New Strategic Security Trumpian doctrine and the South Atlantic - Zeno Leoni (King’s College)

 Zeno Leoni, assistant profesor of International Security at King’s College, London

To somebody who wrote his PhD thesis on the rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific, and has an interest in the international order, the most intriguing part of the US National Security Strategy 2025 is about the "Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine" and the renewed emphasis of the US towards the Western Hemisphere 🌎 

But what got my attention the most is the phrase “readjustment of our global military presence”. The term READJUSTMENT sounds like Obama's “rebalancing” language. Yet, does it mean the same?👇 

1️⃣Trump’s statements and the recent military posture toward Venezuela are not sufficient to conclude that a structural rebalancing - as with the Obama administration, which communicated clearly the percentage of such rebalancing - is already underway. But the fact that this is now embedded in the NSS deserves attention.

2️⃣There are real strategic reasons for a shift, and we highlighted these in a paper published in The Washington Quarterly - https://lnkd.in/er8-GCnt 

We argued that the Wider South Atlantic (from the Caribbean to West Africa and down to Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa) represents a region that provides resources and connectivity that underpin the socio-economic functioning of the international order. Its importance is often underestimated compared to the at times exaggerated prioritization of Indo-Pacific.

3️⃣Yet Trump’s motivations seem different. The current rationale appears tied to migration, drug trafficking, and focusing “more at home” - ultimately, there is a lot of internal propaganda towards the MAGA movement. These are not problems typically addressed through traditional large-scale military deployments, though. 

4️⃣Amidst this uncertainty, however, China not only is still central to the NSS 2025 for obvious reasons; it is also so because the new Monroe Doctrine implies the need for limiting extra-regional influence (especially of China and Russia). This raises a bit of an academic puzzle: how does one reconcile a Western Hemisphere and a rebalancing if the goal is still that of  containing an Indo-Pacific power? Furthermore, this shows that the Wider South Atlantic is becoming more contested, though still more stable than many other regions. But also that in a world order centred on the seas, prioritizing based on geography could, in the long term be a sterile exercise - as evidence by Ariel Gonzalez Levaggi's work on the oceans and by a forthcoming research from Mauro Bonavita.

5️⃣It seems obvious that the pivot to Asia will remain intact, while the new hemispheric focus will draw resources from a larger defence budget and a more systematic form of offshore balancing in Europe and the Middle East (patrolling choke-points, influencing events indirectly).

6️⃣Last but not least, the Biden administration, as the map below shows, was already reconsidering the importance of the South Atlantic, partly to increase leverage on the Global South after decades in which “trans-Atlantic” mainly meant North Atlantic.