Trump's foreign policy has no rules

Trump’s foreign policy has no rules
The president's war with Iran proves that talk of a "Donroe Doctrine" was fiction

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published March 3, 2026 9:20AM (EST)


(Salon) Donald Trump’s national security strategy, which was given the moniker the “Donroe Doctrine,” was supposed to be the new blueprint for America’s role in the world. Actions such as Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico, trying to take over or buy Greenland, threatening Canada and Panama, as well as his military incursion into Venezuela all fall into his updated version of the Monroe Doctrine, which his administration views as stating America’s divine right to rule the Western hemisphere. When considering his outright hostility toward our traditional allies in Europe and Asia, which he is apparently happy to leave to Russia and China, Trump’s vaunted America First movement becomes more sharply defined as a focus on the United States’ own neighborhood and a retreat from larger global concerns.

But as is so often true with the president’s policies, that awful vision has proved too incoherent to be an actual blueprint. Trump is just as invested in the Middle East as any president before him, a fact he proved by launching air strikes on Iran on Saturday for reasons that change from day to day. The Islamic Republic is far from the Western hemisphere, so whatever the Donroe Doctrine is in practice goes beyond a mere desire to withdraw the United States from global commitments outside of its own region. Something else is at play.

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Then there is Iran. This past weekend, the United States, in partnership with Israel, bombed the Islamic Republic for the second time in less than a year. In June 2025, the U.S. military deployed its most powerful non-nuclear weapon to destroy underground bunkers used by the Iranian government to house their nuclear program. At the time Trump said the facilities had been completely obliterated, but no proof was ever offered of that claim. Now he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bombing the country again, ostensibly because they still need to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Or is it that they want to help the protesters? Or do they want regime change? The answer keeps changing.

The administration didn’t bother with the usual constitutional and statutory niceties, and as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye explained, Trump has felt little need to explain his actions to the American people. He believes he has an unfettered right to use American power, whether economic or military, at his total discretion without any consultation or approval from Congress. The administration had been having talks with the Iranian government which, by all accounts, had agreed to nearly all their demands, but Trump decided to bomb anyway, proving that he had always intended to do it and the talks were just a delaying tactic. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/03/trumps-foreign-policy-has-no-rules/