Trump’s Closer-to-Home National Security Strategy Is a Mixed Bag

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) is a mixed bag. Despite the Monroe Doctrine being declared in 1823, the Western Hemisphere, the geographically closest area to the United States, has been neglected in post-war U.S. foreign policy in order to undertake American interventions in regions perceived to be more important. Since 1945, the top priorities of U.S. policy have been in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.

Thus, the new Trump NSS laudably puts more emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. However, in the document, the “Trump Doctrine” appears to primarily rediscover the coercive aspects of the Monroe Doctrine, aimed at keeping foreign influence out of the hemisphere. Yet the first chapter of such coercive U.S. policy, from the 1898 Spanish-American War to the late 1920s, did not go that well. U.S. mercantilist military interventions, mainly in the furtherance of American commercial interests, failed to ensure stability in the hemisphere and needlessly made a lot of local enemies.

That’s why, in the late 1920s, Herbert Hoover began withdrawing American forces from military occupations in Latin American countries. In the 1930s, FDR continued this “Good Neighbor” policy to try to keep Latin American countries from collaborating with Adolf Hitler’s Nazis. The concept apparently was that “you get more with sugar than vinegar,” as Momma used to say. And in Latin America, Momma was right; prior and during World War II, the Nazis got very little cooperation in America’s backyard. Based on such history, Trump’s plinking of small and inconsequential drug boats, with perhaps worse land attacks to come, to intimidate Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to resign, will likely be counterproductive in the long run, even if they succeed in the short term. And threatening to retake the Panama Canal using military force will win no friends and is unnecessary, given that the overwhelming predominance of U.S. naval power in the hemisphere should be able to reopen it quickly if any hostile actor tried to close it. Even that threat is improbable because many countries, including China, regularly use the canal. 

Trump is commendably bringing national security closer to home, but he errs by using the military inside the house. Rather than being used for law enforcement in American cities—as Trump has—the active military and National Guard forces have been trained to shoot to kill foreign threats. They are not trained for law enforcement and are prohibited from doing so by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, unless an actual insurrection arises and the Insurrection Act is invoked. There have been no moves to overthrow the government in any of these cities. Thus, Trump’s deployment of such forces has likely been illegal—and a couple of courts have ruled as such.

In his laudable effort to rein in the currently overextended worldwide U.S. sphere of influence and bring it closer to home, Trump is correct to demand that the wealthy Europeans and East Asians assume more of the burden for their own security. That demand should include both Taiwan and Ukraine. In addition, because the war in Ukraine is effectively a battle to determine whether Ukraine will be in Europe’s or Russia’s sphere of influence, Trump is right to turn over financing of that conflict to the Europeans, who he rightly believes have a greater interest in it than does the United States. However, he should not pressure Ukraine to accept a one-sided peace deal that might, in effect, allow Russia to conquer it in a future war.

This analyst could fully embrace Trump’s “closer-to-home” National Security Strategy if he kept the military out of the American house and used a more benign approach to occasionally annoy close neighbors.