Why Trump resurrected the Monroe Doctrine

0:00N.P.R.

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social this week what looked like a photoshopped Wikipedia page. This described him as the acting president of Venezuela. This was maybe an unsurprising post from a president who not just loves being online, but is also throwing American muscle around. The administration's actions are a deliberate callback to a foreign policy from 200 years ago. It's called the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine is about which world powers get to exert influence in the Western Hemisphere. Different presidents have put their own spin on it, and now it's Trump's turn.

0:55It's being called the Donro Doctrine. Today on the show, we look at how the Trump administration is putting the Donro Doctrine into practice, especially when it comes to the president's desire for oil. You know, when you add the word doctrine to anything, it sounds very serious and official. Oh, for sure. A doctrine is like an official statement of the policy or principles. The origins of the Monroe Doctrine, though, were actually kind of casual. That's according to historian Jay Sexton. He's a professor at the University of Missouri, and he wrote a whole book on this. The original Monroe Doctrine is not law.

1:31It's not statute. It's not international law. It's just like what one president wrote in a message to Congress. So the year's 1823. We've got the fifth president, James Monroe. He's delivering an annual message to Congress. And at one point, he mentions the United States' European rivals. Yeah, these would have been countries like Britain and France. Monroe said any efforts by those countries to exert influence in the Western Hemisphere would be dangerous to the U.S. Jay says Monroe's original idea had an anti-imperialist bent to it because the president wanted European countries to butt out of the region.

2:07He says they can't extend their empires further in the Western Hemisphere. That's it. Doesn't say what the United States should do. Doesn't see this as the beginning of this new pillar of foreign policy. It's not even understood to be a doctrine at the time. That happens like a quarter of a century later. Jay's talking about the 1840s. That's when President James Polk wrote in his diary about Mr. Monroe's doctrine. And he used this policy as a way of bolstering American imperialism. Polk made the case that the U.S. needed to take California from Mexico, because if it didn't, then the British or the French would try to take it.

2:44Then in the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify American intervention in Central America and the Caribbean. This policy is known as the Roosevelt Corollary. Another official-sounding name. Yeah, corollary is something that naturally follows or runs parallel to another thing. And today, we have the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The New York Post also referred to it as the Donroe Doctrine last year, and the name has stuck. Jay says the Donroe Doctrine is part of the Trump administration's unraveling of the world order that the U.S. helped set up in 1945.

3:20There's a move away from global cooperation and towards spheres of influence. That's when a powerful country like the U.S. or China tries to dominate a foreign area. Today, concerns over Chinese economic power have replaced 19th century fears about European countries. China has invested heavily in Latin America, including in Venezuela. As the United States is no longer the sort of global hegemon that's able to preside over this global system, spheres of influence are coming back. The Monroe Doctrine has a new place in American foreign policy and in American politics. In December, the White House published a document outlining its national security strategy.

4:01It talks about reasserting the Monroe Doctrine after what it calls years of neglect. And it describes some goals for the Western Hemisphere. One of them is discouraging mass migration. Another is going after narco-terrorists and other criminal groups. The strategy also talks about keeping critical supply chains in the hemisphere out of hostile foreign hands. And it's this last bit that Javier Blas believes drove the U.S. to attack Venezuela. Javier is a columnist at Bloomberg who's covered the oil market for 30 years. The U.S. is signaling everything under the Americas is safe because I'm going to be protecting and I'm willing to use also my military power to control if needed or put under my umbrella of security those resources if I believe that those resources are not safe.

4:54That's the explanation that the White House is making with Venezuela. And it's kind of like you're under our security umbrella whether you want to be or not. Oh, yes. This is not an optional security umbrella. As long as you are in the Americas, you are under it whether you like it or not. Right. Sounds a little bit like going door to door offering protection for a bit of money. Nice natural resources you got there. Javier says Trump has a longstanding obsession with low oil prices. He describes the president's thinking like this. Trump wants low interest rates. If oil prices and gasoline prices are high, then inflation will go up and the Federal Reserve will hike rates.

5:35So to sum up, low oil prices means low inflation, which means low interest rates. Javier says this comes back to Trump's career in real estate, a business that typically benefits from low rates. Like, really, that's why we bombed Caracas and captured Nicolas Maduro, because on Trump's mind. The cost of a mortgage needs to be low because that's what he did as a business person. And then he associated low oil prices with low mortgages. And then that means going into Venezuela. But I think that probably that's one of the things that he has in his mind. We asked the White House about whether low oil and gas prices motivated the attack on Venezuela.

6:14Anna Kelly with the White House press office responded in a statement that, quote, the president was clear in his motivation, the influx of drugs and criminals into our country was unacceptable. Trump's fixation on oil prices isn't new. What has changed, Javier says, is how openly the president is talking about wanting Venezuela's oil. Javier points out that when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the official rationale from the administration was that it was about weapons of mass destruction. Under the Donro Doctrine, there's no such pretext. And Javier calculates that Trump's security umbrella over the Americas now covers 40 percent of the world's oil production.

6:52He says the healthy supply of oil from the Americas isn't just keeping prices low. It's also insulating the U.S. from geopolitical fallout in other parts of the world. Even when we see a lot of instability in producing areas, including the Middle East, prices remain relatively low. And all of that is allowing a more assertive foreign policy in America, because typically one of the main constraints of the Pentagon was what is the impact if we bomb, for example, Iran? Is the oil price going to go to$100 oil? That has been in the minds of American military and diplomats for a very long time, probably since the 1970s.

7:36Venezuela may be the most prominent example of the Trump corollary or the Don Road Doctrine in practice. But historian Jay Sexton says you can point to other instances of the U.S. throwing its muscle around. The Trump administration has tried exerting influence over the Panama Canal. It's talked about making Canada into the 51st state. The president has also renewed talk of taking over Greenland. He repeated this idea on Wednesday. This was just hours before a meeting at the White House with officials from Denmark and Greenland. There clearly is a vision here about the United States assuming a more muscular, assertive interventionist role in the region.

8:17But there's implications of that downstream. If you're going to depose leaders of sovereign states, then the chaos that unfolds, you're going to have some responsibility for managing it. And I think that's where we're at right now in the current implementation of this new Donroe Doctrine. There's actually another foreign policy term for what Jay is describing. And this one's a little less highfalutin. It's called the Pottery Barn Rule. And it's attributed to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He said, if you break it, you own it. Right now, it's not clear whether Trump will follow this rule or come up with his own.

9:00This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Vito Emanuel. Kate Kincanon is our show's editor, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.