Greg Ip

Trump has made it clear we are going back to the great power system of before World War II, where we have spheres of influence.

And for the U.S., the Western Hemisphere is its sphere of influence.

And it is the prerogative of the United States to essentially establish its influence through military or economic means to ensure that its own security and economic needs are taken care of.

Sure.

President James Monroe, in his address to Congress in 1823, he said that the Western Hemisphere would no longer be a place for colonization by the European powers.

And that was interpreted to mean that the Americas were to be an exclusive sphere of American influence.

Now, as it happened, at the time, the United States was a pretty weak country.

We barely had a navy.

And so it's not like this gave us license to go around intervening in other countries.

And for most of the 1800s, the United States preoccupied itself with expanding its own footprint within the territory of North America.

It seemed unnecessary.

The Soviet Union was gone.

The Europeans were our allies.

And it also seemed kind of unseemly.

Those were all now, for the most part, fairly healthy democracies, and they were all friendly towards the United States.

What kind of neighbor would America be to be going around threatening to meddle in their affairs?

In fact, Obama's Secretary of State in 2013 said the Monroe Doctrine is dead.

And so in some sense, you could argue that globalization became a superior way for the United States to project its economic influence than imperialism did because we could trade with these countries.

We could invest in them.

We could get all the benefits of their resources without having to send gunboats into their harbors.