Throughout 2025, the world watched as President Donald Trump directed increasing amounts of U.S. military assets and political attention to the Western Hemisphere. In his inaugural address in January, Trump threatened to retake control of the Panama Canal, by force if necessary, and then pressured that country’s government to renegotiate two port concessions controlled by China on either end of the canal. Since September, the U.S. military has engaged in a campaign across the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific to sink more than 20 alleged drug-trafficking boats, killing more than 80 people so far, with the bombings set to continue despite members of Congress from both parties publicly questioning their legality.
The Trump administration has also threatened to strike cartel operations on land in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico and potentially elsewhere. And while the administration has waffled on its Venezuela policy several times, at the moment, it continues to suggest that regime change is imminent and that the county’s current de facto president, Nicolas Maduro, will be removed from power in some way, even if the exact mechanism remains unclear.
Last week, the Trump administration published a 30-page National Security Strategy that finally gave its actions in the Western Hemisphere a name and—ostensibly—a set of written principles. The so-called Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine reaffirms the U.S. commitment to that policy from the early 19th century, by which the U.S. pledged to oppose the presence and influence of external powers in the Western Hemisphere. At the time, that meant the former European colonial powers: Britain, Spain and France. But Trump’s corollary goes further, promising to prevent even foreign ownership of strategic assets in the hemisphere and to condition U.S. partnership and support on countries’ efforts to reject outside influence. Trump’s strategy also promises an increased military presence, largely to fight drug cartels, and an effort to promote U.S. businesses. More generally, it appears to increase the relative importance of the Western Hemisphere in U.S. foreign policy compared to Asia, the Middle East and Europe. (Africa, with three paragraphs at the end of the document, barely gets a mention.)
