To Understand The Donroe Doctrine, Look At China

President Donald Trump offers many reasons for his aggressive foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, but one unites his top foreign policy advisers more than others – countering China.

It’s a goal that ties Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime China hawk, with Vice President JD Vance, who has in the past criticized American involvement in foreign countries.

It also animates Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has long focused on countering narcotics and illegal immigration from Latin America, and the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for policy Elbridge Colby, who see China as the United States’ primary threat, said Alexander Gray, Trump’s national security council chief of staff in his first term.

What brings them all together is a belief the United States must clear the Western Hemisphere of Chinese influence.

The overall outlook is “you can't defend the homeland without being predominant in the hemisphere,” said Gray, who is currently the CEO of American Global Strategies. “So you have to defend that. And then from there, you can project power outward to focus on the other major theater of competition, which is the Indo Pacific.”

The view sheds light on just how far the administration may go to extend influence in the Western Hemisphere and how serious it takes Chinese economic expansion as a national security threat.

“China’s economic expansion into the Western Hemisphere, especially via companies controlled or influenced by the [Chinese Communist Party] and the [People’s Liberation Army], poses risks to U.S. national security and prosperity,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO.

In a statement, the White House didn’t address China by name but did focus on battling “adversaries” in a larger effort to reinstate the Monroe Doctrine.

“As President Trump outlined in his National Security Strategy, the administration is reasserting and enforcing the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, counter adversaries, control migration, and stop drug trafficking,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said. “His approach has been successful – narcotics trafficking by land and by sea has effectively stopped, and our border is secure from illegal drugs and criminals.”

Even as Trump prepares for what is expected to be a cordial visit to Beijing in early April, focused on rebalancing trade and ensuring U.S. access to rare earths, his administration has spent the first months of the year taking action that directly weakens China’s position in the Americas.

The administration’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was, perhaps, the most clear example as Beijing was the top buyer of Venezuelan oil and a chief economic partner.

“The isolationists saw [the capture of Maduro] as an extension of U.S., national security and domestic issues,” said Carrie Filipetti, who served as Trump’s deputy assistant secretary for Cuba and Venezuela in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs in his first term.

“The people who are concerned about China saw it as an important means of countering China's shadow fleet and other involvements in the Western Hemisphere,” added Filipetti, who is now the executive director at the Vandenberg Coalition. “And then the hawks were interested in making sure that Venezuela was free and democratic. So all of them agreed on that kind of gunboat diplomacy once he was apprehended.”

The Trump administration is also destabilizing the Cuban government, threatening Panama, the first Latin American country to join the Belt and Road initiative, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature international infrastructure development program, and antagonizing Brazil, China’s largest trading partner.

Trump said the U.S. must “own” Greenland to prevent China and Russia from occupying the island and gaining a foothold in the region.

Even when the administration isn’t engaging in gunboat diplomacy, it’s finding other ways to needle Latin American countries that have gotten in bed with China.

The Peruvian government’s loss of regulatory control of the $1.3 billion Chinese-built and operated Chancay mega-port last week is the latest example of what the administration says are the risks of Beijing’s growing influence in the region.

“No country is immune to the negative impacts of China’s unfair trade practices and state-subsidized overcapacity,” the State Department spokesperson said. “The United States will continue to work with governments across the Western Hemisphere to encourage informed decision-making in their interactions with China.”

The administration’s aggressive posture has won plaudits from right-leaning Latin American leaders in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. But it may backfire in other parts of the region wary of a revival of U.S. gunboat diplomacy and drive governments closer to Beijing.

“The Trump administration's heavy-handed policies may push countries to acquiesce to U.S. demands in the short term, but in the long term it could burn bridges with the region that will absolutely open up opportunities for China going forward,” said Leland Lazarus, former special assistant to the head of U.S. Southern Command. “Invoking the Monroe Doctrine and reimposing U.S. dominance in the region is going to leave a really bad taste in the mouths of people in the long term.”

Canada, for example, has turned to China to diversify trade ties away from the U.S., and Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Beijing last month, the first Canadian leader to do so in nearly a decade.

But many of the highest-ranking Trump officials have previously said that China and the United States are on a collision course.

Colby, in a speech at Dartmouth University in October 2024, said “we need to prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.” Vance, that same month in a campaign speech in Detroit, called China “the biggest threat confronting this country.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned a gathering of defense ministers in Singapore in May of Beijing’s “massive military build-up and growing willingness to use military force to achieve its goals.”

The Trump administration in its first months took an aggressive stance toward China ratcheting up tariffs to as high as 145 percent. China’s retaliation – slowing the flow of critical minerals – forced the president to seek a detente. The National Security Strategy, released in December, said the U.S. will seek to rebalance trade with China while deterring its military presence in the Pacific. But largely the administration has resisted publicly confronting China.

The warm public stance with Xi doesn’t hold in the Western Hemisphere, where Trump and his advisers appear to have more room to push China around and Gray suggested there are myriad reasons to expect it to continue.

“We continue to have leftist governments in South America like Brazil that are expanding their ties to China,” he said. “As much as we love the Milei government, the Milei government still has a Chinese satellite ground station in Argentina.”

The Western Hemisphere section of the National Security Strategy indirectly points to China as a threat, without naming specific countries. Between the lines it’s clear that Beijing’s growing economic power is behind language like “push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region” and how the U.S. aims to wield power by building alliances with Latin American countries to make it “harder for non-hemispheric competitors to increase their influence in the region.”

U.S. efforts to coax countries out of China’s orbit may be a hard sell given Beijing’s deep economic ties to the region fostered through trade and infrastructure investment. China’s bilateral trade with Latin America hit $565 billion in 2025 perChinese customs data, compared with $346 billion for the U.S. Beijing has also signed 22 out of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries for Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure investment projects.

“One big issue is what is the alternative to Chinese financed infrastructure? U.S. firms have largely taken a pass on big projects in Latin America,” said Stephen McFarland, former ambassador to Guatemala who served in eight other diplomatic posts in Latin America.

Trump will convene Latin American leaders on March 7 in Miami — just weeks before his summit with Xi in Beijing, a White House official confirmed, but efforts to persuade Latin American countries to reduce their economic ties to China are likely to flounder unless the U.S. can provide a durable alternative.

That’s a heavy lift given that the U.S. can’t rival China’s bottomless appetite for commodities produced by the region including soybeans, iron ore and beef.

“The fastest growing region in the world today is not the United States, it's not Europe, it's Asia, and particularly China,” said Jorge Heine, Chile’s former ambassador to Beijing. “That’s where the growth opportunities are, so if you were a Latin American minister of economic affairs, why would you want to give that a miss?”

The Trump administration has taken baby steps toward challenging China’s economic influence that its Belt and Road Initiative investments — which include both hydroelectric projects in Ecuador and the construction of the Bogota metro system — have given it in the region. The Trump administration has boosted funding to the International Development Finance Corp. and shielded the U.S. Trade and Development Agency from funding cuts and restructuring that the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency inflicted across the federal bureaucracy last year.

But those moves won’t produce positive results in the short-term, said Brian Nichols, former assistant secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere in the Biden administration.

“It still takes a long time to get a multi-billion dollar project through all of that process and we are not as nimble as the Chinese are yet,” Nichols said.