Floating in his private pool, China’s helmsman Mao Zedong shared his strategic vision with visiting Soviet strongman Nikita Khrushchev in 1958: “You look after Europe, and leave Asia to us.” Obviously, he expected the US to withdraw into its pre-war Monroe world of the Americas, thus making the world tripolar.
Khrushchev, wiser to the world and with a European disdain for the rustic comrade from the eastern paddies, retorted: “No one has authorised us to look after Europe; who has authorised you to take care of Asia?” Indian diplomat T.N. Kaul has recorded this in his memoirs A Diplomat’s Diary. Guess how Kaul learnt of this private chat? Khrushchev’s interpreter told him. Lesson for diplomats: walls may not have ears, but interpreters may have wagging tongues.
What Mao wanted from Khrushchev, Don Trump is delivering to Xi Jinping. With his national security document, a 21st century version of the 19th century Monroe doctrine, Trump is focusing on the American continent to make the US great again, leaving most of the rest of the world to be sorted out between Xi and Vladimir Putin.
Let’s sort out this Monroe conundrum. Finding that European powers were fighting their colonial brawls on the American continent, US president James Monroe told them to keep off the New World; in return the US wouldn’t poke its nose in European affairs. This 1823 statement is thought to have been a definitive proclamation of American isolationism.
Much water has churned the Atlantic and the Pacific since. Scholars now see traits of isolationism and interventionism in America’s global conduct—isolation during the 19th century, intervention in World War I, isolation during the Great Depression, intervention during World War II and thereafter. The fifties and the sixties saw the armed eagle flying around the world, but in 1969 Richard Nixon attempted, in vain, with his Guam doctrine, to take the Vietnam-scarred eagle back to its Monroe nest.
Jim Carter let the eagle fly out as a dove of peace, but it got its wings burnt over the Persian sands. Since the days of Ron Reagan who succeeded him, the eagle has been poking its beak in every conflict on every continent. Trump thinks it’s all been a waste of US tax-payers’ money.
Trump has found a way to MAGA—invoke the Monroe doctrine “to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-hemispheric competitors [read China] the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets [like the Panama Canal] in our hemisphere”. He calls it a “Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine”.
Got the point? He won’t let any eastern tyrant control assets on the American continent, invest in American military industries or dump cheap goods in American markets. He will guard the Caribbean and Latin American lands as his backyard. (Venezuelans, listen!) Xi may do whatever he fancies in most of Asia or Africa as long as those actions don’t threaten American interests there. (Taiwan, Japan, Australia, India, breathe easy!) Russia could be contained and confined—so one may assume—to eastern Europe and central Asia, and roped in to re-establish “strategic stability”.
Western Europe? Getting crowded by Asiatics and Africans, they are losing their “western identity” and facing “civilisational erasure”. They better control the inflow, and spend more euros on arming themselves.
If they don’t? Let the devil, the mullahs or Putin take them.
prasannan@theweek.in