Abstract: In this Newsletter I argue that the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine does not express simple hemispheric nostalgia. It appears at a moment when Russia, China, and Iran no longer accept obedience to the U.S.-led order. Its attempt to secure control of the Western Hemisphere—with Ibero-America as the decisive zone—and to extend Monroe’s logic toward the Middle East and Eurasia does not show unlimited U.S. power; rather, it shows a power trying to encompass more than it can control.

Introduction

Donald Trump did not revive the Monroe Doctrine out of nostalgia. He reactivated it because the world the United States administered for much of the twentieth century is coming undone. Russia, China, and Iran no longer accept the subordinate place Washington assigns them; they have the military, technological, energy, financial, and diplomatic capacity to resist, block, or redirect its projects. In China and Iran—and also in Russia, though in a different way—there is also a political morality that does not accept being battered, and that the U.S. and the European Union find difficult to understand because the adversary, quite simply, is not right. For that reason, U.S. threats are not only political, economic, technological, or military: they are existential. The “Trump Corollary” appears at this moment, when the United States seeks to secure control of the Western Hemisphere, retain Ibero-America as a strategic zone, and project its logic of control toward the Middle East and Eurasia. In the Middle East, its aggressive policy generates responses contrary to its plans.

The recent quotation from the U.S. national security strategy is revealing Washington promises to “reaffirm and enforce” the Monroe Doctrine to restore its preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and deny extra-hemispheric competitors’ control of strategic assets. The decisive word is “our.” It does not speak simply of the Western Hemisphere, but of “our hemisphere.” There lies the core of the problem: the United States continues to think of the Western Hemisphere as its own space, and of Ibero-America as its most contested zone.

The 2025 national security document states it explicitly:

After years of neglect, the United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and protect our national territory, as well as our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny extra-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine constitutes a sensible and powerful restoration of American power and priorities, in accordance with the security interests of the United States. (italics added)

The ambiguity is clear: “our hemisphere” does not name an American community, but rather a U.S. strategic possession. From 1823 to the present, the Monroe Doctrine has changed its language, enemies, and scope; but it has not abandoned its central claim: to secure control of the Western Hemisphere and define who may enter, invest, negotiate, or build power in Ibero-America.

The novelty of the Trump Corollary is that this old logic is no longer limited to defending the Western Hemisphere against Europe. On the one hand, it seeks to retain Ibero-America in the face of China’s advance; on the other, it attempts to extend Monroe’s logic to global strategic nodes: Hormuz, Ukraine, Iran, Russia, China, maritime routes, critical minerals, data, and financial platforms. The problem is no longer only who controls Ibero-America. It is whether the United States can still turn the Western Hemisphere into a platform for administering the world order. So far, that confidence has not brought Trump satisfaction: China responded to tariffs with its own, Russia did not bow as he assumed it would, and Iran found, in the debasification of U.S. military bases in the Gulf and in control of the Strait of Hormuz, forms of pressure that Washington and Israel did not anticipate. Imperial blindness and arrogance consist precisely in not seeing, not listening, and not recognizing difference.

My thesis is simple, although not original: the Trump Corollary reveals less imperial strength than anxiety over overextension. The United States is trying to preserve the Western Hemisphere as a strategic frontier and to project Monroe onto the Middle East and Eurasia just when Russia, China, and Iran have acquired a real capacity to disobey. The Monroe Doctrine worked for a long time because it did not face equivalent rivals within the hemisphere or large-scale extra-Western coordination. In the twenty-first century, that condition has changed.

I. The Monroe Doctrine and the Invention of the Two Americas

But let us proceed step by step. The Monroe Doctrine originated on December 2, 1823, when President James Monroe formulated it in his seventh annual address to Congress. Drafted largely by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, it declared that the Western Hemisphere was closed to future European colonization and interference. In a certain sense, it was an early decolonial affirmation: it underscored that the revolution of 1776 had not been in vain and that the American continent should not again be subjected to European imperial projects.

From the beginning, however, there were two imaginings of America. Thomas Jefferson’s was expansive: the republic as an “empire of liberty,” convinced that its territorial growth could be presented as the extension of liberty itself. Simón Bolívar’s emerged from another experience: the break with Iberian colonialism, the fragility of the new republics, and the need for a confederation capable of preventing both Europe’s return and northern tutelage. Bolívar may initially have seen the United States as a guarantor of freedom in the Americas against the European powers; but that expectation coexisted with a deeper unease: that protection could become subordination. Between Jefferson and Bolívar there already opened the fracture that would run through the whole history of the hemisphere: one America that conceived of itself as a continental power, and another that sought to survive as a set of threatened sovereignties.

Three decades after the Monroe Doctrine was announced, Senator William H. Seward took up that genealogy in the Senate. He presented 1775 as “the first act in the great drama of the decolonization of this continent.” In speaking of the American continent, Seward seemed to include the full range of European colonial experiences: Iberian, English, French, and Dutch. The Monroe Doctrine was thus inscribed within a larger history of separation from Europe.

But that anti-European warning changed meaning toward the end of the nineteenth century. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 and under Theodore Roosevelt, Monroe ceased to be a defense of the hemisphere against Europe and became a technology of U.S. administration. Protection began to resemble tutelage too closely. The shift did not come from nowhere: it had already been prepared by two expansionary victories. The first was the war between Mexico and the United States (1846–1848), concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, and ratified that same year.

Under that treaty, Mexico ceded close to 55 percent of its territory: Alta California and New Mexico—that is, present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming; it also renounced its claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande as the border. The second was the Spanish-American War of 1898, closed by the Treaty of Paris of December 10 of that year. Spain renounced Cuba—which remained under U.S. occupation and tutelage—and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. In both cases, the rhetoric of liberation or protection ended by expanding Washington’s territorial, political, and strategic radius.

That tension reappeared forcefully in 1902, when Argentine foreign minister Luis María Drago formulated an Ibero-American position, known as the “Drago Doctrine,” in response to the naval blockade imposed on Venezuela by Great Britain, Germany, and Italy to force payment of public debts. Drago argued, relying on the Monroe Doctrine itself, that the debt of a state could not justify armed intervention or territorial occupation by foreign powers. If Monroe sought to prevent Europe’s colonial return to the continent, Drago applied that principle to prevent debt from becoming an imperial pretext.

Venezuela was the decisive setting. European intervention allowed Washington to revive the call for hemispheric autonomy, but it also opened the possibility of an Ibero-American interpretation of Monroe. Drago took that step: if the principle was to prevent Europe’s colonial return, debt could not become a pretext for intervention. The United States, however, did not take that reading as a common principle of the hemisphere.

The reception—or, more precisely, the non-reception—of the Drago Doctrine in the United States revealed the existence of two Americas. On one side stood Jefferson’s America, already becoming Roosevelt’s America: a republic that thought of itself as heir to liberty but was beginning to act as a hemispheric power. On the other side stood Bolívar’s America: a constellation of republics seeking to defend their sovereignty against Europe without being subjected to Washington’s tutelage.

Roosevelt did not take the Drago Doctrine as a common principle of the hemisphere; he practically ignored it. That indifference was politically eloquent: it showed that, for the United States, the Monroe Doctrine did not mean an alliance among American republics, but rather Washington’s right to administer the boundary between Ibero-America and Europe. The defense against old European colonialism thus opened the way to a new form of U.S. tutelage.

The invention of the “Western Hemisphere” was, from then on, more than a cartographic operation. It was a political operation: Ibero-America was included in the West, but in a subordinate position. Monroe was born as a warning against Europe and ended as a language of U.S. authorization to secure control of the Western Hemisphere.

II. After 2001: A World That Begins to Disobey

The second movement of the argument begins in 2001. While the United States concentrated its strategic energy on the Middle East after September 11, Russia was recomposing itself, China was accelerating its integration into world trade, and Iran was consolidating its regional centrality. U.S. attention was absorbed by Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and the so-called war on terror, just as other actors were beginning to gain room for maneuver in relation to the unipolar order.

The first major misstep was the administration of George W. Bush. September 11 made it possible to reinvent the notion of terrorism, renew an Islamophobia already anticipated by Huntington, and justify preventive wars and regime change, especially in Iraq. Obama tried to repair that damage with a more diplomatic and globalist rhetoric, but Syria and Ukraine showed that the imperial logic persisted. The language changed; the objective of sustaining Western primacy remained.

Two events undermined that Western expectation. The first was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, under the illusion that it would integrate docilely into the order designed by the West. The second was the recovery of the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin. Far from being absorbed by neoliberal globalism, Russia and China began to coordinate positions, limit Western decisions, and open the path of de-Westernization.

NATO’s eastward expansion and the Ukrainian crisis intensified that rupture. From the Russian perspective, regime change in Kyiv and Russia’s subsequent exclusion from the G8 confirmed that the Western security architecture functioned as a strategic encirclement. From the Western perspective, Russia appeared as an aggressor. For this argument, what is decisive is that Ukraine showed the impossibility of sustaining the unipolar order inherited from 1990 without conflict.

Trump enters in that scenario. His first presidency abandoned globalist neoliberal rhetoric and set in motion a national-imperial rhetoric. It was no longer a matter of expanding democracy, human rights, or “regime change” in the name of the international community, but of speaking openly about possession, control, recovery, and national greatness. The turn did not eliminate coloniality; it made it more explicit, more territorial, and more brutally honest.

De-Westernization, however, does not by itself eliminate coloniality. What it disputes is that the West—led by the United States—cannot be the only and exclusive administrator of the colonial matrix of power of it. China, Russia, and Iran are not simply another economic model; they are the emergence of centers of power capable of disputing who sets the rules of the world order.

III. Ibero-America as the Frontier of the Western Hemisphere vis-à-vis China

Coloniality has not been overcome. It no longer always needs settler colonies. It operates as a classification of regions: resource reserves, zones of influence, strategic backyards, market frontiers, and available spaces for new dependencies. Neoliberalism changed the rhetoric and spoke of globalization, but it maintained a recognizable hierarchy.

For that reason, the return of the Monroe Doctrine under Donald Trump should not be read as rhetorical extravagance or imperial nostalgia. It is a symptom of the times. On the new map of competition between the United States and China, Ibero-America again appears as the decisive space for securing control of the Western Hemisphere. Washington does not ask what the region wants; it asks who controls it. Beijing does not arrive as a classic colonial power; it arrives with infrastructure, credit, ports, technology, critical minerals, and markets. The result, however, may be an old scene with renewed actors: the region once again turned into the board of someone else’s dispute.

The hemispheric question has changed form. During the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the issue was the relationship among Ibero-America, Europe, and the United States. Today the triangle has shifted: Washington looks south in order to prevent China from turning the region into a logistical, energy, technological, and financial platform of global reach. Ibero-America matters again, but not necessarily because of its peoples or historical projects; it matters because it is the zone where effective control of the Western Hemisphere is at stake: resources, corridors, data, and markets.

In 2001 I published the article “The Western Hemisphere in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity”. At that time, neoliberal globalist dreams and designs faced few obstacles. In 2026, the map is different. The United States is no longer defending a comfortable hegemony, but a contested primacy. MAGA abandons the liberal rhetoric of the indispensable nation and replaces it with a territorial, possessive, and aggressive defense of the Western Hemisphere.

Defending the hemisphere no longer means protecting it from Europe, as in the beginnings of the Monroe Doctrine, but from China and the circuits of de-Westernization. Hence the reactivation of Monroeist language around the Panama Canal, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and the search for subordinate governments in the region. But the genealogy of coloniality also requires reading the global infrastructure: bi-oceanic corridors, deepwater ports, lithium, copper, rare earths, submarine cables, artificial intelligence, satellites, digital currencies, financial sanctions, and supply chains. The old coloniality did not disappear; it became more technical, more logistical, more algorithmic, and harder to name.

This is the fundamental geopolitical difference: in 2001, Ibero-America was debating how to escape neoliberal unilateralism; in 2026, it is debating how not to become trapped between Washington’s hemispheric restoration and Beijing’s geoeconomic expansion. It is no longer only a matter of economic dependence, but of strategic alignment. Every port, every mine, every 5G network, every energy contract, every vote in international organizations, and every defense agreement can be read as a sign of belonging to one camp or the other. The region moves on a board where even pragmatism can be interpreted as betrayal.

The formula “America for the Americans” always had an original ambiguity. In the mouth of the United States, “Americans” rarely meant the peoples of the whole continent. It meant, rather, the claim to organize the Western Hemisphere from the North. The Monroe Doctrine was born in the nineteenth century as a warning to Europe, but it soon became a license for the tutelage, intervention, and political disciplining of Ibero-America. Its new version is no longer aimed at the old European monarchies, but at China. The rival has changed; the grammar of domination remains.

IV. From Monroe to Hormuz: The Global Extension of Hemispheric Logic

The Trump Corollary updates “America for the Americans” as America for U.S. Americans. The Western Hemisphere appears as a zone of U.S. national security. What other countries call sovereignty, autonomy, or national interest is subordinated to Washington’s self-proclaimed right to protect its sphere of influence. This logic helps explain a power facing simultaneous difficulties in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza, and one that does not easily accept losing control on several fronts at once.

Trump’s statement about the Strait of Hormuz—that the United States would have “total control” and could “keep it”—allows this reading to be extended beyond Ibero-America. If it was serious, it was absurd; if it was a joke, it was an embarrassing folly from someone who still speaks from the position of the indispensable country. What matters is not the factual truth of that claim, rejected by Iranian authorities; what matters is the political gesture. Hormuz does not belong to the Western Hemisphere, but the logic is familiar: a power declares that a strategic geography must remain under its administration because global security, trade, energy, and the international order depend on it.

That is a Monroe-ization of the world: what was once formulated as “America for the Americans” now reappears as “the planet’s vital corridors under U.S. custody.” The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung published a note on August 18 titled “Trump barks because he cannot bite”. In summary, and apparently, Trump has dug his own grave with Netanyahu’s help.

The claim about Hormuz also shows that the Monroe Doctrine no longer functions only as a regional doctrine. It expands as an imperial principle for controlling nodes: straits, canals, ports, cables, satellites, maritime routes, data, critical minerals, and financial platforms. In the nineteenth century, the problem was preventing Europe’s return to America. In the twenty-first century, for Washington, the problem is preventing China, Iran, Russia, or the BRICS bloc from consolidating alternative circuits of trade, energy, technology, and finance. Geography returns, but it returns as the infrastructure of global conflict.

Hormuz is not an isolated episode. Panama, Chancay, the Caribbean, South American lithium, submarine cables, the Amazon, the South Atlantic, and Hormuz belong to different scales, but they participate in a common dispute: who controls the passages, materials, routes, and languages of the world economy. Contemporary coloniality does not only occupy territories; it secures points of circulation. Power is not exerted only over land. It is exerted over transit.

The dispute between de-Westernization and re-Westernization should not be understood only as competition to replace one unipolar control with another. What is decisive is whether the multipolar world will limit the colonial pattern of power, or whether it will merely distribute dependency among several centers. For Ibero-America, the test is not to change owners, but to build its own capacity for decision-making.

V. Imperial Overextension and the Limits of the Indispensable Country

The BRICS+ appear in this context as a symptom of a multipolar order in formation. They do not by themselves guarantee a decolonization of the world system, but they show that the future can no longer be defined from a single center. Their importance lies in displacing the U.S. claim to speak on behalf of the entire international order.

The current competition is not only military or diplomatic; it is a competition over the material architecture of the future. The United States retains financial, military, technological, and normative power; China advances through trade, infrastructure, manufacturing, electromobility, and financing; Europe reappears with the language of critical minerals; Russia and Iran intervene at the military and energy edges of the Western order. Ibero-America, meanwhile, is once again read as the solution to other people’s problems: energy, climate transition, minerals, logistics, data, and migration control.

The comparison between 2000 and 2026 shows both continuity and rupture. The continuity is coloniality: Ibero-America continues to be called upon to occupy a functional place within projects it does not control. The rupture lies in the form of that functionality. Before, the issue was market opening, privatizations, debt, and financial discipline. Now it is the control of strategic nodes: ports, minerals, energy, data, artificial intelligence, logistics, and currencies. In 2000, the question was how to survive globalized neoliberalism. In 2026, the question is how not to become the fuel, route, and database of a global geopolitical war.

The task of Ibero-America, from my point of view, is not to choose a master or replace one dependency with another. In another register, that was also Mark Carney’s warning in Davos (full speech): in a world of rivalry among great powers, middle powers cannot simply accommodate themselves, avoid problems, or hope that obedience will buy security; they must act together if they do not want to be left out of the room where the new order is being decided.

Carney recognized that the inherited international rules no longer offer sufficient stability and that middle powers cannot respond with passivity, nostalgia, or subordination. His central argument is that, even in a scenario dominated by geopolitical and economic tensions, countries that are not great powers retain room for action if they strengthen their internal capacities, diversify alliances, and refuse to sustain fictions that conceal the crisis of the old order.

The Ibero-American task would be to produce a foreign policy from its own historical needs: industrialization, social justice, a non-extractivist energy transition, technological sovereignty, regional integration, and the defense of the commons. The decisive question is not whether Washington or Beijing is preferable. The question is how to prevent the dispute between Washington and Beijing from once again reducing the region to the object of someone else’s strategy.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine, in this sense, is not merely a foreign policy. It is an imperial pedagogy: it teaches one to see Ibero-America as someone else’s own space within the Western Hemisphere. But that pedagogy now appears in a less obedient world. Ibero-American sovereignty cannot be limited to an abstract defense of territory; it must be translated into real capacity to decide over energy, food, knowledge, technology, infrastructure, data, and alliances.

For that reason, in the face of the new clash between the United States and China, Ibero-America needs more than commercial pragmatism. It needs its own geopolitical imagination. This is not a matter of passive neutrality, but of active autonomy: negotiating with everyone without subordinating itself to anyone, strengthening regional integration, diversifying alliances, strategically controlling its resources, and producing knowledge from its own historical experiences. Coloniality is not overcome by changing majority partners, but by acquiring the capacity to stop being an object of dispute and become a subject of decision.

That is the decisive point. The Monroe Doctrine reappears because the Western Hemisphere matters. Ibero-America matters because a large part of that hemispheric control is at stake there. China advances because the region matters; Europe looks again at critical minerals because the region matters; technology companies seek data, energy, and markets because the region matters. But the Trump Corollary reveals something more: the anxiety of a power trying to retain its hemispheric frontier while projecting its claim to control over the Middle East, Russia, China, and Iran.

That is overextension. The United States no longer faces a world willing to obey its role as the indispensable country. There are actors capable of resisting, coordinating, and limiting its will to administer the globe. For that reason, the Trump Corollary is not proof of omnipotence, but the symptom of an order slipping from its grasp. For Ibero-America, the question is urgent: will it continue to be administered by others in that dispute, or will it turn its strategic importance into its own political capacity?

VI. Conclusion: Monroe in a World That No Longer Obeys

The Trump Corollary does not announce the triumphant return of an intact Monroe Doctrine. Rather, it announces the effort of the United States to preserve an authority it can no longer take for granted. Re-Westernization consists of defensive tactics and strategies. It is the counter-reform against the reform as de-Westernization advances. Washington attempts to secure control of the Western Hemisphere in the face of China’s advance and, at the same time, to project Monroe’s logic toward the Middle East and Eurasia. But that expansion reveals its limit: the more it tries to administer the decisive nodes of the world—maritime routes, energy, military bases, data, critical minerals, and regional alliances—the more visible it becomes that the world no longer accepts being administered from a single center. Russia, China, Iran, and other states produce responses that Washington no longer fully controls. Overextension is not an accident of U.S. foreign policy; it is a symptom of a change of era. For Ibero-America, the task is not to choose among obedience, but to turn its strategic importance into its own capacity for decision-making.