“The New Monroe Doctrine"
A Compound Security Reappraisal.
By Dr. Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III | prepared for The Mackinder Forum Symposium |
originally written, June 16th, 2025
As we gather under the weight of a volatile global moment, it’s worth remembering: the Monroe Doctrine, originally asserted in 1823, was less a declaration of force and more a strategic signaling act—a geopolitical deterrent shaped as doctrine. It was born in an age where geography conferred advantage and proximity defined threat.
But today’s strategic terrain is different.
The 21st century demands a reframing of such doctrines, and I argue that our rethinking must be anchored in a compound security paradigm—one that integrates military, economic, environmental, digital, and moral dimensions into a cohesive whole.
The hemisphere we inhabit—the Western Hemisphere—is no longer a backyard fortress but a compound theater of converging threats, vulnerabilities, and trans-regional linkages.
This demands vision, not nostalgia.
Across the Americas, we are witnessing an intensification of what I term the “compound dilemma”—where traditional state threats are fused with hybridized challenges: climate insecurity, disinformation, narco-governance, fragile governance, and strategic encroachments by external actors like China and Russia.
In the Caribbean, climate-induced disasters are collapsing public health and maritime commerce corridors. In Mexico and Central America, transnational crime is not just exploiting governance gaps—it is creating alternative sovereignties. Brazil’s ecological collapse is no longer just an environmental issue—it’s a hemispheric energy, migration, and legitimacy crisis.
Even in the Arctic—often ignored in Monroe-era framing—we face melting geographies, rising geopolitical contests, and the sharpening of Sino-Russian incursions through infrastructure, shipping corridors, and data sovereignty stakes.
From my own recent Substack analysis on Arctic geopolitics, I’ve detailed how the High North is becoming the new northern front of compound competition. The Russian military footprint in the region is growing, while China’s “Polar Silk Road” threatens to create a dual-use economic–military vector for great-power intrusion.
If we do not act now, the hemisphere will become surrounded by edges that aren’t just blurred—they’re perforated.
Therefore, any “new Monroe Doctrine” worth its name must begin not by asserting dominance, but by asserting infrastructure-led trust—through climate-resilient energy grids, public health investments, maritime domain awareness, and Arctic Indigenous inclusion in regional security governance.
But WHEM’s future isn’t just shaped from within—it’s being affected by off-axis leverage.
African port development, Chinese debt diplomacy, and Indo-Pacific force realignments are all bleeding into Latin American security equations.
In Africa, Chinese-built ports like Mombasa or Luanda are increasingly dual-use and are already flowing into logistical hubs across the Caribbean.
In the Indo-Pacific, U.S. naval redeployments impact capacity for Caribbean Sea Lane security.
Venezuela, Cuba, and segments of Brazil now act as hybrid geostrategic interlocutors with Beijing and Moscow.
The Monroe Doctrine of the future must be trans-regional in both design and diplomacy. It must deepen trilateral and quadrilateral alliances—U.S.–Latin America–Africa or U.S.–Canada–Indo-Pacific—and it must embrace diasporic diplomacy as a 21st-century tool for narrative resilience and civic cohesion.
In such a theater, military power is necessary, but not primary. As I’ve written elsewhere: “The most tragic use of power is to wield it bluntly in places where wisdom, patience, and positioning would have sufficed.”
Strategic influence today is won by shaping the pre-conflict terrain—by owning the commanding heights of legitimacy, trust, and civic coherence.
That means investing in digital infrastructure, secure supply chains, educational exchanges, and climate-smart agriculture.
It means defending not just borders, but bonds—cultural, historical, diasporic, and narrative.
A Trans-Regional Industrial Arsenal
To secure the hemisphere and support allied interests globally, we must reconceive deterrence not just in military terms, but as an industrial campaign — an “arsenal of democracies” (plural, no longer just singular, unilateral) fit for the compound age.
The post-WWII U.S.-centric model is obsolete. Instead, we need a ‘Western Hemisphere-Western Alliance’-wide (WHEM-WA) Integrated Defense Industrial Architecture: one that leverages the comparative advantages, resources, and capabilities of ABCA nations (America, Britain, Canada, Australia), Japan, New Zealand — and others like South Korea, Poland, and Taiwan — in a fused, distributed, and resilient production network.
Strategic Blueprint:
Shared Production Hubs: Establish modular, interoperable manufacturing clusters across strategic nodes — from Texas and Ontario to Brisbane and Osaka — focused on high-need, low-cost, scalable assets (e.g., munitions, drones, energy systems).
Defense Free Zones: Create sovereign co-development corridors exempt from excessive regulatory friction, backed by joint venture capital, and governed by shared export, IP, and procurement standards.
Surge Capacity Agreements: Pre-bake surge contracts with mutual obligations for rapid scale-up in crises — covering everything from shipping logistics to semiconductors and AI-enabled systems.
Dual-Use Innovation Loops: Build regional tech transfer mechanisms linking universities, defense startups, and procurement hubs across WHEM and the Indo-Pacific. Examples include Arctic climate sensors built in Alaska, software innovations from Estonian firms, and quantum communication pilots from Canadian research institutes.
Governance Infrastructure:
Allied Industrial Mobilization Council (AIM-C): A rotating governance consortium modeled on NATO’s Defense Planning Committee — but focused on economic and production alignment, not just troop posture.
Crisis Simulation Frameworks: Institutionalize tabletop and industrial mobilization war games, akin to COVID-19 vaccine ramp-up drills — only now focused on contested logistics, cyber-survivability, and rapid theater equipping.
Supply Chain Sovereignty Metrics: Establish allied-led assessments akin to Moody’s or Fitch ratings — but for defense logistics: mapping reliability, redundancy, and vulnerability across industrial sub-sectors.
Strategic Effect:
This networked industrial deterrence model deters by implication: it signals to adversaries that the democracies of the world are not just politically aligned — they are materially and industrially fused. That their resilience is not confined to domestic shores, but embedded across oceans, continents, and commercial domains.
If we embed this vision — if we align procurement with purpose, industry with integrity — we will forge the operational backbone for a 21st-century grand strategy. One that doesn’t just react to crisis but builds out the conditions to prevent it.
To make this actionable, I propose five imperatives.
First, we need a Hemispheric Resilience Compact: a binding initiative integrating climate foresight, digital ID systems, and public health capacities from Canada to Patagonia.
Second, we must launch a Hemispheric-Arctic Council, incorporating Indigenous governance and bilateral security capacity between Canada and the U.S., with conditional coordination mechanisms with Russia and Greenland.
Third, diaspora diplomacy should be mobilized as a core pillar—leveraging Haitian, Brazilian, Caribbean-American networks for regional civic empowerment.
Fourth, we must invest in civic narrative infrastructure—using public diplomacy to showcase democratic pluralism across climate, youth activism, and digital truth-seeking.
Finally, defense and diplomacy must synchronize at the operational level. That means not just special forces presence, but tech-civil society partnerships countering malign cyber influence in places like Brazil’s information ecosystem or Haiti’s electoral space.
The stakes are existential. The Western Hemisphere is not immune to the tides of global disorder—it is one of its most volatile confluences.
But this gives us a choice: we can either allow our inherited doctrines to harden into brittle artifacts—or we can remake them as flexible, responsive, legitimacy-driven strategies.
A “New Monroe Doctrine” must not signal unilateralism. It must signal resolve in plural form: resilience, relevance, and regional rootedness.
If we get this right, the U.S. will lead—not by dominating—but by designing. We will not merely deter malign actors—we will deny them narrative legitimacy and civic purchase.
In so doing, we reclaim not only hemispheric stability—but the possibility of shared security and pluralistic prosperity in a world too complex for old answers.