The removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in early 2026 have represented the most forceful display of American power since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In Venezuela, a decade of sanctions, mass protests, and economic collapse ended with the strongman gone in a single night. In Iran, nearly half a century of fundamentalist theocratic rule, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of its own people, was upended by a joint US-Israeli air and naval assault that eliminated Khamenei and crippled key military infrastructure.
Days after the Venezuelan operation in early January, speaking at his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, US President Donald Trump made no mention of democracy or human rights. Instead, he spoke of “enormous wealth” beneath Venezuelan soil and proclaimed that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never again be questioned.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was similarly blunt after the Iran strikes, promising “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars,” while insisting that “this is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change.” Both operations, despite their differences in scale and risk, followed the same logic: precision, speed, spectacle—and silence on the question of what comes next.
The Monroe Doctrine was swiftly invoked after Venezuela, reviving fears of a return to spheres-of-interest politics. Yet the analogy is misleading—and Iran proves why. What we are seeing is not a revival of a 19th-century doctrine but another adaptation of US foreign policy to a world in which the United States remains the strongest power, but is no longer able to impose rules without regard to cost. The “Trump Corollary,” as it has been dubbed in the latest National Security Strategy, operates far beyond the Western Hemisphere and carries profound implications for a Europe long accustomed to durable alliances and a predictable, rule-based order.
From Shield to Sword to Scalpel
In 1823, US President James Monroe declared the Americas off-limits to European meddling. The claim was largely aspirational: The United States lacked the military power to enforce it. Latin American independence leaders—from Simón Bolívar to Guadalupe Victoria—welcomed the statement as political sympathy rather than a claim to hegemony. They were right—in 1823.
Eighty years later, then US President Theodore Roosevelt changed everything with a single sentence: If Latin American nations could not maintain internal order, the United States had the right—even the duty—to intervene as an “international police force.” What followed was three decades of near-continuous expansion. General Smedley Butler, a veteran of these operations, later admitted with brutal honesty that he had helped “rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
The Trump administration is drawing selectively from both traditions while departing from each in crucial ways. Like Monroe, it reaffirms hemispheric primacy; unlike Monroe, it rejects isolationism. “America First” rhetoric appeals to domestic fatigue with global commitments, yet the record points in the opposite direction. In 2025 alone, US forces conducted strikes in seven countries—more than under the preceding administration of US President Joe Biden—including its first direct strikes on Iran in June 2025, a prelude to the far larger joint assault of February and March 2026.
From Roosevelt, the current approach inherits a willingness to intervene militarily but discards ideological justification. Roosevelt framed the “Big Stick” the US should carry as a moral obligation, using the guise of a “civilizing duty” to justify everything from administrative control to sustained military occupation. Today’s policy is governed by cost-benefit analysis and largely devoid of moral pretense. Interventions are designed to be swift, reversible, and economically remunerative.
Venezuela is the blueprint: rapid leadership change that avoids the quagmire of nation-building while securing economic returns and sidelining Beijing. Iran confirms the pattern. The current strikes, which began on February 28, were conducted exclusively from the air and sea—precision operations targeting leadership, military infrastructure, and nuclear facilities—with no American ground troops deployed and no occupation envisaged.
Moral arguments have not disappeared entirely, but they function mainly as public-facing justifications rather than genuine drivers of policy. In cases such as the December 25, 2025 strike on Islamic State in Nigeria—the largest African exporter of crude oil to the United States—interventions may be framed as protecting Christians from Islamist violence, though strategic considerations remain the likely driver.
Structural Decline and Strategic Reorientation
The pivot to a “Trump Corollary” is a survival mechanism for a superpower with a shrinking footprint. In 1960, the United States accounted for roughly 40 percent of global GDP and devoted nearly 10 percent of its economy to defense. Today, its share of global output stands at approximately 25 percent, with defense spending at roughly 3 percent of GDP. The industrial base that once sustained prolonged overseas commitments is now struggling to replenish munitions expended in Ukraine and Iran. Full-spectrum global hegemony on the post-1945 model has become economically and politically unsustainable.
The resulting posture is selective interventionism, operating along two principal axes. First, Washington is increasingly offloading the burden of regional security onto local actors, preferring economic pressure and technology controls over direct military engagement. This approach has already been taking shape in the Middle East, and is poised to extend to Europe, with allies expected to shoulder primary responsibility for deterring Russia. A hasty pivot to this approach carries the risk of a more assertive Moscow, tempted to probe for weakness where US presence has thinned.
Second, Washington is pursuing strategic denial of critical resources to rivals—above all China. Securing Greenland’s rare-earth deposits would—at least on paper—sharply reduce US dependence on Beijing, which controls global supply. Similarly, safeguarding access to Taiwan’s semiconductor output underpins efforts to reshore vital supply chains.
In both instances, the strategy simultaneously constrains adversaries and preserves structural leverage over European allies, who also require these minerals for electric vehicles and other green technologies. An ally lacking independent access to critical materials remains dependent on supplier terms—explaining Trump’s repeated insistence on “owning” Greenland. The Iran operation extends this logic to energy. Together, Venezuela and Iran supplied an estimated 15 percent of China’s oil imports; both have now been struck by US military action within the span of weeks. Iran alone exported roughly 1.6 million barrels per day, nearly all of it destined for China. Eliminating these supplies simultaneously weakens Beijing’s energy security and strengthens Washington’s hand in any future confrontation.
The Trump Variable
Two features lend the Trump Corollary its distinctive character. The first is the fusion of state power with private gain—the effective privatization of US foreign policy. Chevron campaign donations followed by expanded Venezuelan operations after the 2026 regime change; Saudi investments in Jared Kushner’s fund after Washington’s hard line on Iran; and a $500 million Emirati stake in a Trump family crypto venture coinciding with the approval of AI chip sales previously blocked under US President Biden all point to the same logic: Foreign policy no longer merely serves national interests—it monetizes access to power. The Iran strikes are likely to reinforce this pattern. When the Gulf states that previously bankrolled Trump-adjacent ventures stand to gain most from the fall of the Islamic Republic, the line between national security and private interest becomes difficult to locate.
Second, the strong imprint of Trump’s personality: grandiosity, impatience, and a fixation on immediate, claimable victories. This injects a spectacle-driven logic into foreign policy—one that privileges quick wins and personal credit over sustained process. Trump’s repeated proposals to purchase Greenland and his musings about absorbing Canada recall the expansionist vision of William H. Seward, the Alaska Purchase architect. Yet Seward planned across decades; Trump demands swift, attributable results. A genuine pursuit of Greenland might have followed a patient path—expanding US military presence, deepening commercial ties, cultivating pro-American sentiment, or even quietly supporting pro-independence forces to position America as a protective partner upon eventual separation from Denmark. The barrier was time: Trump wanted Greenland fast, and above all, the associated glory.
Europe and the Return of the Law of the Stronger
Trump’s foreign policy—driven by structural limits, transactional logic, and a realist view that treats power as the ultimate boundary—carries profound implications for European security.
According to the logic of this foreign policy, multilateral rules and legal norms are optional, subordinated to the president’s personal sense of “morality”—a qualitative break with the post–Cold War consensus. Even the Iraq war under former US President George W. Bush relied on multilateral structures to secure legitimacy and share responsibility. Trump rejects that approach, treating multilateralism not as a source of leverage but as a constraint on unilateral action—a view made concrete by the January 2026 withdrawal from another 66 international organizations and treaties.
The US conduct in Venezuela—coupled with explicit threats against Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Panama—marks a clear shift from asymmetric partnership to overt dominance. Europe cannot assume it is exempt. For Eastern Europe, the stakes are existential. The erosion of international law and institutions deprives weaker states of even minimal protection and of coalition-building tools against Russia, ushering in the “law of the stronger”—the very order Moscow has long sought. US policy, intentionally or not, lends it legitimacy.
With this approach, NATO is no longer a security community grounded in shared values but a contract permanently open to cost-benefit reassessment. This explains why Trump could suggest that Denmark’s refusal to “hand over” Greenland might endanger the alliance. The episode was not an aberration but a preview of alliance politics under this model.
Europe as Counterparty
As the United States abandons the rules and predictability Europe depends on, it is treating Europe less as a partner than as a counterparty. In a transactional framework, European fragmentation becomes strategically useful—simplifying bilateral leverage and weakening collective resistance.
Here, the Trump administration’s practice is converging with long-standing Kremlin strategies. Russia, for decades, has exploited European divisions through bilateral deals and support for euroskeptic movements. The Trump administration has adopted a similar repertoire: endorsing far-right parties, promoting a “Europe of nations” over supranational integration, and undermining Brussels as a center of collective authority.
Some observers cast this as a defense of “conservative” forces in Europe to excuse or normalize it. Yet recent US engagement with separatist figures in Canada’s oil-rich Alberta confirms the real driver: a deliberate cultivation of internal divisions for strategic gain—entirely consistent with the Trump Corollary’s focus on economic calculation over ideological pretense.
What Comes Next
The structural reconfiguration of American power sets clear limits on what the United States is willing—and able—to do. Yet structure alone does not determine outcomes. Politics is not physics; it is the art of choice under constraint.
One plausible trajectory is continuity under a Trump-aligned successor. A second scenario would bring a president who rejects Trump’s worldview, particularly his approach to Russia. Under that outcome, relations with Europe would be less confrontational, buying time for a more orderly transfer of security responsibility.
Crucially, however, the underlying structural realities would not change: China would remain the central competitor, technological and economic rivalry (including with Europe) would persist, and the United States would not automatically rejoin abandoned treaties and institutions. The choice, then, would not be between hegemony and partnership, but between crudely transactional hegemony and one managed more pragmatically through institutions and alliances.
Whichever path emerges, Europe must prepare for a world in which American power can no longer be relied upon by default.
Europe After Pax Americana
Permanent security provision and global rule-based stewardship are fading models. If Europe is seeking not merely to adapt but to prevail, it will need a harder-edged strategic culture than Brussels has traditionally embraced. Ursula von der Leyen’s March 9 address to EU ambassadors acknowledges as much, declaring that Europe “can no longer be a custodian for the old world order” and calling for a “more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy.” Translating that rhetoric into action will require specifics.
One possible response lies in reconsolidating core partnerships—above all with the United Kingdom and Canada—and answering Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call for middle-power coalition-building. Both Canada and the UK possess significant strategic weight, making them natural partners for the European Union. This requires re-anchoring the United Kingdom, whose post-Brexit drift has weakened Europe’s external posture.. Yet, as former the British development minister, Rory Stewart, has noted, Britain’s foreign-policy elite remains mentally tethered to the US, making closer alignment with the EU harder than cooperation with geographically distant Canada.
A second consideration is to move beyond state-to-state diplomacy. As Washington increasingly treats Europe as a divide-and-rule arena, reciprocity suggests that the EU and its member states should respond in kind. California alone ranks as the world’s fifth-largest economy, and Democratic-led states routinely pursue international partnerships and trade policies that diverge from federal positions. If Trump’s former homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, could campaign in Poland for the conservative presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki, Europeans should have little reason to shy away from cultivating ties with US governors and state-level actors.
Third, Europe must relearn balance. The emerging order is increasingly bipolar. While history and values will continue to bind Europe and the United States, automatic alignment can no longer be assumed. Under certain conditions, leverage vis-à-vis China may be necessary—not as alliance, but as equilibrium. Strategic ambiguity, in such a system, is not disloyalty; it is survival.
Finally, Europe should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The greater risk may not be Trump himself, but his vice president and possible successor, JD Vance—ambitious and ideologically driven—who may succeed where Trump has failed, Greenland included, simply to mark his own legacy. Europe’s window for adjustment may be far narrower than it assumes.
The rule-based international order is no longer a plan for the future but an inheritance from the past. The question is whether Europe can muster the strength, cohesion, and nerve required to shape what comes next.
Wojciech Solak is a researcher at King’s College London. He previously consulted for international organizations including OSCE and NATO.
