President Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy of “speak softly and carry a big stick” prioritized diplomacy first, with military force as a last resort.
William Allen Rogers
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William Allen Rogers
The Monroe Doctrine. Big Stick policy. Gunboat diplomacy.
Until recently, the terms were relegated mostly to the pages of dusty history books. But President Trump is leaning heavily on his own understanding of these concepts to justify his attack on Venezuela, his bullying tactics aimed at acquiring Greenland and his latest threats to strike Iran.
At a news conference this month, Trump said U.S. troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro because his actions amounted to a “gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries … to the Monroe Doctrine.”
“And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine,'” he said.
What is the Monroe Doctrine?
In 1823, President James Monroe cautioned Europe in his address to Congress, declaring that “any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of” the Western Hemisphere would be seen as “dangerous to our peace and safety.”
A painting of James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, who served from 1817 to 1825. The doctrine named after him has served as a justification for U.S. intervention in Latin America and elsewhere.
National Archives/Getty Images
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National Archives/Getty Images
Monroe’s declaration came at a time when Spain was struggling to hang on to its North American possessions — areas on the continent that included parts of Florida and vast areas of the present-day U.S. Southwest.
The Monroe Doctrine “emerged from a geopolitical context in which the United States was a rising power, staking a claim to the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence,” says Jay Sexton, director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.
At its inception, the doctrine “simply stated what European powers could not do in the Western Hemisphere” but was deliberately open-ended, allowing “later Americans [to] redeploy it or reimagine it for a new context,” adds Sexton, who is author of The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America.
In fact, eight decades later, President Theodore Roosevelt reimagined the Monroe Doctrine as a more muscular policy — in part as a response to Britain, Germany and Italy’s naval blockade of Venezuelan ports over that country’s failure to pay on foreign debts. In his 1904 annual message to Congress, Roosevelt argued that “chronic wrongdoing” on the world stage required “intervention by some civilized nation.”
“In the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power,” he said.
“Roosevelt strongly believed that the real advances are through diplomacy — slow, patient diplomacy — and not through military instruments,” says Jon Alterman, the Brzezinski chair in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research organization in Washington, D.C.
In contrast, he says, Trump “seems to think that the diplomacy stuff is slow and hard and imperfect, and the nice thing about the military is that things … [are] sharp and clear and successful.”
In 1907, Roosevelt famously dispatched a flotilla of 16 U.S. battleships, dubbed the “Great White Fleet,” on a global circumnavigation to showcase American strength to potential rivals, particularly an increasingly assertive Japan. However, Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, emphasizes that Roosevelt’s flotilla “didn’t go to war,” but rather “he brought it to the Pacific and said, ‘Look at how large our navy is.'”
President Theodore Roosevelt (center) sits on a steam shovel at the Culebra Cut of the Panama Canal in November 1906.
U.S. Library of Congress/AFP
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U.S. Library of Congress/AFP
Even so, the Roosevelt Corollary, as it came to be known, justified intervention in Latin America to maintain regional stability, such as the U.S. support for Panama’s secession from Colombia, which allowed the construction of the Panama Canal, and the sending of U.S. troops to Cuba in 1906 to quell an insurrection there. The corollary reflected Roosevelt’s broader Big Stick philosophy — “speak softly and carry a big stick” — prioritizing diplomacy first, with military force as a last resort. Trump’s approach appears to flip those priorities, says Michael Cullinane, chair of Theodore Roosevelt studies at Dickinson State University.
Cullinane notes that in the case of Venezuela, “the lead-up to what Trump did is very similar to what Roosevelt did, but the ‘speak softly’ bit was missing.” Trump, he says, “didn’t conduct diplomacy before using the big stick. He just used the big stick.”
The emergence of American “gunboat diplomacy”
Expanding on the policies of Monroe and Roosevelt, President Woodrow Wilson took “gunboat diplomacy” to a new level.
Using America’s growing naval power, Wilson demonstrated a more aggressive, interventionist approach than his predecessors, sending U.S. Marines to invade Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic to secure U.S. financial interests on Hispaniola. He inherited a U.S. Marine presence in Nicaragua ordered by his predecessor, William Howard Taft. Wilson later ordered the U.S. Navy to occupy the Mexican port of Veracruz as part of a campaign to depose Mexico’s dictator. He also sent U.S. forces across the border in pursuit of Mexican guerrilla leader Pancho Villa.
This political cartoon depicts President Woodrow Wilson handing a thick, heavy olive branch, representing the League of Nations, to a dove of peace, in 1919.
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Wilson’s policies may be the better analogy to Trump’s own interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. Like Trump, Wilson wanted to be seen as a peacemaker, famously pushing for the League of Nations — a predecessor to the United Nations — in the wake of World War I. “The paradox of the Wilson years is that Wilson is the president that orders the most interventions in the Caribbean and Central America,” Sexton says.
But Brinkley warns against “overthinking Trump’s thinking” on foreign policy. He argues that Trump “just cherry-picks what’s convenient from the bushel of American history.”
Ultimately, Trump’s famously transactional nature translates into a type of realpolitik that informs his relations with others.
Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore and helped negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize — an honor that Trump has repeatedly insisted he deserves.
But Trump is no Teddy Roosevelt, Cullinane says. Among other things, “disrespecting international law is something that Roosevelt would not have done.”
“Roosevelt supported international arbitration. … That is very different from how Donald Trump is approaching international relations,” Cullinane says.
U.S. interventions in Latin America continued after World War II, but the Monroe Doctrine was invoked less often, Sexton says. That’s because the doctrine “arose from a geopolitical context in which the United States was a rising power and was staking a claim to the Western Hemisphere to its sphere of influence.”
With the U.S. emerging from World War II as a truly global power, it didn’t seem to fit.
“But as that world order has begun to unravel [and has] begun crashing down, spheres of influence are making a return,” he says.
