannot return to the isolationism of yesteryear.
Two foreign policy statements by Trump during the transition encapsulate his new Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century. The first was his demand that the Kingdom of Denmark consider selling Greenland to the U.S. or, in some other unspecified way, accede to U.S. domination over the huge island strategically located to dominate the Arctic. The second Trump statement was his aggressive and unexpected demand to Panama, seeking the return of the Panama Canal, which was handed over to the Latin American nation through the Torrijos–Carter Treaties negotiated in 1977 by the late President Jimmy Carter. To add a headline-grabbing emphasis to his plans to assert U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere, Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the “Gulf of America.”
As a strategic move, acquiring Greenland would be a home run for the Trump administration. It would also fit neatly into the historical pattern dating back to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France of the U.S. buying territory that entrenched the domination of its quarter of the world. Greenland has long hosted a U.S. military base, and acquiring the enormous frigid land mass would help prevent China and Russia from exploiting the Arctic’s vast mineral resources. Acquiring Greenland has been bandied about by U.S. policymakers for more than a century. It does not seem out of the question that Trump could bring it to fulfillment and extend U.S. strength in the northeastern corner of the Americas.
The Panama Canal is another matter. Seeking its return is as much an effort to repudiate Carter’s actions and lamentable presidency as it is a warning to the Chinese government, which has spent billions of dollars in Central and South America.
The government of Panama has pushed back on notions that China controls the canal, which was built by the U.S. in the early 1900s, but the two ports at either end of the canal are run by CK Hutchison Holdings, a Chinese company based in Hong Kong. At the time that the ports were built, Hong Kong had more independence from China, but this autonomy has been slashed back in the past decade.
China’s involvement in Latin America goes far beyond Panama. Several South American countries have joined the BRICS bloc, an economic organization led by China and India, which seeks to undermine the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative has also found willing participants among Latin American countries, including El Salvador, Panama, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador, and Chile.
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In the Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested billions of dollars into the economic and civil infrastructure of these countries, often on predatory terms, greatly increasing Chinese influence over their political affairs and strengthening the superpower’s power in the region. Likewise, Mexico has allowed Chinese companies to build factories on its soil to circumvent U.S. tariffs. Countering the influence of an antagonistic global power is precisely what the Monroe Doctrine was intended to do.
Trump’s foreign policy goals may seem as outlandish on the surface and mockable departures from the international relations playbook of recent years that both Democrats and Republicans have adhered to since the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. However, he is following the wisdom of the founding fathers. As he takes office Monday, the foreign policy agenda of the Trump administration is clear: The Monroe Doctrine is back in a big way, and international meddling in the Western Hemisphere will no longer be tolerated.