My Evolving Love Affair with the Donroe Doctrine
By Aunt America
For a president who ran largely on non-intervention for his comeback term, Donald Trump sure is making his presence felt anywhere that seems to catch his fancy. Let’s count the ways and means: Tariffs, Iran, Taiwan/China, Venezuela, whatever is going on with Ukraine, whatever is going on with Israel, and, perhaps most enjoyably, entering a diss war with the Pope (Vatican City counts) over how he chooses to accomplish all that.
Now, once Inauguration Day passed by in January 2025, on the bio line of my X account, I posted “I voted for this.” I was looking forward to closed international military bases, ships at home instead of at sea, and fighter jets looking mighty fine at Pensacola air shows rather than in the air over third-world nations. Maybe the 18 acres of the UN headquarters could be given over to something more useful, such as a protected wildlife habitat for the Long-Nosed Saiga Antelope (which, yes, exists. For now, UN.)
So when all of a sudden we were messing with South Africa and Greenland and Pakistan and the entirety of NATO and, for some reason, Eswatini (which, yes, exists—for now), that gave me pause. This wasn’t… Well, this just wasn’t the own-business-minding I had in mind. It seemed to go well, for the most part, but my goodness, all this world-hopping.
Did I vote for this, exactly? I can’t speak for all Trump voters… but as for me and my vote, we are mostly pleased by the Doings of the Trump Doctrine. What exactly the Trump Doctrine– or, much more Rat Packishly, the Donroe Doctrine—encompasses differs depending on who’s talking about it. But the most important kernel of it is this: there’s a difference between politely attending to our own family fights, chief among them who exactly is setting the College Football Playoff brackets, and mindfully leaving the rest of the world the hell alone. We also have the option of taking five minutes to shoot a laser beam into a nuclear facility or cruising into Caracas to pick up a narco-dictator like a Big Gulp.
It seems awfully interventionist to do the hemispheric Big Gulp and the laser thing, and I certainly thought so at the time, but it looks like what might wind up happening is that if we perform these small dictator DoorDashes effectively, the rest of the world will leave us, and pretty much everybody else, the hell alone for a long, long, time.
This was apparent early on with Tarriffpolooza– other nations coming to the table, folding in economic disputes, leaders in suits shooting off dramatic X posts but not shooting off much else.
We could have done this in a lot of nations, but only acted in a select few. A curated guest list, if you will. If Trump and Big Marco (we call Marco Rubio Big Marco now, in conservative spaces) are doing what I think they’re doing, they’re preventing a thousand forest fires by fighting ten.
And of course, there’s the issue of government spending. Trump voters don’t like it. Trump voters want government spending to fall off the balance sheet. We want it to look like the chances of Libya sweeping the Winter Olympics in all speed skating events. We want it to be practically non-existent.
So, like many other Americans, even conservatives, I looked forward to a dedicated streamlining of the Department of Bombing and Shooting Things, and letting those actually involved in the bombing and the shooting direct all the bombing and shooting when life gets hot.
But streamlining doesn’t mean gutting, especially if these surgical strikes are to serve a larger foreign policy. If most Army barracks were built out of concrete and spit and looked like Daytona Beach the morning after spring break, only with vaguely fewer venereal diseases, throw some effective money at it. If our airplanes get mad when we try to start them up, why, make them happy so they can spread their wings.
Trump voters are largely pleased with the idea of spending what needs to be spent when needed– but asking the government to do such a thing seems an impossibility. However, withdrawing from the larger world sprawl expedites the process. Eliminating threats from the world theater seems to save money as well as lives and wasted words. Sometimes a surgical strike takes out more than one enemy– or even a pre-enemy.
And the Trump administration expedites at the approximate cost of $0 at times. By seeing to America’s own interests in Iran, Trump has pissed off NATO. By pissing off NATO, Trump demonstrates that our allies perhaps aren’t quite so allied. And if these folks aren’t so allied… well, what are we hemorrhaging dislocation pay and jet fuel for defending Brussels?
Shutting down entire unneeded military bases as a result of efficient diplomacy sounds like an awfully large chunk out of the federal budget.
The Donroe Doctrine specializes in the art of You Can Just Do Things. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen Rubio or Trump lean back from a microphone and think, “I have never seen a President or a Secretary of State say or do that in my entire life,” and then realize that I never thought to even hope for such a thing, because I simply thought it wasn’t possible. You can’t just… withdraw from NATO. You can’t. People won’t stand for it. The republic will fall.
Won’t it?
For the first time in my life, what the Secretary of State and Trump are delivering aren’t apologies, a chopper or two over a desert, and a geography lesson about the Strait of Hormuz. They’ve tossed the usual playbook directly into the UN shredder, and with not a lot of bloodshed. Turns out there are ways of handling the world without flinging our young men and women into a couple of decades of nation-building in nations that don’t want to be built.
The Donroe Doctrine’s success lies mostly in showing not what American might is, but what it can be when properly deployed. It undercuts the indecisiveness and politician-run wars of the last seventy years and makes great shows of what happens when crossed.
And that is precisely what I voted for.
