President Donald Trump will readjust the military’s footprint in the Western Hemisphere to “address urgent threats,” including mass migration, drug cartels, and foreign adversarial influence close to America’s shores, according to a policy release from the administration.
The Trump administration released its new 33-page national security strategy on Thursday, detailing the president’s “America First” doctrine and outlining the administration’s foreign policy objectives.
The NSS outlines the initiatives the Trump administration has already undertaken in its first year, with a primary focus on the Western Hemisphere over other regions. The administration has cracked down on illegal immigration, is carrying out a controversial lethal military campaign targeting purported drug smugglers heading for the United States, and the president has discussed the possibility of targeting cartels in Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.
The strategy says the administration wants to “ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” It wants the countries’ governments to “cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations.”
It also wants “a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes, to thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis.”
For decades, the U.S. viewed the smuggling of drugs into the country as a law enforcement problem and not one meant for the military. Previously, the Coast Guard would primarily stop vessels suspected of carrying illicit cargo, search them, and, if necessary, arrest those on board. However, the Trump administration has changed that.
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Since the start of September, the U.S. military has carried out lethal operations targeting 22 vessels it said were carrying drugs intended for the U.S., killing about 85 people.
The NSS notes that defending the homeland may include “targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including, where necessary, the use of lethal force to replace the failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades.”
The strategy refers to this as a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, a 1823 U.S. policy by former President James Monroe that instructed European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere.
It also warns, “Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future,” but it does not identify those competitors.
An increased U.S. presence in the Western Hemisphere will come at the expense of areas “whose relative import to American national security has declined in recent decades or years,” the NSS says.
Trump’s NSS deprioritizes the Middle East, in part because of the administration’s assessment that the region is less likely to initiate a conflict that expands beyond its borders.
“For half a century at least, American foreign policy has prioritized the Middle East above all other regions. The reasons are obvious: the Middle East was for decades the world’s most important supplier of energy, was a prime theater of superpower competition, and was rife with conflict that threatened to spill into the wider world and even to our own shores,” it says, noting that “at least two of those dynamics no longer hold.”
It also confirms many of the president’s comments about migration, both at home and abroad, particularly in Europe.
“But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” it says. “The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
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When it comes to the Pacific, Trump’s NSS maintains the long-held U.S. position that it does not support any unilateral change in the Taiwan-China relationship and calls the need to deter a war over the island “a priority.”
It says a key way to ensure such a war never occurs is through “preserving military overmatch,” as well as American “economic and technological preeminence.”
