This article is published in full in Tribune and is part of Alameda’s Depois da Ordem project.

The chaotic, brutal imposition of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ has overshadowed the start of 2026. But is Trump partly driven by insecurity about gathering left-wing victories in the Western hemisphere — and is a new left Atlanticism possible?

On 4 December 2025, Donald Trump’s second US presidency published its National Security Strategy. An ominous document, the NSS was both an embodiment of long-running trends and a sign that a step change in the Trump project was underway. On the one hand, Trump’s tendency towards isolationism in foreign affairs seemed to be confirmed by talk of rejecting the post-Cold War order (in which ‘American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country’). Now, the NSS claimed, US intervention in far-flung countries would be curtailed. ‘The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas,’ it tartly announced, ‘are over.’

But along with such rhetoric, the NSS also contained portents of a different, darker strain in the Trump ground plan — a tendency that would surface spectacularly in the early days of 2026. As the NSS made clear (and as the subsequent kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and the ructions over Greenland have underlined), the US is morphing into a new kind of belligerent in the global power struggle. Under the sign of the so-called Donroe Doctrine, the Trump administration is burrowing deeper into its own hemisphere, imagining itself to be the potentate of a fantasy Greater USA stretching from Pole to Pole.

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