Allan Little’s BBC piece on Trump’s foreign policy is shockingly bad history. It tries to fool readers into a buried premise underlying the entire report:

When it was announced by the fifth president of the US, James Monroe, the doctrine that bears his name was widely seen as an expression of US solidarity with its neighbours, a strategy to protect them from attempts by the European great powers to recolonise them. The US, after all, shared with them a set of republican values and a history of anti-colonial struggle.

But the doctrine quickly became an assertion of Washington’s right to dominate its neighbours and use any means, up to and including military intervention, to bend their policies into alignment with American interests.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1904, said it gave the US “international police power” to intervene in countries where there was “wrongdoing”.

So could it be that President Trump’s re-interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is simply part of a continuum in US foreign policy?

Uh, ‘allo ‘allo?

Even if you want to stretch things and bring Roosevelt into this, as a corrupt cop, Trump is post-legal. The difference matters, given slippery slope is the fallacy the BBC is making here.

Trump is rejecting the Monroe Doctrine while camouflaging himself with it. It’s like the BBC asking if Bernie Madoff’s interpretation of retirement savings is a continuum of Wall Street.

Madoff was committing fraud while claiming to invest. The crime isn’t just an aggressive interpretation on an infinite slope. The crime is that no interpretation was happening at all. The activity being claimed wasn’t the activity being performed.

Roosevelt perverted a framework. Trump says framework? What framework? There’s only me.

Little pulls an unwitting historian Jay Sexton into this, presumably to prevent any challenge to the flawed premise, without challenging whether it’s the right premise.

Does Trump’s brand of unstable unpredictability give America “a 19th century feel”? Perhaps excited to speak about his knowledge of the Monroe Doctrine, Sexton accepts false framing and speaks about relative predictability within a framework. The piece treats Greenland, Panama, and Canada as territorial claims simply updated as imperial and brutal, but historically legible.

Wrong.

Trump’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) is a direct rejection of Monroe. His unpredictability is not anything like Roosevelt. Like how a policeman who says he is the law, is a different animal to one who says he will accept twenty dollars to ignore you. Categorical difference, as the Nuremberg Trials would say.

The NDS clearly dismisses Monroe by explicitly purging an entire “rules-based international order” and calling it “cloud-castle abstractions.”

The Trump document announces decisions will not be, and can not be, Monroe Doctrine, because instead it uses “concrete interests first” (also a not-so-subtle replacement of America first). That’s anti-doctrine. The announcement is that there will be no doctrine at all.

That’s not Monroe. Nope. Check the simple math.

Trump applying Monroe would mean that China is seen as a threat to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. That’s foundational to Monroe. Yet the Pentagon was just ordered to deprioritize China. The Trump anti-doctrine downgrades threats to the hemisphere, while prioritizing “credible military options” against American neighbors and allies. China is literally opening up trade with Canada and “cementing” itself, yet Trump is saying ignore the thing that Monroe would have worried about the most.

Such a contradiction becomes the only consistency in dictatorships like Trump’s, where Monroe is flaunted as lipstick on their pig. If the BBC has you convinced you’re about to be kissing Monroe, I have some very bad news for you.

A historian of Great Power rivalry was pulled by the BBC to explain framing within a Napoleonic aftermath. What the framing failed to acknowledge is the actual foundation of Trump negates Monroe, that “concrete interests first” with explicit rejection of rules is the rejection of 19th century balance-of-power politics.

The actual lineage is Jackson’s Florida campaign in the 1810s (anger about non-whites having prosperity) that delegitimized indigenous governance, manufactured false security pretexts, deployed overwhelming force, and ignored legal constraints. Far too few Americans study Jackson’s war against Blacks, illegal seizure of Florida to expand and preserve slavery where it had already ended, for what it was.

Mussolini studied the Jacksonian playbook for Ethiopia in 1935. Hitler industrialized the Jacksonian playbook for the Sudetenland in 1938. Each iteration refined the template of American white nationalism, based on abject lies and corruption of power. Trump Jr. flying to Greenland with MAGA hats was an homage to Mussolini’s sons flying bombers to Abyssinia, the same family theater of white man’s entitlement, with the same “strategic necessity” rhetoric.

Not Monroe. Nope.

That’s what we call today 1930s decisionism that Peter Thiel was a huge fan of in college. It’s Carl Schmitt, Peter Thiel’s big influence in political thought, perhaps after his father who tried to preserve and expand Nazism. It’s the theoretical framework that made Nazi foreign policy formally unpredictable by design, given predictability constrained the Führer’s freedom of unilateral action. There were only laws when Hitler said there were laws. Nothing was inherited (e.g. no parent, no precedent, no peers), everything was controlled by the dictator’s minute. The sovereign decides the exception. All justification flows from that decision rather than constraining it.

Peter Thiel’s obsession with Schmitt, and being raised a Nazi by a Nazi, is well documented. So is his company’s role building the surveillance infrastructure that sued the government to force itself (despite technological failures, such as data lock-in and false positives) into being the administration tool of oppression. Thiel’s family didn’t just flee Germany to avoid anti-Nazi movements, it fled to South Africa to continue Nazism and profit on white supremacy. So did Elon Musk’s.

Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman was arrested in Canada in 1940 and convicted on three charges relating to Technocracy, because Canada outlawed it as a national security risk (antisemitic, racist, and Nazi-adjacent). Technocrats said all of North America should be governed by a totalitarian regime. They published maps of a continental “technate” almost identical to what Trump keeps talking about today. They were militant radicals in gray uniforms, with special salutes, adding swastikas (Xs) to names, calling members by numbers. Haldeman was 10450-1.

When Trump calls Canada the “51st state,” he’s not channeling Monroe. He’s channeling the 1930s Technocracy maps of Elon Musk’s grandfather. When Musk rebrands Twitter as a swastika (X), names his child “X,” and promotes “Technocracy” as his objective, he’s not being mysterious. He’s expressing a Nazi goal of engineered society for white supremacy.

The BBC’s 19th century frame tries to deny all the evidence that contradicts their hope it’s just Monroe and not Hitler.

The “concrete interests first” in a Palantir world doesn’t mean honesty, let alone pragmatism. Palantir is known for falsehood and lies, targeting innocent people with extra-judicial assassinations. It means a sovereign decides, the way Peter Thiel was raised to believe, and then the apparatus generates whatever data can justify the horrible outcomes retroactively. AI-defined threats, slop targeting. Algorithmic hallucinations to orphan children. Synthetic intelligence to cover up war crimes. The data is always there because it allows an absolute, infinite lack of integrity to be weaponized.

Musk has repeatedly proven how the Thiel and Musk apartheid-derived fraud model works in technology (as basic regulations in other industries could have prevented their rise, but not Big Tech). Refuse any third-party view of data. Cook everything. Promise driverless cars by 2017 and every year since. Promise Mars by 2018. The claims are lies, the promises never deliver. The stock rises on “soon” instead of delivery. What was delivered, when? Nobody can really prove anything. The gap between a flood of impossible claims and reality is the product. Tesla’s valuation is built on futures that never arrive. “Concrete interests first” applied to governance is the same grift: promise whatever generates value in the moment, fabricate metrics to thinly hide huge gaps, and when lie after lie is exposed, you’re already rich and onto all the next ones.

Monroe was not this.

Monroe Doctrine operated within a framework that had room for interpretation while it created predictability. You could understand American actions as serving stated goals, even brutal imperial ones. “Concrete interests first” means that by design EVERY constraint is banned – the only decisions are by one man and justified by fabricated evidence manufactured at industrial scale.

That’s fascism.

What the BBC pushing a Monroe frame obscures most dangerously is that the racism was ambient. By the late 1700s there was massive push back against racism, just look at Carter versus Washington. Or Wollstonecraft versus Rousseau. But it was still the water everyone swam in. Monroe wasn’t choosing regression to centuries before him. Hitler, however, in 1933 was intentionally regressive by consciously rejecting all progress the Enlightenment claimed to have made. He claimed to regress thousands of years even. And to embrace his regression openly now? After post-Monroe American genocide (e.g. Stanford, Jackson) let alone the Holocaust. After decolonization. After Civil Rights. After the science definitively demolished racism theories. After even Reagan knew through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s he had to launder his horrible racism through dog whistles and plausible deniability.

This frames it properly. You want precedent?

Now we aren’t talking about 1823 ignorance or even 1933 regression. Trump’s 2025 anti-doctrine attacks on citizens, neighbors and allies is a form of denial industrialized by Nazism. It’s the deliberate choice of propaganda against what’s been established, backed by infrastructure to enforce militant deadly denial at scale.

The BBC normalizes this Nazism by suggesting we ground it earlier in something it is not.

Little probably has a mental block on looking at Hitler for what Hitler really was, heavily inspired by Ford and IBM to improve on the American genocide traditions. My guess is Little chokes on his tea if you point out just how much Hitler treated America as his blueprint. Attempting to make Trump comprehensible within an American tradition, means accepting that the same reflex also makes Hitler comprehensible within an American tradition. We’re watching something historians of the 1930s tend to recognize instantly, enabled within 20th century infrastructure development.

Sexton says we know from “even a cursory look at modern history, from 1815 onwards” that Great Power rivalries are destabilizing. Sure, but he isn’t grounding properly in what makes Jackson’s 1830s so attractive to Trump. And also, any cursory look at modern history from 1933 onwards would tell him something much, much more specific.

Trump stormtroopers executing political opposition in targeted cities is unmistakably a campaign to become more unpopular. Monroe couldn’t have imagined such a level of self-harm and victimization as social manipulation to rapidly consolidate power and end democracy. And that’s before we ask whether Monroe could have implemented fascism at rapid scale over electronic unregulated communication.

Top three reasons Trump could never be a Monroe:

1. Monroe Doctrine was drafted mostly by John Quincy Adams, debated in cabinet and presented to Congress. Trump doesn’t give a whiff about drafts, debates or separation of powers. He’s a unitary executive with note-card length attention only.
2. Monroe Doctrine was welcomed by regional leaders who saw it as a future-looking solidarity against past threats (colonization), the exact opposite of Trump’s aggressive, invasive regression rhetoric. Trump is the kind of past threat that Monroe was trying to prevent.
3. Monroe himself supported institutions, procedures, consultation and predictability. He didn’t reject progress, he embraced it. All things that Trump opposes, because he’s repeating old patterns of Nazi Lebensraum in a push to become as unpopular and brutal as possible, while promising “easy” fixes, in rapid destruction of democracy.

Monroe was racist in the way everyone at the time was racist, by being paternalistic and fearful. It wasn’t like Trump at all, who is being consciously regressive and neglectful of others. Monroe wasn’t rejecting all progress that had already been established to promote a fictional “return”. He was creating a framework to be measured against in the future, while Trump is abolishing frameworks.