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„3. The Regions
It has become customary for documents such as this to mention every part of the
world and issue, on the assumption that any oversight signifies a blind spot or a
snub. As a result, such documents become bloated and unfocused—the opposite of
what a strategy should be.
To focus and prioritize is to choose—to acknowledge that not everything matters
equally, to everyone. It is not to assert that any peoples, regions, or countries are
somehow intrinsically unimportant. The United States is by every measure the
most generous nation in history—yet we cannot afford to be equally attentive to
every region and every problem in the world.
The purpose of national security policy is the protection of core national
interests—some priorities transcend regional confines. For instance, terrorist
activity in an otherwise less consequential area might force our urgent attention.
But leaping from that necessity to sustained attention to the periphery is a mistake.
A. Western Hemisphere: The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe
Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to
protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We
will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other
threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our
Hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense
and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American
security interests.
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Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as “Enlist and Expand.”
We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug
flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by
cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s
appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.
Enlist
American policy should focus on enlisting regional champions that can help create
tolerable stability in the region, even beyond those partners’ borders. These nations
would help us stop illegal and destabilizing migration, neutralize cartels, near
shore manufacturing, and develop local private economies, among other things. We
will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and
movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy. But we must not
overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share
interests and who want to work with us.
The United States must reconsider our military presence in the Western
Hemisphere. This means four obvious things:
• A readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in
our Hemisphere, especially the missions identified in this strategy, and away
from theaters whose relative import to American national security has
declined in recent decades or years;
• A more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes, to
thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug
trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis;
• Targeted deployments to secure the border and defeat cartels, including
where necessary the use of lethal force to replace the failed law
enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades; and
• Establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations.
The United States will prioritize commercial diplomacy, to strengthen our own
economy and industries, using tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful
tools. The goal is for our partner nations to build up their domestic economies,
while an economically stronger and more sophisticated Western Hemisphere
becomes an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment.
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Strengthening critical supply chains in this Hemisphere will reduce dependencies
and increase American economic resilience. The linkages created between America
and our partners will benefit both sides while making it harder for non
Hemispheric competitors to increase their influence in the region. And even as we
prioritize commercial diplomacy, we will work to strengthen our security
partnerships—from weapons sales to intelligence sharing to joint exercises.
Expand
As we deepen our partnerships with countries with whom America presently has
strong relations, we must look to expand our network in the region. We want other
nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various
means) discourage their collaboration with others.
The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should
partner with regional allies to develop, to make neighboring countries as well as
our own more prosperous. The National Security Council will immediately begin a
robust interagency process to task agencies, supported by our Intelligence
Community’s analytical arm, to identify strategic points and resources in the
Western Hemisphere with a view to their protection and joint development with
regional partners.
Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both
to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us
strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is
another great American strategic mistake of recent decades.
The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of
our security and prosperity—a condition that allows us to assert ourselves
confidently where and when we need to in the region. The terms of our alliances,
and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on
winding down adversarial outside influence—from control of military installations,
ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.
Some foreign influence will be hard to reverse, given the political alignments
between certain Latin American governments and certain foreign actors. However,
many governments are not ideologically aligned with foreign powers but are
instead attracted to doing business with them for other reasons, including low costs
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and fewer regulatory hurdles. The United States has achieved success in rolling
back outside influence in the Western Hemisphere by demonstrating, with
specificity, how many hidden costs—in espionage, cybersecurity, debt-traps, and
other ways—are embedded in allegedly “low cost” foreign assistance. We should
accelerate these efforts, including by utilizing U.S. leverage in finance and
technology to induce countries to reject such assistance.
In the Western Hemisphere—and everywhere in the world—the United States
should make clear that American goods, services, and technologies are a far better
buy in the long run, because they are higher quality and do not come with the same
kind of strings as other countries’ assistance. That said, we will reform our own
system to expedite approvals and licensing—again, to make ourselves the partner
of first choice. The choice all countries should face is whether they want to live in
an American-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel
one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world.
Every U.S. official working in or on the region must be up to speed on the full
picture of detrimental outside influence while simultaneously applying pressure
and offering incentives to partner countries to protect our Hemisphere.
Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between
the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be
aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major
government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these
countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies
compete and succeed.
The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment
opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities
for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program, including but not
limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small
Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the
Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. We should also
partner with regional governments and businesses to build scalable and resilient
energy infrastructure, invest in critical mineral access, and harden existing and
future cyber communications networks that take full advantage of American
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encryption and security potential. The aforementioned U.S. Government entities
should be used to finance some of the costs of purchasing U.S. goods abroad.
The United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation,
unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses. The terms
of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and
therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for
our companies. At the same time, we should make every effort to push out foreign
companies that build infrastructure in the region.“
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https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
