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From Monroe to ‘Donroe’: America enforces its back yard again
When President Donald Trump stood before reporters Saturday and invoked the Monroe Doctrine, he was not indulging nostalgia. He was announcing enforcement. Then came the line that removed all ambiguity: The Monroe Doctrine, he said, will now be known as the Donroe Doctrine.
The leftist political class recoiled on cue. Mainstream commentators scoffed. Corporate editorial boards feigned alarm. Strip away the theatrics, and the meaning was clear. The United States has decided to resume responsibility for the Western Hemisphere — not in the language of empire, but in the language of order, law, and consequence.
One reality is already clear. The Western Hemisphere no longer serves as an unguarded corridor for corruption, narcotics, and foreign subversion.
The Monroe Doctrine emerged in 1823, when President James Monroe warned European powers that further colonization or political interference in the Americas would not be tolerated. It never meant isolationism. It reflected realism.
Power vacuums invite conquest. Disorder invites domination. The early American republic understood that if Europe continued exporting its political systems into the New World, the hemisphere would remain unstable and unfree. America declared an end to European colonial ambition long before “decolonization” became a fashionable academic slogan.
Over time, enforcement varied in wisdom and restraint. Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary warned that chronic wrongdoing in the Americas could require U.S. intervention. During the Cold War, Washington invoked the doctrine — sometimes clumsily — to block Soviet expansion and nuclear weapons in the hemisphere.
Through each phase, the premise endured: The Western Hemisphere is a distinct political space, and the United States bears a special responsibility to prevent it from becoming a staging ground for criminal regimes and foreign adversaries.
That responsibility eroded in recent decades, replaced by a dangerous fantasy: that cartel-run states can invoke sovereignty to excuse any behavior so long as it occurs within their borders — or moves outward through drug routes and illegal oil networks. Venezuela stands as the clearest casualty of that delusion.
The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolás Maduro on narco-terrorism charges for conspiring with drug cartels to flood the United States with cocaine. This was no symbolic gesture. It marked a recognition that Venezuela under Maduro is not a normal sovereign government, but a criminal enterprise masquerading as one. Enforcement, not rhetoric, gives such indictments meaning. That is what the Donroe Doctrine signals.
Democratic critics objected immediately, even though the indictment originated under the Biden administration. Some argued that because the United States cannot remove every tyrant everywhere, it lacks moral authority to act against any single one. That is moral paralysis disguised as principle. By that logic, no law should ever be enforced because more criminals remain at large. Police would stop making arrests. Courts would close. Justice would dissolve into excuses.
Others insisted Venezuela’s sovereignty places it beyond American reach. Sovereignty does not magically convert criminal conduct into legitimacy. A regime that finances itself through narcotics trafficking, collaborates with cartels, launders money through international systems, facilitates human trafficking, and exports violence across borders has already violated the sovereignty of others — especially the United States. Cocaine and fentanyl ignore borders. So do the trafficking networks Venezuela enables. By its conduct, the Maduro regime declared hostility. Enforcement followed.
Venezuelan officials now appeal to international law. The claim borders on parody. Venezuela ranks among the world’s most corrupt regimes. Its institutions lie hollow. Its courts serve politics. Its elections perform theater. For such a regime to suddenly demand protection from a rules-based order it has systematically violated is not irony; it is audacity. This is not a government. It is a cartel with flags and uniforms.
RELATED:The Venezuela crisis was never just about drugs
The more revealing question is not why the United States finally enforced its laws against a narco-state but why so many Western politicians rushed to defend it. How many careers, campaigns, and institutions have drawn quiet benefit from regimes like Maduro’s? How many activists and academics repeat talking points that align perfectly with the interests of Caracas, Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran?
America’s adversaries understand Venezuela well. China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran treat it as a strategic asset — oil-rich, geographically close to the United States, and governed by leaders willing to trade sovereignty for survival. Through Venezuela, hostile powers gain leverage and access in the Western Hemisphere. Only America’s political class pretended this did not matter.
Venezuelans themselves understand what is at stake. Many celebrated the renewed enforcement of U.S. law because polite diplomacy never delivered accountability. They lived under a regime that destroyed the economy, emptied shelves, silenced dissent, and drove millions into exile. They do not fear American responsibility. They welcome it. While American professors protest Donald Trump and plead for Maduro, Venezuelans cheer Trump and hope for freedom.
The Donroe Doctrine does not promise instant liberation or universal justice. It promises something more basic and more necessary: Criminal regimes will no longer receive legitimacy simply because they occupy a seat at the United Nations. Traffickers, tyrants, and their patrons now face consequences.
Whether this approach extends beyond Venezuela remains to be seen. But one reality is already clear. The Western Hemisphere no longer serves as an unguarded corridor for corruption, narcotics, and foreign subversion.
The age of moral neutrality is over. The age of the Donroe Doctrine has begun.
China is on the brink of beating us back to the moon
A curious feature of American life is the belief that putting a man on the moon in 1969 was not merely a thing we did, but a thing that defined who we are. The moon landing became the fixed point in a national narrative of progress, the ultimate rebuttal to any subsequent doubt. If we can put a man on the moon, the refrain went, we can do any lesser thing. It was a statement of faith in a particular kind of American power, the fusion of technological genius and free-enterprise grit that could, it seemed, bend the arc of history. The phrase has since acquired a certain nostalgic patina, a relic from an era when the country could still muster that kind of singular, massive effort.
Now, the proposition is being tested.
The question of whether China will beat the United States back to the lunar surface is, on one level, a technical one, a ledger of rocket tests and budget allocations. Yet to frame it this way is to miss the point. The competition is not about launch windows or payload capacities but about the story America tells itself. A Chinese flag planted in the regolith of the lunar south pole before an American one would do more than mark a geopolitical achievement; it would be a blow to perceptions of American exceptionalism. The old refrain would hang in the air, suddenly hollow.
We are witnessing the formation of two distinct camps, exporting earthly rivalries to space.
The American effort, named Artemis after Apollo’s twin sister, is a program freighted with legacy and ambition. It relies on the Space Launch System, a behemoth of a rocket that flew a successful uncrewed test in 2022, but also shed foam insulation on its way up, a disquieting echo of the Columbia disaster. For the actual landing, NASA has outsourced the task to SpaceX, whose Starship is a fully reusable silver ship promising fantastically to deliver, not just astronauts, but the entire infrastructure of a settlement. It is a characteristically American bet on the power of the private sector, a leap of faith that has yet to achieve, as of mid-2025, a successful orbital flight. The official timeline for an American return has slipped from 2024 to 2026, and now, in the quiet admissions of internal reviews, to 2027, at the earliest.
China, meanwhile, proceeds with the calm of a nation that confidently measures progress in five-year plans. Its program lacks a poetic name but possesses an observable momentum. The hardware has a familiar, almost classical design: a Long March 10 rocket, a crew capsule named Mengzhou (“Dream Vessel”), and a lander called Lanyue (“Embracing the Moon”). The architecture is a direct echo of Apollo: a two-part lander with a command module in orbit. It is a repetition of a proven method, not a reinvention of it. While NASA contends with the uncertainties of Starship, China has been methodically hitting its marks. In August 2025, engineers successfully test-fired the first stage of its new rocket and simulated a lunar landing by hanging a 26-ton prototype from a crane. Its stated goal is to land taikonauts on the moon before 2030. At the current pace, they are likely to succeed.
This divergence in approach is telling. The United States is trying to innovate its way back to the moon, to do something bigger and more sustainable than before. China is simply trying to get there. One could argue this reflects a difference in governance models: the chaotic, brilliant, and often inconsistent engine of America versus the focused, centralized will of the Chinese state. While NASA’s budget is subject to the whims of Congress and shifting presidential priorities, a cycle of grand announcements and quiet cancellations that has plagued the agency for decades, China’s space program is integrated with its national and military ambitions, backed by pockets of undisclosed depth.
RELATED: China built a solar-powered back door into millions of American homes
The geopolitical stakes extend beyond mere prestige. Both nations are aiming for the lunar south pole, where permanently shadowed craters are believed to hold vast quantities of water ice, the key resource for any sustained presence on the moon. The United States has attempted to shape the norms of this new frontier through the Artemis Accords, a set of principles for peaceful lunar exploration signed by over 35 nations. China and Russia are conspicuously absent, instead promoting their own coalition around an International Lunar Research Station. We are witnessing the formation of two distinct camps, exporting earthly rivalries to space. The nation that arrives first will not own the territory (the 1967 Outer Space Treaty forbids it), but it will enjoy the advantage of being there, setting precedents and controlling the most valuable real estate.
There are those who see a silver lining in this scenario. A Chinese landing could serve as a “Sputnik moment,” shocking the United States out of its complacency and galvanizing a new era of investment and innovation. It’s also possible that being second, but arriving with the revolutionary capability of Starship, could prove to be the more significant achievement in the long run. History may judge the establishment of a true lunar outpost as more important than the planting of the next flag.
Yet, the symbolism of that first footprint remains potent. For over half a century, the moon has belonged, in the popular imagination, to America. It was our “can-do” spirit made manifest. To see another nation achieve what we have struggled to repeat would be to confront a fundamental shift in the global order. It would suggest that the future is no longer a chiefly American enterprise. The race to the moon was never just about the moon. It was, and is, about the terrestrial anxieties and ambitions of the nations doing the racing. As we watch the trajectories of these two great powers, it is difficult to avoid the sense that we are witnessing not just the dawn of a new space age, but the twilight of an old one.
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