On December 15, 2025, the White House unveiled President Donald J. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, a document that has already sent ripples through the foreign policy establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. The strategy, which many analysts and commentators have described as a sharp pivot from decades of U.S. international engagement, is being viewed as a modern echo of the Monroe Doctrine—an early 19th-century policy that famously warned European powers to stay out of the Americas. But what does this latest recalibration actually mean for America’s allies, rivals, and its own global standing?
According to a letter published on December 16, 2025, in National World, a reader drew direct parallels between Trump’s approach to Europe and the Monroe Doctrine. The original doctrine, outlined by President Monroe in the early 1800s, asserted that the “incessant wars in the old countries of Europe were their affair and nothing to do with the USA.” It also aimed to disrupt the colonial grip of Spain and Portugal in South America and the Caribbean, encouraging the rise of new republics. The Spanish-American War, which effectively ended Spain’s colonial role in the New World, marked the United States’ emergence as a world power with territorial claims stretching from the Caribbean to the Pacific. As the letter writer observed, “the late entry of the USA into the 1st World War was also a sign of the doctrine,” with some seeing similar patterns in World War II.
This historical perspective is more than just nostalgia. The Trump administration has made clear that history is informing its present-day policy. As Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported, Trump’s new National Security Strategy is “the chattiest foreign policy document you’ve ever seen.” Gone are the days of mass migration, European centrality, and globalist ambitions. In their place: “flexible realism, drug boat strikes, and Golden Dome–style missile defense.”
The document does not mince words about Europe’s current predicament. Trump, in a United Nations speech on September 23, 2025, warned, “Europe is in serious trouble. They have been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody has ever seen before.” The strategy casts Europe as teetering on the edge of “civilizational erasure,” noting a decline in the continent’s share of world GDP from 25% to just 14% over recent decades. The European Union, the document argues, has become a “regulatory machine prone to spitting on U.S. business interests,” particularly in areas like technology and space policy. The White House questions whether some European countries will remain “reliable allies” in the future, stating, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
But the strategy is not about American retreat—at least not in the eyes of its authors. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” the document declares. Instead, the administration is calling for new security leadership from countries “serious about containing Russia,” suggesting a shift in focus from traditional Western European powers to states like Poland and Finland. The strategy maintains, however, that “on NATO and military matters, Europe is still family.”
One of the most striking elements of the strategy is what Fox News and other outlets are calling the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The administration vows to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” including the use of lethal force to defeat drug cartels and a repositioning of U.S. military assets—such as F/A-18s from the USS Gerald R. Ford—over the Gulf of Venezuela. The strategy’s goal is clear: America wants to be the “partner of choice” in the Western Hemisphere, and it sees China’s growing influence in Central and South America as a threat that “needs to be eradicated.”
In the words of the National Security Strategy, “the US rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself.” Instead, the document emphasizes “burden-sharing and burden-shifting,” reaffirming the Americas as the U.S. sphere of influence and calling for a restoration of “conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia.”
China, long identified as a strategic competitor by both Trump’s first administration and the Biden administration, is now labeled a “near-peer” in the new strategy. The document calls for a rebalancing of the economic relationship with Beijing, “prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence,” while still aiming for a “genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship.” On the contentious issue of Taiwan, the strategy is unequivocal: the U.S. intends to “deter conflict over Taiwan by preserving military overmatch” and “does not support any unilateral change of the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
In the Middle East, the Trump administration is signaling a clear deprioritization. While the strategy seeks to prevent any adversarial power—including China—from dominating the region’s resources and chokepoints, it declares, “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.” The document gives credit to American B-2 bombers for targeting Iran’s nuclear sites, but the focus is firmly on the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific.
Economic priorities are front and center throughout the strategy. The administration projects that the U.S. economy could grow from $30 trillion in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s, provided the country maintains its lead in artificial intelligence, energy, and technology. The document warns that this growth depends on the ability to “halt and reverse the ongoing damage that foreign actors inflict on the American economy.” This rationale underpins Trump’s controversial decision to allow the sale of third-rate NVIDIA AI chips to China, with the strategy noting, “global market share matters.”
One area where the strategy falls short, according to several commentators, is space policy. Despite Trump’s creation of the U.S. Space Force during his first term, the new document is noticeably thin on details regarding the protection of U.S. assets and interests in space. As Fox News pointed out, “Trump owes Americans a plan for protecting space, which is vital to the U.S. economy and prosperity. National security depends on it.”
For critics and supporters alike, the new National Security Strategy is confirmation of the “America First” recalibration that has defined Trump’s foreign policy. As one observer wrote, “the NSS is really confirmation of the obvious under Donald Trump: an America-first policy recalibration imprinted with the US president’s mercurial personality.” The administration’s willingness to coerce Venezuela under its interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is cited as a clear example of this doctrine in action.
With its sweeping assertions and unvarnished language, Trump’s strategy marks a significant departure from the past and sets the stage for a new era of U.S. foreign policy—one that looks inward for strength, outward for opportunity, and backward for guidance from America’s own history.
