Yale historian Greg Grandin believes that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is putting the US on a dangerous course that could lead to a new world war.
Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Grandin argued that the Trump administration seems determined to throw out the US-led international order that has been in place since World War II.
In its place, Grandin said, is “a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence,” in which the US has undisputed control over the Western Hemisphere.
As evidence, he pointed to the Trump White House’s recently published National Security Strategy that called for reviving the so-called Monroe Doctrine that in the past was used to justify US imperial aggression throughout Latin America, and that the Trump administration is using to justify its own military adventures in the region.
Among other things, Grandin said that the Trump administration has been carrying out military strikes against purported drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, and has also been “meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina, and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.”
Most ominously, Grandin said, is how the US Department of Defense has been “carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela.”
A large problem with dividing the globe into spheres controlled by major powers, Grandin continued, is that these powers inevitably come into violent conflict with one another.
Citing past statements and actions by the British Empire, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, Grandin argued that “as the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine.”
This dynamic is particularly dangerous in the case of Trump, who, according to Grandin, sees Latin America “as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence, and end migration.”
The result of this policy shift, Grandin concluded, “will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war.”