Some columnists, including some scholars among them, claim that the 2025 U.S. Security Strategy Paper is the road map for "Trump’s own Monroe Doctrine.”

At the first reading, it sounds right for Trump's America to adopt an approach to foreign policy aiming to start global expansionist and interventionist practices, like that of President James Monroe, who declared it in 1850, and President Theodore Roosevelt appended it with additional items as a logical corollary in 1904.

Mountains' size and vastness humbled the regular people and ordinary statesmen and stateswomen, and they eventually dropped their ego. But for people like President Donald John Trump, whose ego puts the mountains to shame, expansionism and interventionism look like the right way to go. Especially, having JD Vance as vice president, Marco Rubio as secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of war – the three guardians of the neocon and globalist interventionist cabal docked and nested in the U.S. deep state – makes Trump the ideal person to raise the flag of an American Empire once again.

Yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

The Republican Party suggested, and the Democrats acquiesced, that the time had come to take care of the country and its people even before Trump’s first term in 2017. Remember MAGA? "Make America Great Again,” that political slogan popularized by Trump during his presidential campaigns in 2016, 2020, and 2024, was in fact an answer to the claims that the U.S. is diminishing in power on a geopolitical, military, financial, economic and technological basis (The American Decline). But now even The New York Times cannot tell if anything is holding MAGA together.

Thirty years ago, when Paul Kennedy, a historian and a Yale scholar, published his seminal book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military,” there was an avalanche of rebuttal books and articles refuting the Decline Theory. But, by now, it is so proven that George Friedman, an American futurologist and political scientist and the founder of The Stratfor, who developed his own theory of "America’s Crisis,” explains that the current situation in the U.S. fits within the framework of institutional and socioeconomic cycles, as described in his book, "The Storm Before the Calm.” Trump’s America fits into the American historic shifts of the 21st century: shrinking military advantages, deficit spending, geopolitical overreach, and a shift in moral, social and behavioral conditions have been associated with the "America’s Crisis.”

There has been debate over the extent of the decline and whether it is relative or absolute; not anymore. The end of the American empire is approaching quickly, and the U.S. is diminishing so very rapidly. Paul Krugman, a distinguished professor of economics at the Graduate Center of the City University and former columnist for The New York Times, wouldn’t mince his words: "In 2024 America was still in a real sense the leader of the free world. ... in just seven months, Trump has completely ripped up the foundations of the Pax Americana. Almost all his tariffs are clearly in violation of the GATT, yet Trump has vandalized the world trading system as casually as he has paved over the Rose Garden. We haven’t yet had a test of whether he would honor our obligations under NATO, but he’s said that his willingness to abide by the most central obligation, the guarantee of mutual defense, ‘depends on your definition.’”

Divided West

No leader of any political bloc in today’s so-called "Western” world asks the question political commentator David Brooks begs to be asked: "How can we create a civilization to be proud of?” Instead, we cringe seeing that America still seizes boats in the open seas, commits extrajudicial killings in the international waters off Venezuela and captures huge oil tankers. Consequently, the U.S. national security policy document, formally showing America’s contempt for Europe, made it clear that the two continents now stand at a strategic crossroads. From this point on, Trump’s America will continue on its way to turn inward. For the egotistical Trump, this might be "just curling up and dying”; so he has to find palliative ways to satisfy his ego.

But who could expect a new Monroe Doctrine from a U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) paper that calls for European nations to take "primary responsibility” for their own defense, indicating that the U.S. should no longer guarantee Europe’s security? Now, the U.S. seeks to align not with "all of Europe and NATO” but with "patriotic European parties.” That euphemism stands for the Netherlands’ Partij voor de Vrijheid (the Party for Freedom), Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice), Slovakia’s Smer (Direction – Social Democracy), Spain’s Vox (Latin for "voice"), and Denmark’s Dansk Folkeparti (the Danish People's Party). Despite the references to social democracy in their names, they are all far-right movements.

Despite the NSS’s lip service to "maintain the U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” it clearly calls for avoiding military competition with China and Russia and disparaging such alliances by the superpowers across the oceans. This cannot be a new blueprint for a Monroe Doctrine; some even label the NSS as "The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine." In the 1800s, Monroe's declaration provided precedent and support for U.S. expansion on the American continent. In the late 1800s, U.S. economic and military power enabled it to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.

Declining America

The Monroe Doctrine, as it was initially meant as an isolationist foreign policy, did not promise any engagement either against or for Europe or Latin America. It was just what it was: a bunch of threats against "a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere.” Later, after the two world wars, the U.S. built a rules-based international system and promised to defend that system from countries that would challenge it.

Does anyone see any such promise in the new NSS? Dear old Samuel P. Huntington, my advisor at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, would lament the "American Declinism” that he opined has been happening since the end of the Cold War. But it happened. Did it not? Yes, it happened so slowly that most people cannot see it was happening. Columnist Charles Krauthammer expressed it very well when he wrote: "If the Roman empire had declined at this rate, you'd be reading this column in Latin.” But it happened.

"MAGA” yells so loudly that the U.S. should "just curl up” and lick its strategic wounds, but Trump’s big ego, his inflated sense of self-importance, and a strong desire for admiration lead us to misread the NSS. So, he enters palliative discussions like Warner Bros. fight saying it’s imperative that CNN be sold; he casts pearls before swine pulling the U.S. out of World Health Organization (WHO), UNESCO and the United Nations Human Rights Council; he says meaningless things like "if America nukes the world, there will be no U.N.” in his UNGA speech in front of the representatives of 150 nations. Does he want to remove the U.S. from the U.N., too?

Few people would be shocked if Trump does that, too, as part of the U.S.’ shrinking back into its shell.