Having mastered the domestic politics of nostalgia, Donald Trump’s new administration is now reaching back to the 19th century for diplomatic inspiration. The issues on the foreign-policy agenda harken back to the days of steamships, telegraph wires, and pith helmets—trade disputes with Canada and Mexico, dreams of annexing Greenland, and ambitions to control the Panama Canal. The headlines could have come from 1867!
Connecting it all is the old Monroe Doctrine, a versatile nationalist symbol of exceptional stamina. Rarely referenced since the late 1930s, it has resurfaced as a cohering symbol of the administration’s foreign policy, which, according to National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, will amount to “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.”
How does Monroe Doctrine 2.0 compare to its predecessor? Does the past offer any clues as to how Trump’s Monroe Doctrine will play out in the years ahead?
The first key to understanding the old Monroe Doctrine is that its text is essentially meaningless. It differs, in this sense, from the Constitution. Monroe and his team never intended the non-sequential paragraphs of the president’s routine annual message in 1823 to be a binding doctrine of foreign policy. Those paragraphs boldly stated what foreign powers could not do (intervene in the Western Hemisphere), without delineating the policies the United States would pursue.
“There was an anti-imperialist Monroe Doctrine.”
The 1823 message was therefore a blank canvas, filled in by subsequent statesmen who cloaked their competing agendas in Monroe’s popular nationalist brand. There was an anti-imperialist Monroe Doctrine, but also one that called for territorial expansion. Pro- and anti-slavery interpretations jostled for supremacy, as did isolationist and internationalist ones. Nineteenth-century Americans invoked the Monroe Doctrine against each other far more than they did against foreign governments. The best definition of the Monroe Doctrine is as follows: a contested political symbol into which competing actors loaded their agendas.