David E. Sanger

Absolutely.

We're slipping you the copy right now, Natalie.

The Monroe Doctrine, which dates back to 1823, declared that the Western Hemisphere would essentially be closed to European colonization.

The Europeans had to stay out of our territory, which was a pretty bold thing to say, but

for a country that was about 45 years old and barely had a navy at the time, right?

But over the following 200 years, we both expanded from and retreated from the Monroe Doctrine.

How so?

Well, Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 issued a Roosevelt corollary to this doctrine that basically said we reserve the right to intervene in Latin America if we see governments that are coming together that are not to our liking.

And we did exactly that, right?

We got involved in a civil uprising in Colombia and we ended up with the Panama Canal.

I mean, we did a whole bunch of actions up through the 1950s when the CIA was conducting coups in the region.

But then we turned away for a bit.

We had the Cold War.

We had the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We had 9-11.

And we began to think, as China rose, that it's really in the Indo-Pacific that we needed to concentrate our forces.

What this document is saying is it's time to come home again and to focus on our home region.

And when you read the actual document,

The president talks about building on the Monroe Doctrine and creating a sort of Trump corollary to it.

What it's saying is we are going to control access to the region.