From In These Times.
Trump’s plans around tariffs and annexation resemble a new Monroe Doctrine, but it’s a recipe that only leads to economic collapse—and war.
When President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office at the end of February, the live footage of Trump and Vance berating the beleaguered Ukrainian leader immediately went viral. “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people,” Trump said. “You’re gambling with World War III. And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to [the United States].”
Trump had already engaged in talks directly with Russia to secure a cease-fire in Ukraine — largely without input, however, from Ukraine or U.S. allies in Europe. Zelenskyy came to the White House to sign a deal that would exchange security guarantees for rights to jointly develop titanium, lithium and other mineral resources in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy left the Oval Office with neither security guarantees nor a mineral deal.
This raised the specter that Trump will abandon Ukraine to Russian aggression. “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out,” Trump warned Zelenskyy toward the end of the meeting. “And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty, but you’ll fight it out.”
Given Trump’s record of favoring Russia over Ukraine, including a recent vote by the United States against a United Nations resolution condemning the Russian invasion, some members of Congress, including Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), suggested the spectacle of confrontation at the White House had been pre-planned as a reason to cut off support for Ukraine. Some Republicans, such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, agreed and accused Trump of “walking away from our allies and embracing Putin.”
The reaction from traditional European allies was swift. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, declared after the meeting, “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader.” Elon Musk, who has been acting as unofficial co-president with Trump, likely further added to this urgency for European countries by openly calling for Trump to leave NATO. The sequence reverberated far beyond Europe, with some analysts warning that U.S. allies in Asia “cannot count on [U.S.] protection — and will not count on that protection.”
During this meeting, viewers witnessed in real time the end of the U.S.-led order that has dominated global politics since the end of the Cold War. Trump is ushering us into a new and uncertain future — and, although he claims to be doing this in the name of world peace, he is increasing the long-term risk of renewed global conflict.
THE MONROE DOCTRINE AND NEW SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
Trump is reshaping the global order into the rule of the bullies. He has a “quasi-19th-century worldview that global affairs should be directed not by multilateral institutions but by a handful of large powers and their strongman leaders, each with their sphere of influence,” the editorial board of the London-based Financial Times wrote shortly after the Zelenskyy meeting.
In the imperialist system of the late 19th century through the early 20th century, a handful of imperial powers (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and later the United States and Japan) carved up most of the rest of the world, each claiming a “sphere of influence” that could include colonial possessions on the other side of the planet and imposing their will within that sphere.
Each imperial power was expected to defer to the authority of the other powers within their respective spheres of influence. In this way, the imperial powers sought to avoid military conflict with each other — an idea that worked fairly well until it failed catastrophically with World War I.
In similar fashion, Trump appears willing to allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to claim his sphere of influence, which includes Ukraine and presumably most of the rest of the former Eastern Bloc. Trump claims this is key to avoiding World War III.
This posture is entirely consistent with Trump’s current foreign policy. Since December 2024, he has escalated the discourse around annexing Greenland as he fixates on his own expansionist agenda and goal of establishing an exclusive sphere of influence for the United States, claiming he wants to annex a growing list of territories that now includes Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and, most recently, Gaza. Aside from Gaza, this wish list recalls the Monroe Doctrine, a tradition from the 19th century that claims the Western Hemisphere as the U.S. sphere of influence. Trump has so far made offers to purchase territory, threatened tariffs if territory isn’t ceded, and not-so-subtly entertained the possibility of invasion.
Trump’s expansionism promises to return the United States to a more virile role in the world, which has helped win over some key MAGA supporters.
“I think we take Canada, and then we go right into Mexico,” top podcast host Joe Rogan said to guest Theo Von, who seemed to have a visceral response, exclaiming, “Let’s fucking go,” then doing a little happy dance in his chair.
The New York Post’s January 8 cover celebrated the plans, showing a smiling Trump next to a redrawn map of the Western Hemisphere — with renamed territories including the “Gulf of America,” “Our Land” instead of “Greenland” and “Pana-MAGA” instead of the “Panama Canal.”
Supposedly sober-minded conservative commentators, like Bret Stephens of the New York Times and British historian Niall Ferguson, have also responded positively to this revival of the Monroe Doctrine. One of their key rationales is the strategic need to respond to the perceived threat of China.
“I’m for it. Not by force, of course,” Stephens wrote about Greenland. “But Greenland is strategically important, minerally wealthy and economically underdeveloped — which is why the Chinese have taken an unwholesome interest in it.” Some Democrats have also expressed interest in the new imperial project, including Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who also raised concerns about Chinese influence in Panama and affirmed that “the United States reasserting its history in the Panama Canal is actually a good, important, strategic issue.”
Anxieties among U.S. policymakers and pundits about perceived Chinese incursions into Greenland and the Panama Canal are not new.
Chinese companies already own ports and other infrastructure along the canal, and in 2023 the commander of the U.S. Southern Command hyperbolically warned that China might “flip it around and use it for military application.” A Politico article from 2022 warning of China’s growing influence around the world described a former U.S. ambassador to Panama who felt “frustrated and powerless” in 2017 in the face of the growing competitiveness of Chinese capital and the inability of U.S. diplomats to stop local Panamanian leaders from cutting deals with China.
In Greenland, Chinese companies do not yet have a substantial presence, but they have attempted to make investments in infrastructure and mining. The White House has pressured both Danish and Greenlandic officials, during both the Biden and the first Trump administrations, to stop these deals.
Since the escalation of U.S.-China tensions under Trump’s first term, U.S. policymakers have come to view Chinese companies as a national security threat. This concern about the presence of these companies is particularly heightened in geographies seen as strategically important, as is the case for the Panama Canal — critical for U.S. shipping interests and the Navy — and Greenland — the site of the northernmost U.S. military base, providing increasingly important access to arctic seas. Greenland may also become increasingly important for mining as retreating glaciers reveal new sites for so-called critical minerals, such as zinc and graphite, which are needed for clean energy technology, like electric vehicle batteries.
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, saying Chinese companies are “all over Panama,” claimed concerns about China drove Trump to seek annexation of the canal and Greenland.
“If the government in China in a conflict tells them to shut down the Panama Canal, they will have to,” Rubio said. “I have zero doubt that they have contingency planning to do, so that is a direct threat.”
It is notable that anxiety over China would likely not explain Trump’s desire to annex Canada or Gaza. What may be happening, however, is that Trump has acquired such a habit of imperial bullying that he sees annexation as the best solution to difficult foreign policy problems. Trump’s issues with Canada, for example, seem linked to his idiosyncratic obsession with trade deficits, which would indeed be abolished if the United States could just swallow Canada up.
In other cases, Trump is in effect providing a solution to the supposed China threat: Simply take over these territories, then exclude China by fiat, and, if necessary, expropriate existing Chinese investments.
MAGA thought leaders like Elbridge Colby and Tucker Carlson have also argued that the United States cannot both support the defense of Ukraine and compete properly with China. Trump’s embrace of spheres of influence provides a solution to this dilemma. “We are not gaining in Asia by spending in Ukraine,” said Colby, Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy. Meanwhile, Carlson asserts that “the biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin — that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat, obviously, is China.”
Tobita Chow is an organizer in the US (in the Chicago area) and researches progressive strategy, great power conflict, and international climate politics.