Political doctrines, like public buildings, are often named after persons. The United States boasts the Lincoln memorial, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, even Washington D.C. itself.
America’s very name owes its origins to the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512). Had the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller not appropriated the name America for his map of the New World in 1507, America might have been named Colombia, after Christopher Columbus.
Political doctrines too have a patrimony: in the east, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, and Brezhnevism. The latter declared the then USSR’s obligation under the Warsaw Pact (as a counter to NATO) to intervene militarily if any Eastern Bloc socialist country was threatened.
China has seen Taoism, Maoism and more recently Xi-ism. Xi-ism has morphed from ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, announced in 2017 and formally incorporated in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party in 2018. Xi Jinping Thought has been summarised to include Ten Affirmations, Fourteen Commitments, Thirteen areas of Achievements, and Six Musts. Collectively they encapsulate Xi Jinping’s world view and the Sinicization of Marxism, i.e. socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Xi Jinping has chosen to follow the foot-steps of his precursors. In the west, president Trump has hurdled over the doctrines left by his predecessors – in particular, Dwight Eisenhower’s of 1957, which assured economic aid and military assistance to any Middle Eastern countries threatened by ‘international communism’. And Richard Nixon’s in 1959, which affirmed that the U.S. would honour ‘treaty commitments’ but expected its allies to be responsible for their own defense. It would provide arms and aid but not troops.
Trump has back-tracked centuries, to Theodore Roosevelt’s doctrine of 1904 and to James Monroe’s earlier doctrine of 1823. Roosevelt’s doctrine identified Latin America as its backyard, where the U.S. could expand its commercial interests and block European hegemony in the region. It sought to make the U.S. the dominant power there. Monroe warned all European powers such as Spain against colonising the Americas further.
The impact of the Monroe doctrine on subsequent U.S. foreign policy has been discussed in Jay Sexton’s The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth – Century America (2011). He traces the growth of these United States (the original 13 states) to the United States. He explores their ambivalent relationship with an expansive 19th century Great Britain, and describes the Monroe Doctrine as ’an American shorthand for a hemisphere (and ultimately a world), cleared of the British Empire’.
Two hundred years later, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 has been refurbished and reframed as the Don-roe Doctrine. Today, Trump’s America has nothing to fear from King Charles III’s Great Britain. Trump’s slogan Make America Great Again (MAGA) is more than a doctrinal goal. It is a combustible propellant that admixes ‘right-wing populism, right-wing anti-globalism, national conservatism and neo-nationalism’.
His policy is a forceful application of ‘dollar diplomacy’, used many times before in U.S. history – instances are when the U.S. bought Louisiana from France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1819, Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.
The Danes having sold the Virgin Islands should prepare themselves for the ‘forced sale’ of Greenland. They may not have a choice. The contiguous U.S. mainland is almost four times bigger than Greenland which is fifty times larger than Denmark. A Great Dane is no match for a hungry Rottweiler.
Trump’s demands evoke fears that were expressed over a century ago by small nations when threatened by larger ones. Hispanics in particular became especially apprehensive. As one Argentinian put it, by substituting the United States for Europe as ‘a source of civilisation’, they would be getting ‘European civilisation second hand’.
This in essence is the unease felt by many in our modern world. There are over 190 sovereign states, each with its own flag, its individual aspirations, and its unique identity. They view modern Xi-ism with its One Road, One Belt universalism and Trumpism with its insidious tariff ultimatums through the same lens. They fear being treated by both superpowers as ‘politically free’ but also as ‘commercial slaves’.
These concerns are sharpened by the reality that China and the U.S. share a sinister characteristic: Xi Jinping is leader for life; Donald Trump for a finite term, ending whenever. At their apex, both superpowers have become what John Quincy Adams (who helped draft the Monroe doctrine) warned against – ‘a military monarchy’.
Those with memories will recall the Five Principles [Panchsheel] agreed between China and India in 1954, and echoed in the I. K. Gujral Doctrine of 1996. They spoke inter alia of territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality, and peaceful co-existence.
Sadly, ‘the past’, in L. P. Hartley’s words, ‘is a foreign country’. They did things differently there.
F.S. AIJAZUDDIN
Presented on this site by kind permission of the author. Published in Dawn, January 15th 2026
