Monroe Doctrine? What doctrine?

At the end of this year, Donald Trump’s government published a “report” on “National Security Strategy.” In addition to the usual “America First” buzzwords, the Trump administration said it would “reaffirm and reinforce the Monroe Doctrine in order to restore American supremacy.”

The report has a lot to do with the Trump administration’s obvious intentions to destabilize the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, through the seizure of oil tankers, the destruction of vessels in the Caribbean—with the deaths of their crew members—and perhaps even an invasion of the country.

But the truth is that the “Monroe Doctrine” never existed in the words of James Monroe, president of the United States in 1823.

All he did, in the wake of the independence of European colonies such as Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil, was to say that European countries needed to give up maintaining possessions on the American continent, from north to south.

It took more than two decades before another president, James Polk, invoked the so called “doctrine” to take California from Mexico, using the excuse that the British Crown was interested in seizing that piece of land.

From then on, poor Mexico lost more than half of its territory to the United States, and other invasions followed—some very clear and in broad daylight, others disguised, such as the one that led to the fall of the Allende government in Chile, plans to send a naval force to Brazil if the 1964 military coup had not been successful, the “Operation Condor” in the Southern Cone, and so on.

But do not blame James Monroe for a doctrine he never formulated.

If the supposed “Monroe Doctrine” were to prevail in international politics, then we would have to admit its obvious corollary: Russia could invade European countries (and even Asian ones, given its geographic extent), and China would also have the right to carry out military incursions in the Far East.

In short, the law of the strongest, cowboy style—damn humanity’s civilizing processes. And Donald Trump should not come up with the excuse that Greenland is an “European colony” under the terms set out by James Monroe: Denmark’s constitution explicitly states that the island is an “autonomous territory” with the right to separate from the government in Copenhagen by a vote of its population.