President-elect Donald Trump‘s nominee to head the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, will face senators at a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Since announcing Hegseth as his pick, Trump has been talking about acquiring the island country of Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Media outlets including the New York Post have characterized Trump’s second administration’s global vision as “The Donroe Doctrine,” a mashup of the Monroe Doctrine (which called for non-interventionism and an end to future colonization) and, of course, a shortening of Trump’s first name. The GOP calls it the Trump Doctrine.
Today's cover: Why does Donald Trump want Greenland? Behind the ‘strong, deliberate’ message to China https://t.co/YRRwun1C8z pic.twitter.com/iarP5cYnBy
— New York Post (@nypost) January 8, 2025
In an article titled “Hegseth Will Implement the Trump Doctrine,” RealClear Defense writer Francis P. Sempa posits that as Secretary of Defense is a strong choice to lead and refocus a Department which he asserts has been largely ineffectual in multiple conflicts — from the Korean War to the Iraq War to the “Global War on Terror.”
Sempa favorably compares Hegseth’s views to those of Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Sempa wrote: “Hegseth’s views also appear to coincide with the Weinberger Doctrine that helped shape Reagan’s and Bush 41’s approaches to national defense and waging war.”
Sempa, who repeats the Trump Doctrine mantra “peace through strength” throughout the article, suggests that the implementation of the Trump Doctrine will “mean ending the woke fixation on diversity, equity, and inclusion (which Hegseth has publicly criticized) in favor of reinvigorating the warrior culture.”
Sempa added: “And perhaps Hegseth will suggest that we bring back the proper name of the department he will lead—the War Department.”
Note: In June 2023, Sempa wrote an article entitled The Monroe Doctrine Is Dying (for the Chinese Falun Gong-owned outlet The Epoch Times) after House Democrats issued a resolution calling for an annulment of the Monroe Doctrine, and cited Reagan’s military invasion of Grenada in 1983, which the UN condemned as a “flagrant violation of international law,” and Trump’s threat to invade Venezuela in 2017.
