By announcing his territorial ambitions in Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, President Donald Trump seems to have breathed life back into the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. That was the first time the US asserted its right to unrestrained autonomy within the Western Hemisphere. President James Monroe declared that Washington would take any interference in the hemisphere by other great powers as an ‘unfriendly disposition toward the United States’. Are you listening, China?
Hemispheric policy is nothing new to Trump’s circle. Project 2025, the Trump-friendly set of ideas about US governance published last year, envisaged ‘re-hemisphering’ supply chains as both a requirement of US economic security, and a way to support economic activity in ‘parts of the Americas in need of growth and stabilization’.
John Bolton, in his capacity as National Security Advisor during Trump’s first term, made the point more bluntly in a 2019 speech when he declared that ‘the Monroe doctrine is alive and well’.
Hemispheric advantages
The basic idea behind this hemispheric tilt in American policy is that the US and its neighbours north and south are collectively bigger, richer, stronger and more self-contained than any possible challenger. Not only is the continent separated from the rest of the world by two massive oceans, the argument goes, but it is economically more closed, and less dependent on the rest of the world, than any rival region. And there’s some evidence to back this view up.
The Western Hemisphere’s nominal GDP in 2023 was over $36 trillion, according to IMF data. Even if you add the GDP of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and ASEAN members to China’s, you barely get to $27 trillion.
Meanwhile, the Western Hemisphere’s weighted-average per capita GDP, which exceeds $70,000, is way higher than east Asia’s, where weighted average per capita GDP doesn’t quite hit the $17,000 mark, even after including the region’s three richest economies.
Some academics make the point that these two variables – total nominal GDP and per capita GDP, both in dollar terms – contain most of the information one needs to assess national power.
Tufts University’s Michael Beckley, for example, argues that GDP per capita can act as a reliable proxy for economic and military efficiency, and that simply multiplying nominal GDP with per capita GDP creates an index that generates an accurate picture of what he calls ‘net resources in international politics’.
Indeed, combining the Western Hemisphere’s nominal GDP and its per capita GDP generates a measure of the region’s power that exceeds East Asia’s by a factor of 3.5.
Another feature of the Western Hemisphere is its relative lack of dependence on the rest of the world. Total trade in goods accounted for over 40 per cent of GDP for China along with its neighbours in ASEAN, Japan and Korea. For the Western Hemisphere, by contrast, goods trade accounts for less than 10 per cent of GDP.
It therefore seems that being big, rich, closed and geographically isolated can confer some decent geopolitical advantages.
Shortcomings
Yet there are obvious shortcomings to a Trumpian vision of Western hemispherical dominance.
The first is economic. While it’s big and rich now, the hemisphere as a whole is much less integrated than East Asia: this might be an obstacle to future growth. The Western Hemisphere’s imports from within the region are only some 15 per cent of total imports, around half the equivalent figure for East Asia – albeit that much of this is trade in intermediate goods to produce end-products that depend on markets outside the region. In any case, since economic integration is a source of long-term strength, one might argue that the Western Hemisphere could in the end add up to less than the sum of its parts.