Elbridge Colby on the Opportunities of the “Donroe Doctrine”

Americas Quarterly  |  Elbridge Colby

U.S. Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby presented the "Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine"—or "Donroe Doctrine"—at the 17th Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, signaling a major shift toward active military engagement against regional narco-terrorism. This strategic pivot aims to secure the American homeland by directly targeting transnational criminal networks.

Decades of perceived U.S. neglect allowed hard-left regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia to flourish while exporting instability through drug trafficking and border crises. To counter these threats, the Pentagon is executing Operation Southern Spear, deploying joint kinetic operations to augment partner-nation capabilities rather than supplanting them. The administration expects hemispheric partners to protect critical assets and increase their defense spending beyond the current sub-one percent of GDP to mirror rising European security expenditures. Ultimately, this framework seeks to establish self-reliant regional allies capable of denying external adversaries any opportunity to exploit key assets in the Western Hemisphere.

Comment

The introduction of the Trump Corollary, operationalised through initiatives like Operation Southern Spear, marks a fundamental departure from traditional hemispheric security cooperation. By framing narco-terrorism as an existential threat equivalent to global terrorist networks, the Pentagon is establishing a doctrinal precedent for direct kinetic intervention within the sovereign territory of regional partners. This shift conditions future bilateral defence assistance on local political compliance and increased domestic security expenditures, effectively replacing the previous developmental aid model with a transactional security framework. Consequently, Latin American militaries will face intense pressure to reallocate scarce national resources toward border enforcement and counter-cartel operations to maintain access to American intelligence and logistics pipelines.

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