Note from the Editors: The second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy was released on December 5. It reads, in part: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.” In January, Professor James Holmes weighed in on the merits of such a corollary.

The shade of Theodore Roosevelt is grinning. President Donald Trump has been holding forth about matters of geopolitical import. Some of his remarks reflect his tongue-in-cheek style. Not for nothing has the president earned the title of galactic overlord among trolls. There is no political constituency either north or south of the border for making Canada the 51st US state. Nor is there any constituency for changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” And I say that as someone who grew up alongside the Gulf. The historic name of that body of water offends no one—least of all residents of states abutting the Gulf of Mexico.

He is jesting. One hopes.

His musings about Greenland and the Panama Canal are a more serious matter. He broached a purchase of Greenland from Denmark while declining to rule out a military seizure of the island. There would be strategic logic to such a move. Greenland fronts on the Arctic, an emerging theater of strategic competition, while abutting the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, Russia’s access to the North Atlantic. It abounds in critical minerals. China has been nosing around for mining rights along with its other activities as a self-proclaimed “near-Arctic” state. And then there’s the Panama Canal. Shutting the canal in times of war would compel US maritime forces to default to much longer, more time-consuming, more arduous voyages to swing between the oceans. US control would hold that prospect at bay.

Control of the two sites would the bolster strategic defense of the Americas.

Such worries are nothing new. In fact, some shrewd commentators have detected a Roosevelt-esque strain in Trump’s words. Not by name. But they connect Trump’s remarks to the Monroe Doctrine, an enduring theme in US foreign policy ever since President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams 

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