In defence of the Trump doctrine
Pundits stress the Trump administration’s emphasis on protecting its near abroad as if this is a new priority. But the defence of the Western hemisphere has been the No.1 strategic priority of the US since the 1820s, when president James Monroe asserted that European powers would not be allowed to interfere in Latin America. The difference today is that the threat is China.
The mindset reflects an old truth of geopolitics: that great powers fervently protect what they benignly refer to as their sphere of influence. This is tragic but it is the way the world works, and Washington has long gone to great lengths to defend vital strategic interests in its hemisphere.
Sometimes US officials are explicit about this, as was a US secretary of state who declared in 1895: “Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confined its interposition.”
Still, the strategic ideas that underpin the Monroe Doctrine have hardly been stated since the US’s emergence as a great power, simply because it has been so obvious. The question to ask in 2025 is: How does Washington think about the other regions of the world outside the Western hemisphere, most importantly Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf?
With the Cold War, Europe had been the most important strategic area. That was because of the threatening and hostile Soviet Union. However, in recent times Europe has ceased to be of vital interest to the US. This is not simply because, as the authors of the NSS stress, Europe is in “civilisational erasure”. It’s because Europe is no longer the main strategic or economic theatre.
Russia is a declining great power that is bogged down in the Donbas. Its economy is primarily reliant on commodities and it faces a serious demographic crisis. Its invasion of Ukraine was driven more by a reaction to what Moscow sees as Western encroachment in its own sphere of influence than re-creating any Russian empire. Add to that continental Europe’s declining share of the global economy – down from 25 per cent in 1990 to 14 per cent today – and it’s no wonder that Washington considers Europe a much less important strategic theatre these days.
None of this is surprising. As leading Australian foreign policy realist Owen Harries identified after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe and the US have almost always been deeply divided politically. The history of “the West”, he argued, had been studied with internecine conflicts and vicious intramural wars, culminating in both world wars – which, in civilisational terms, were essentially Western civil wars. Indeed, for most of its history the US has been deeply suspicious of, and hostile towards, European power politics, stressing its differences from the older continent.
It has taken 3½ decades since the collapse of Soviet communism, but Donald Trump is finally realigning US policy with the reality that the US can’t impose its will and leadership across all three major theatres. The unipolar moment that leading neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer identified in the 1990s – and the mindset that led to NATO expansion and the forever wars in the Middle East – is no more.
Moreover, since roughly 2017, the most important outside strategic theatre for the US has become East Asia – that is self-evidently because of China, whose rise, says the NSS, was directly attributed to decades of western engagement. China’s dramatic rise creates powerful incentives for the US to get out of Europe and concentrate its forces in East Asia. This, remember, justified Barack Obama’s so-called pivot.
Unlike Russia, China is a rapidly rising power: whereas Ukraine has exposed the Kremlin’s strategic limits, the Chinese Communist Party is bent on upsetting the Asian status quo, challenging and eventually replacing US military power in the region. As a result, even old Cold War foe Vietnam clamours for US security guarantees in the face of a threatening China. Unlike Finland and Sweden, Taiwan and Japan are vital US interests.
In recent times, prominent Australian scholars Hugh White and Sam Roggeveen have raised serious doubts about US staying power in our region. But the NSS calls for “a robust and ongoing focus on deterrence to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific” and insists “a favourable conventional military balance remains an essential component of strategic competition”.
Moreover, “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority”. And this: In concert with its allies, the US “will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain”. Not much evidence here of US retreat or isolationism.
It is true that Trump is highly erratic and unpredictable. Given his temperament, it would be the easiest thing in the world for an adversary to taunt and goad Trump out of any sense of prudence.
But Washington is bigger than one president. To the extent the NSS reflects America’s global priorities, it’s clear that East Asia is the most important area outside the Western hemisphere that impinges on US interests. And that undoubtedly serves the Australian national interest.
Tom Switzer is the author of Events, Dear Boy: Any Government Can Be Derailed (Centre for Independent Studies).
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