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Future high school students be forewarned: You will have another corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to memorize before your U.S. history exam. Last week, on the 202nd anniversary of President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration, the White House rolled out a new “Trump Corollary” of its own.

Presented under the label of “America 250,” the announcement connected contemporary politics to an imagined national past. Yet the thinness of President Donald Trump’s history doesn’t mean his announcement won’t have real consequences. If he follows his message with military intervention in Latin America, Trump, like his some of his predecessors, will discover that the public’s enthusiasm for patriotic doctrines doesn’t translate to support for ill-conceived wars.

Future high school students be forewarned: You will have another corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to memorize before your U.S. history exam. Last week, on the 202nd anniversary of President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration, the White House rolled out a new “Trump Corollary” of its own.

Presented under the label of “America 250,” the announcement connected contemporary politics to an imagined national past. Yet the thinness of President Donald Trump’s history doesn’t mean his announcement won’t have real consequences. If he follows his message with military intervention in Latin America, Trump, like his some of his predecessors, will discover that the public’s enthusiasm for patriotic doctrines doesn’t translate to support for ill-conceived wars.

The original Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to European colonization in order to safeguard the security of the relatively weak United States. But Monroe stated only what European powers were not allowed to do; he did not outline U.S. policy, let alone set about to create a binding foreign-policy doctrine.

Ever since, the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine, and the new corollaries attached to it, has been one of U.S. policymakers presenting their activist agendas under the umbrella of Monroe’s anti-imperial banner. The most famous corollary to date was the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, in which the United States asserted the privilege of unilaterally intervening in, and occupying, indebted and unstable Caribbean nations to prevent European powers taking such actions........

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