Return to the Monroe Doctrine: A New Vision of American Foreign Policy
The primary geopolitical goal of the United States in the 21st century should be American excellence, not world domination.
Summary: The United States has created a powder keg in the world through NATO, military expansionism, and aggressive encirclement of her enemies. It is time for her to return to the Monroe Doctrine, to become a land power, and focus inwards on the theme of American renewalism.
The year is 2123, and the world is very different. After some significant events and catastrophes, China and Canada have forged a military alliance, the “Trans-Pacific Security Alliance” (TPSA). Russia has reclaimed Alaska. There are also Russian military bases in Mexico and Cuba. Hawaii declared independence in 2073; the United States of America has retreated to its continental borders. Overseas superpowers squeeze America from above and below. Even as Russia and China downplay the threat of their military bases and alliances, assuring us there is no cause for war, the threat is clear: stay in your place, or face annihilation.
This is the situation for America’s biggest rivals today. On the world’s chessboard, through careful positioning and strategic alliances like NATO, America has placed her opponents in check. American military bases exist on every continent, with over 750 bases in 80 other countries. Every single one of America’s major rivals—Iran, Russia, China, North Korea—is bordered by a country with a US military base.
Map of US military base locations around the world.
While the sun may have never set on the British Empire, the American Empire is sunburnt. Through its military alliances such as NATO and the Rio Treaty, the American military is sworn to protect lands as far as Anchorage, Alaska, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Tokyo, Japan; from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York; from London to Helsinki to Istanbul, which was literally the eastern capital of the Roman empire. But that’s not enough. NATO, in the words of its Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, is “helpful in dealing with Russia,” but also “helps the United States…to project power into the Mideast [and] to Africa.”
Neither Genghis Khan nor Alexander the Great, Joseph Stalin nor Mao Zedong, could have fathomed such military domination across the face of the earth. The military reaches of America’s rivals are paltry in comparison: Russia's military bases are limited to its immediate surroundings and bases in Vietnam and Syria; China has just one overseas base in the tiny African country of Djibouti, which also hosts a US base.
What makes America’s reach more impressive is the fact that the country doesn’t even sit on the “World-Island”—the geopolitical term used to denote the world’s largest landmass, which is comprised of Europe, Asia, and Africa. From its comfortable perch in the “New World,” the US dominates the two major landmasses of the planet: the New World, made up of North & South America, and the larger World-Island. If you look at a map of the US military alliances across the world, we’ve placed our rival superpowers, China and Russia, in a pincer grip. Europe serves as our western beachhead on the World-Island; countries like Japan, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan keep China fenced in from the east.
This is the policy known as containment or encirclement. Every major war the United States has fought since WWII has primarily been to further this geopolitical objective—not for the lofty ideals its politicians have cited. The Korea and Vietnam wars were to contain China and the Soviet Union. The Gulf War was to contain Iraq.
Even the decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, famously coined the “War On Terror,” were not a fight against terrorism, but a brazen effort to seize geopolitical control in the Middle East and encircle one of the United States’ biggest enemies, Iran. The Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank which included former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney, emerged in the 90s—the decade in which the United States had finally achieved global unipolarity, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yet that was not enough for our reptilian-minded elites. The PNAC demanded that future American administrations “preserve and extend” America’s global military domination “as far into the future as possible.” As if encouraging an obese man to guzzle cake, they recommended that we “increase defense spending significantly,” pursue a foreign policy “that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad,” and compel “regional foes to act in ways that protect American interests and principles.” But so thorough was the United States’ global military domination at the time that a September 2000 report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, zeroed in on just a few last adversaries to bring to heel: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, the three countries that, by no coincidence, would later make up President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil.”
The end of the report ominously noted that “Further, the process of [America’s military] transformation…is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.” For those questioning why we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan when none of the 19 hijackers bore Iraqi or Afghan passports, but instead mostly were of Saudi nationality—look towards this prescient report. The fact that Afghanistan and Iraq border Iran from the east and west sweetened the deal. Capitalize on a new Pearl Harbor to depose Saddam Hussein, secure Iraqi oil, and encircle Iran? In the eyes of our foreign policy elites, that was worth $2 trillion dollars and the blood of American sons.
Notice how the “War on Terror” helped the United States encircle Iran: using Iraq from the west and Afghanistan from the east. (The United States already has military alliances with Pakistan and Kuwait, and is Saudi Arabia’s biggest defense supplier.)
Ironically, in their path to eliminate the last few holdouts to American hegemony, the PNAC neoconservatives actually hastened its downfall. Iraq worsened from bad to hell. North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapons in 2006 after seeing how easily the US overthrew Saddam. And the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan.
The Iraq War should have been a learning lesson—that further attempts at total global military domination are fruitless and come at great personal cost. We clearly failed to learn from that lesson, as we now see in Ukraine. All but the most indoctrinated of Westerners could see there was some provocation on NATO’s part for the current war. When we hear former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reminisce about how he told Putin that Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO “for the foreseeable future” but refused to specify a timeline, or George W. Bush admit that he always “felt Ukraine needed to be in NATO” while chuckling that it didn’t “really matter” what Russia was promised, it should make the average peace-loving person’s blood boil. Russia and America alone have the power to end the world through their arsenals of nuclear weapons—so instead of working to make Russia an ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, why did American elites insist on bringing a military alliance right up to their border?
Just like it would aggravate us if Canada formed an ironclad military alliance with China, so too is it ludicrous not to expect rival superpowers to see the expansion of NATO as a provocation of war. With Finland, a neighboring country that Russia fought with as recently as 80 years ago, having joined NATO this year, that scenario is now a reality. And the doomsday clock inches closer to midnight.
The reflexive argument that this is all done to “keep us safe” is ludicrous considering that America is the most un-invadable country in the world, ensconced by two vast oceans. As long as she protects her Second Amendment, she is a nation that cannot be subjugated, except from within. When politicians cite “democracy” and “human rights” and “self-determination” as justification for their wars, my question is: where were “human rights” during the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, or the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and her family in Iraq? Where was the support for “democracy” and “self-determination” when 97% of Crimea, whose citizens overwhelmingly speak Russian, voted to integrate into Russia, and yet Barack Obama responded with sanctions and kicking Russia out of the G8 bloc? If the ICC is insistent on charging Putin for invading Ukraine, where are the charges for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, who premeditated the War on Iraq?
The Journalist Problem
The problem is compounded by Western journalists and pundits who refuse to question our appetite for world domination or to interrogate our internationalist mindset. Journalists from both the American right and left write about how Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping complain about “all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression” of their countries, without reporting on if that’s true or not—when it obviously is, based off one glance at a world map of US military bases & alliances.
Map of US military base locations versus Russia military base locations.
If you only paid attention to the American mainstream media, you would never know about the belligerent expansion of NATO in the last two decades, the “color revolutions” staged by the CIA in post-Soviet states to flip them into McDonald’s-friendly nations, our covert funding of the Arab Spring which proved to be disastrous for the region, and cruel CIA-backed coups of democratically elected leaders such as Salvador Allende in Chile. You would toss and turn in bed at night thinking about Putin or Kim Jong Un using nuclear weapons, without realizing that America has been the bully when it comes to nuclear weapons: being the only nation to use them in war, and preemptively pursuing the hydrogen bomb, as shown recently by the movie Oppenheimer.
Jimmy Carter called America “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” We spend more on our military budget than the next ten nations combined. Yet I believe the American people themselves are not warmongering. Winning the public’s support for an overseas war almost always involves a trail of deceit by politicians and journalists. Our media complex, while claiming to be the most objective on planet Earth, never questions our politicians on their most fundamental assumptions, such as the actual need for American global military domination—a stance which doesn’t originate from the American people, but from shady think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Project for the New American Century, whose members also sit on the boards of multinational defense corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Halliburton, which profit from war.
Return to the Monroe Doctrine
If our journalists and politicians won’t address the obvious, Americans must ask the questions ourselves: Why does our country insist on world domination? Why is our military so unnecessarily big? Why can’t we take a step back?
In 1823, President James Monroe articulated the Monroe Doctrine, the most significant foreign policy statement in US history. The doctrine stated that any attempt by a European power to interfere with the affairs of an independent nation in the Americas would be met with hostility by the US. In turn, the United States would not meddle in the internal affairs of European countries. The doctrine is fabulously ambitious, even presumptuous—it established the US as the arbiter of the entire Western Hemisphere, half of the world. Yet today, America’s foreign policy doctrine is to attempt to dominate both of the world’s hemispheres, all of the world.
19th-century political cartoon illustrating the Monroe Doctrine.
No longer shall we bite off more than we can chew. It’s time to return to the Monroe Doctrine. This is not to abandon our allies nor fail to support our friends. But it is to be more prudent about our military alliances and to allow the World-Island to shape its own destiny. It is also to enforce our own security; according to former President Donald Trump, China is now building military installations in Cuba. Returning to the Monroe Doctrine would give us the legitimacy and focus to expel foreign superpowers from our side of the world.
We have precedents in the West for such behavior. George Washington gave up power after two terms as President and is considered one of the greatest American presidents for it. In fact, in his farewell address to Congress, Washington urged America to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” knowing they would inevitably harm America’s national interest. In Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth kept her stature by accepting the independence of former colonies like Nigeria and Kenya; imagine the bloodshed if she or her father, King George V, had vainly tried to enforce a kind of English unipolarity upon the world. And in ancient times, the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla commands eternal respect for relinquishing the title of dictator, twice.
For if America does not give up her grip on the world, we will be forced to. As former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger acknowledged in his book World Order, unipolarity is not sustainable. The future of the world is multipolarity, where different great powers tend to their own spheres of influence. However, as Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin stated in a 2021 interview with Countere, multipolarity is not some “rose dream” with world peace. Just like the rest of history, including our own so-called Pax Americana, it will have tears, blood, and war. But the alternative to multipolarity is no less than a world conflagration, triggered by chimerical military alliances that would send boys from Ohio to defend Istanbul.
Map of US military alliances in 2020. Since then, America has severed relations with Afghanistan and accepted Finland into NATO.
If you lived in America and never watched the news, you wouldn’t be able to tell we were the world’s pre-eminent superpower. In the last 50 years, as our foreign policy establishment and military spent trillions of dollars on failed crusades, our middle class hollowed out, our cities collapsed, our wages stagnated, our infrastructure crumbled, our national debt skyrocketed, and our spiritual life is gone.
“It has reached a point now where unipolarity is negatively affecting…the majority of Americans who do not benefit from the elite Washington unipolar network,” says Hrovje Morić, the founder of the popular Geopolitics & Empire podcast and a former Professor of International Relations, in an interview. “And of course, unipolarity is detrimental for the non-American world because unipolarity unfairly takes wealth from the rest of the world. It is neo-colonialism, it subjugates nations through color revolutions, making them vassals, and then through complicated financial arrangements siphons off their wealth.”
A New Age of American Renewalism
While America has focused outwards, her people have suffered. Their suffering begets a new question: What if America were to focus inwards?
For America’s might is not solely tied to her military. America’s global domination extends to the economic, political, and cultural realms. We are still the world’s #1 economy. We still sit on the United Nations Security Council. And most significantly, we are still the global tastemakers of culture, with our music, our movies, our social media apps, celebrities, artists, and so forth.
I suggest that we concentrate our energy in the cultural and economic realms, at the expense of the military and political ones. I am not advocating to make our military “weak”; rather, it should concentrate its forces on the express purpose our Framers formed it for—to first and foremost defend our national borders.
I asked Sarah from DD Geopolitics, a prominent English-language Telegram focusing on geopolitics and global affairs, about what a less unipolar world might look like. After insisting that one “must get the average American to understand that they have more in common with a member of the working class in any other country than they do with the richest 1% of the American population,” she provided a long list of reasons why a less hegemonic world would help ordinary Americans, including economic opportunity for smaller businesses, cultural exchange and enrichment, reduced risks of international conflict, educational exchange, diplomatic flexibility, cultural soft-power, and humanitarian efforts and solidarity.
My proposal is to ensure America ends this century as the creative engine of the world. Let’s invest in the potential of our own citizens. To do this necessitates an enormous pivot in the way we run our country: where the billions we export to Ukraine goes to the families who lost their homes in Hawaii. Where the trillions postmarked for Iraq went instead to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Where the money we spend on clandestine “black box” military programs goes instead to improving the lives of American people.
One of the founding fathers of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, famously observed that history often features a battle between a reigning “sea power” and “land power.” These names refer to how civilizations derive their military might—a sea power might control the waterways and a land power might focus on territorial expansion—but also to more spiritual aspects of their culture. Land powers are tied to tradition, to the earth, to austerity. Sea powers are tied to trade, to multiculturalism, to materialism. Sparta was a land power and Athens was a sea power. The same for Rome and Carthage, and the Soviet Union and the United States.
The United States, with its vast, fertile territory, is one of the few countries with the unique opportunity to choose its destiny between a land-based power—think Protestant American work ethic, family values, connection with nature, and “one nation under God”—or a sea-based power, always abroad. Ever since Woodrow Wilson entered America into WWI and introduced his Fourteen Points for world government, we have been at sea. It is time for us to return home.
In 2000, the Project for the New American Century stated that the primary American goal of the 21st century should be to “preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals.” They were wrong. The primary goal of America in the 21st century should be American excellence, not world domination. Only by relinquishing its hold on the world’s chessboard, returning to principles laid out in the Monroe Doctrine, and turning inwardly towards the metaphysical ideals of a land power, can America fulfill its destiny as God’s country.
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