The Donroe Doctrine: How Trump’s Foreign Policy Repudiates the Rules-Based Order and Makes the World Less Safe

Eileen O'Connor analyzes how President Trump is dismantling the UN, NATO, trade deals, US soft power and standing, even Ukraine. While beating his chest, as if it was all on purpose...

BY EILEEN O’CONNOR

In his State of the Union address, President Trump declared himself the most successful foreign policy president in American history. He boasts of brokering eight peace agreements in eight months. His November 2025 National Security Strategy proclaims a commitment to “peace through strength.” But beneath the self-congratulation lies a foreign policy that represents the most dramatic repudiation of the liberal, rules-based international order since the United States helped build it after World War II.

In Donald Trump’s view his foreign policy is whatever he decides on any given day - neither dependent on allies nor the rule of international law. As to whether there are any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump told the New York Times: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

Yet any use of military force inevitably hurts people. He proved that point once again this week in attacking Iran, with Israeli assistance, and killing its leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. At least three Americans died, with several more wounded, and according to Iranian news media, nearly 800 of its citizens are dead. This, just a few weeks after using a massive military strike in Venezuela to arrest its leader, Nicolás Maduro and his wife pursuant to an indictment on drug charges. After that, his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, put it this way: “We live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

He added: “The future of the free world depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology.”

That future certainly does. But does a retreat from multilateralism make America more safe or the world more secure? That was not the view of most foreign policy experts and economists over the last 70 years.

I. Dismantling the Rules-Based Order

After two world wars, American foreign policy rested on a bipartisan insight: the United States was safest when it led a system of alliances and institutions that constrained great power rivalry. This was not charity. The Marshall Plan, spending roughly one percent of GNP annually for four years, rebuilt America’s trading partners, increased exports by nearly fifty percent, contained Soviet expansion, and underwrote seven decades of peace. Historians ranked it the best U.S. foreign policy decision of the twentieth century.

The Trump administration has methodically dismantled this architecture. Since January 2025, the U.S. has moved to exit sixty-six international organizations, including the WHO (eighteen percent of its budget), the Paris Climate Agreement, UNESCO, and the UN Human Rights Council. It shuttered USAID and accumulated over four billion dollars in unpaid UN dues. The National Security Strategy (NSS), released in December, is candid about the philosophy: “The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests - that is the sole focus of this strategy.”

It dismisses post-Cold War strategies as “laundry lists of wishes” disconnected from the national interest. The Brookings Institution characterized the NSS as “essentially asserting a neo-imperialist presence in the region.”

Instead, the administration is brokering transactional deals and military might centered on resource extraction and the enrichment of those close to the president. These actions are not making America stronger. They are making America weaker - economically diminished, strategically isolated, and less safe. The result is a world returning to great power spheres of influence - a world we have seen before, and one that ended catastrophically.

This ignores the foundational insight of the Marshall Plan era. U.S. annual UN dues amount to less than Rhode Island’s state budget; American firms won $2.13 billion in UN contracts in 2024 alone. These institutions provide pandemic early warning, trade frameworks, and intelligence-sharing networks that protect American lives and save American money.

Meanwhile, every institution the U.S. leaves is one China will reshape. China has publicly committed to “always uphold multilateralism” and now leads the $1.8 trillion global clean energy market. Russia benefits from reduced NATO cyber cooperation. Rules governing trade, digital security, and intellectual property are being written without American input. When the Soviet Union boycotted the UN Security Council in 1950, the U.S. used that absence to authorize the Korean War.

The lesson: the power that shows up shapes the outcome. The power that walks away loses.

II. The Donroe Doctrine: Speak Loudly and Swing the Stick

The administration has explicitly revived the Monroe Doctrine, announcing a “Trump Corollary” to “restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” President Monroe’s 1823 declaration warned European powers against interference in the Americas. Theodore Roosevelt expanded it in 1904, arguing that the U.S. might exercise “an international police power” - but Roosevelt’s maxim was to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” with the emphasis on speaking softly first.

Trump has inverted this. He speaks loudly and swings the stick first. The administration has imposed tariffs on allies from Mexico to Brazil, waged military strikes in Iran, the Caribbean (killing at least sixty-four people), captured Venezuela’s president, and threatened to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal. After the Venezuela operation, Trump told reporters the Monroe Doctrine was “a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot. They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine.’”

The irony is that the approach is already counterproductive. China is now the leading trade partner of every South American country except Colombia. When Trump tariffed China, Beijing stopped buying U.S. soybeans and turned to Argentina. Brazil and Mexico are building bilateral alternatives specifically to hedge against American coercion. Latin American governments are learning the lesson: the United States, under this doctrine, is a hegemon to be managed, not a partner to be trusted.

III. Peace Deals as Business Deals

Trump claims to have “ended seven unendable wars,” was awarded the hastily conceived inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, and renamed the United States Institute of Peace after himself.

But as Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations observed, what Trump negotiates are ceasefires, not peace agreements - and the distinction matters.

The Thailand-Cambodia accord saw fighting resume within a month. Violence in eastern Congo has surged since the DRC-Rwanda signing. The Carnegie Endowment noted some of the eight deals don’t qualify as peace agreements at all - Egypt and Ethiopia were not at war. The Economist concluded that Trump works for peace “loudly, dramatically and quickly” but without “sustained attention,” producing agreements that “may pause, but cannot end” the world’s most enduring conflicts.

A pattern emerges across these deals: what analysts call a “resources-for-peace” approach. In the DRC, the U.S. is brokering exclusive access to critical minerals for American companies in exchange for taxpayer-funded security support, with deals managed by Trump’s “Africa czar” Massad Boulos - the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany. In Ukraine, the mineral resources agreement commits fifty percent of future revenues from new state-owned resource projects to a joint fund, framed as Ukraine “paying” for past assistance. The Armenia-Azerbaijan deal came with the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” reportedly granting the U.S. exclusive development rights for ninety-nine years. Reports allege many deals involve close associates who are also campaign contributors or investors in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business.

As Yale’s David Simon and Kathryn Hemmer wrote in Just Security: “One cannot buy peace with mineral and real estate deals.” The agreements consistently lack enforcement mechanisms, exclude key stakeholders, and leave fundamental disputes unresolved.

They are peace made to look like a business success story - and like many of Trump’s businesses, the illusion is more impressive than the reality.

IV. Economic Retreat and the Erosion of Soft Power

The NSS calls for “the world’s strongest, most innovative economy.” Yet its policies systematically undermine that goal. The Trump tariffs represent the largest U.S. tax increase as a percentage of GDP since 1993 - an average $1,500 per household in 2026, according to the Tax Foundation. U.S. GDP growth fell to 2.2 percent in 2025, with the final quarter at just 1.4 percent annualized. The Yale Budget Lab estimates the tariffs reduced real GDP growth by half a percentage point in both 2025 and 2026. Even after the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February 2026, the remaining tariffs will persistently shrink the economy and function as a regressive tax hitting lower-income households hardest. The trade deficit barely moved - supply chains rerouted through intermediary countries rather than returning to American soil.

The administration has proposed cutting NIH (National Institutes of Health) by forty percent and NSF (National Science Foundation) by fifty-seven percent, even though every dollar of NIH research generates $2.56 in economic activity. The NIH has already cut approximately 2,100 grants worth $9.5 billion. China’s share of published cancer research has now surpassed America’s. International students contribute $55 billion annually to the U.S. economy; fifty-six percent study STEM fields that feed the AI, biotech, and the defense workforce pipeline here at home. Anti-immigration policies are driving them to Canada, the UK, and Australia, with Fall 2025 enrollment already down $1.1 billion in economic contributions.

The all-fossil-fuels energy strategy has cost $35 billion in clean energy investment and 38,000 jobs in 2025 alone, ceding the $2 trillion global clean energy market to China. Clean energy jobs had been growing at twice the rate of overall employment. Republican districts have lost $12.4 billion in investment since January 2025. The withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement contradicts the Pentagon’s own recognition, since 1998, that climate change is a “threat multiplier”—and abandons the frameworks where climate-driven security threats are managed and trillions in investment are directed.

V. The World That’s Coming

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at Davos in January 2026, described the current moment as “a rupture, not a transition.” Drawing on Václav Havel, Carney argued that for decades, middle powers had “placed the sign in the window” - participating in the rituals of the rules-based order while knowing it was partially false. But the fiction was useful: American hegemony provided real public goods.

That bargain, Carney said, no longer works. When great powers weaponize economic integration, middle powers must develop strategic autonomy. But “a world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.” His warning to Washington was direct: “Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”

In six months, Canada has signed twelve trade and security deals on four continents, agreed a comprehensive partnership with the EU, and begun building a trading architecture that deliberately routes around American dominance.

This is the Donroe Doctrine’s real legacy - not restored American pre-eminence but a world in which allies build alternatives to it.

As Carney put it: “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

The middle powers are refusing that bargain.

Before World War I, great powers carved the world into spheres of influence, competing through bilateral deals and military intimidation. That system produced catastrophic results both militarily and economically. The liberal order that followed was built from those bitter lessons. We are now unlearning them.

Senator Fulbright warned in 1966 that “power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.” That confusion is now the organizing principle of American foreign policy.

The question is not whether the Donroe Doctrine will reshape the world - it already has - but whether the damage can be reversed before the consequences become as devastating as the last time great powers decided they could go it alone.

Eileen O’Connor is a former award-winning White House and foreign correspondent for CNN and ABC in Russia and Ukraine, a crisis management attorney, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration, and former Senior Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation, specializing in issues and places where bad things (or “sh#t”) happen(s). You can also read Eileen here.