The Trump Corollary & Manifest Destiny

ByMarcos Roitman Rosenmann

This editorial by Marcos Roitman Rosenmann originally appeared in the December 11, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media, or the Mexico Solidarity Project.

Whenever the US administration publishes an ad hoc document defining its policy toward Latin America and the world, commentary is swift. In November 2025, the White House released its latest policy handbook, titled National Security Strategy of the United States of America. It has received extensive media coverage, with intellectuals, academics, and journalists analyzing its contents. It could be summarized as “a peace that foreshadows war.” Despite this, in Western European power circles, whether governments or institutions, it has been largely ignored, with the tone it uses to describe European governments and culture as decadent.

Gregorio Selser

However, beyond the language and the current situation, the Trump corollary offers little new regarding the objectives of US imperialism to dominate and exploit the planet according to its interests. Rather, it corroborates the original myth upon which it bases its warlike and expansionist worldview. Let’s examine this. A few months after its independence, in February 1776, John Adams, the second president after George Washington, wrote to his friend James Warren: “The unanimous voice of the continent (that is, the 13 colonies) affirms that Canada must be ours; we must seize Quebec.”

Thus begins Gregorio Selser’s four-volume work, Chronology of Foreign Interventions in Latin America. It is a way of alerting the public to the objectives of the United States. Meanwhile, Adams writes to his wife about Thomas Jefferson’s proposal, the next occupant of the White House, to be inscribed on the great seal of the United States: “The children of Israel in the wilderness, guided by a cloud by day and by a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chieftains from whom we claim the honor of descent and whose political principles and form of government we have adopted.”

Jefferson reasons: “Has not every restoration of the old Saxon laws had happy results? Is it not better now that we return at once to that fortunate system of our forefathers, the wisest and most perfect ever devised by the ingenuity of man, just as it was before the eighth century?” Following his words, the mythical narrative that has legitimized the conquest of the West, the invasions, participation in coups d’état, destabilizing processes, support for genocidal governments, assassinations, interventions in electoral processes, financing and sale of weapons, not to mention bombings and plots to overthrow governments considered enemies.

Reginald Horsman, in Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, points out that after the American Revolution, “the earlier explanations of the Germanic origin of the supposed love of liberty among Saxons would be extensively elaborated. The old Anglo-Saxon myth would come to seem iniquitous next to an overwhelming Aryan myth that helped transform respect for Anglo-Saxon institutions into the new racial interpretation of the triumph of England and the United States. The creation of this new myth was prepared in the second half of the 18th century; in the 19th century, Americans would share the discovery that the secret of Saxon triumph was not found in their institutions, but in their blood.”

To label Trump as a self-proclaimed visionary intent on annexing Canada is to ignore American history. Focusing on the Monroe Doctrine (1823) is to disregard its origin: the myth of Manifest Destiny. It is no coincidence that Simón Bolívar wrote the oft-quoted and often-overlooked phrase to Colonel Patrick Campbell, His Majesty’s Ambassador to Colombia, on August 5, 1829: “…and the United States, which seems destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” Following the trail of Manifest Destiny, we have the statements made in 1997 by Duane Clarridge, who was the CIA’s chief for Latin America and Europe, responsible for the Iran-Contra affair, and with three decades of service.

When questioned by a journalist [John Pilger] about the legitimacy of his interventions around the world, the response was emphatic: “We’re gonna protect ourselves, and we’re gonna go on protecting ourselves, ’cause we end up protecting, and let’s not forget that! We will intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interests to intervene. And if you don’t like it, lump it! Get used to it, world! We’re not going to put up with nonsense. If our interests are threatened, we’re going to do it.” Trump’s corollary is met with the complicit silence of Western Europe and the Arab countries. Claiming dignity is out of fashion.

Dollar diplomacy, carrot-and-stick diplomacy, good neighbor diplomacy, backyard or front-yard diplomacy, is applicable today not only to Latin America, but also to Western Europe, NATO, the G-20, the G-7, the UN, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. In short, to the entire world. From George Washington to Donald Trump, there is no President whose plans do not include the myth of Manifest Destiny as an argument for imposing their imperialist dominance.

From all sides, by fair means or foul. And the fair means—not so fair, but effective—involve bribery, pressure, buying off judges, members of parliament, presidents, and so on. And the foul? The use of force and military supremacy. We know the history. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, to name a few. Global war is underway, and the Trump corollary emphasizes the task considered a privilege of the American people since their founding: proclaiming themselves chosen by Providence to carry out their Manifest Destiny. On the horizon, China. Mentioned again and again in the Trump corollary. Any doubts?