Europe risks the 'erasure of civilisation'. Here is the 'Trump Corollary'

The new Strategy declares that, after "years of neglect,"the United States will "reaffirm and enforce" the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and protect homeland and access to key geographies in the region. The clearest point is the commitment to prevent "non-hemispheric competitors" from positioning threatening forces or capabilities or owning and controlling strategically vital assets on the continent. The White House calls this passage a "restoration of power and priorities" consistent with American security interests.

In the vital interests section, the objective is translated into four concrete outcomes: sufficient stability and governance to prevent mass migration to the United States; cooperation against narco-terrorists, cartels and transnational crime; a hemisphere free of foreign control of strategic assets and capable of sustaining critical supply chains; continuous access to key strategic locations.

The regional chapter sums up the recipe with two verbs: 'Enlist and Expand'. Washington wants to 'enlist' established friends as regional champions capable of contributing to stability beyond its borders, with an agenda that weaves together control of irregular migration, neutralisation of cartels, maritime security and manufacturing nearshoring (the choice to move production or services to a country close to the target market, rather than to the other side of the world).In parallel, it intends to 'expand' the American partner network and attractiveness, so as to make it more politically and economically costly for states in the region to cooperate with extra-regional powers.

The Strategy also announces an inter-agency process coordinated by the National Security Council to identify resources and strategic points in the Hemisphere to be protected and developed together with allies. It is the contemporary version of the monroist logic: on the one hand, prevent the entry of a rival, on the other hand, build an economic and infrastructural network robust enough to make the competitor's less attractive.

In political terms, the most explosive passage concerns the military posture. The Strategy argues that the United States should reconsider its presence in the Hemisphere, reallocating resources from theatres considered less central today. It calls for increased Coast Guard and Navy action to control routes, contain trafficking, and manage transit crises. But above all, it prefigures targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat the cartels, including, when necessary, the use of lethal force instead of an approach based only on police enforcement, judged to be a failure.

Here the document does not merely describe a policy, but changes the political category of the drug trafficking problem, taking it from the terrain of judicial cooperation to that of national security understood in a military sense. A choice that, in the near future, could influence relations with Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South American governments, because American action becomes more conditional and less negotiable.

Another key element is strategic conditionality. The White House states that the terms of alliances and any assistance will have to depend on the reduction of 'adversary' external influence, from control of ports and infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets. The document argues that many governments do not choose competing powers for ideological affinity, but for lower costs and fewer regulatory constraints, and promises to use American financial and technological levers to convince them to reject offers deemed risky in terms of cybersecurity, espionage, and debt.

For months, in fact, there has been an increasing centrality of the security dimension in US-Latin American relations, including a strengthening of the US military presence in sensitive areas.

The link between hemispheric stability and migration control is one of the most obvious threads of the text. Not least because, far beyond mere domestic rhetoric, American diplomatic pressure on Caribbean bridge countries and islands has become more visible in 2025. One only has to think of the Bahamas' decision to introduce tougher laws against human trafficking, also against the backdrop of US demands for greater containment of maritime migration corridors to Florida.

The "Trump Corollary", therefore, is also an attempt to move the forward line of American security south: a deterrence of migration built not only on land borders, but on regional governance.

The second axis of the Strategy remains the Indo-Pacific. The document emphasises the region's economic weight and holds Beijing centrally responsible for distortions in global supply chains. It reclaims the role of the tariffs initiated in 2017 as a breakthrough of awareness and proposes a rebalancing of the economic relationship with China based on reciprocity and reduction of "sensitive" sectors. At the same time he insists on the need for robust deterrence to prevent conflict and strengthen cooperation with allies and partners, including the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, of which Australia, Japan and India are members in addition to the US).

If the Indo-Pacific remains the theatre of economic-military competition, Europe becomes the site of political and cultural friction. In the most disruptive reading of the document, the Old Continent is not only a militarily useful partner but a political and cultural project that risks losing 'recognisability' and even - as Reuters points out - a kind of 'erasure of civilisation' if it does not change trajectory. The Strategy accuses the EU of eroding political freedom and sovereignty, compressing freedom of expression and stifling internal opposition, while migration policies are transforming the continent at such a pace that in less than two decades it will be a different actor from the one the US thinks it knows. Washington goes so far as to doubt that some European countries can maintain economies and armed forces strong enough to remain reliable allies and goes a step further by posing an identity issue within NATO, hypothesising that within a few decades some members could become "non-European majority", with unpredictable effects on the cohesion of the Alliance as it was understood in the post-war period. Next, Ukraine. The US administration sees it as astrategic American interest to arrive quickly at a negotiated settlement and rebuild 'strategic stability' with Moscow, challenging Europeans' perceived unrealistic expectations of the conflict and insinuating that a pro-peace social majority would not translate into public policy because of governments that would bend or circumvent democratic processes.

The Middle East remains on the list of vital interests, but more selectively. Washington wants to prevent a hostile power from dominating resources and strategic choke points, while avoiding a relapse into the long-term military campaigns that Trump calls 'endless wars'.

The Strategy places American leadership in artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing among vital interests. Future supremacy, therefore, will also be determined by standards as well as military bases. And the Western Hemisphere thus becomes a strategic reserve of materials, supply chains and industrial integration indispensable for global technological competition.

The Monroe Doctrine was born to keep European powers away from the Americas. The "Trump Corollary" to keep out, together, instability, cartels, migration and above all the infrastructure penetration of outside powers in Washington's "near abroad". Whether it lives or dies will depend on its ability to produce real stability and not momentary consensus.