The White House has released its much-anticipated National Security Strategy, and as rumored, the document situates the Western Hemisphere squarely atop President Donald Trump’s list of priorities. Not only does it list the Americas first, it explicitly declares a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”

This is bracing. The White House has sounded a homeward note.

The strategy’s language riffs on President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, enunciated in 1904 to frame the US response to a war scare in Santo Domingo, the modern-day Dominican Republic. (Someone ought to write a book about that.) In those days it was commonplace for a European great power to send its naval fleet to seize the customhouse of a country that had defaulted on its debts to European banks. In such a case, the fleet would divert tariff revenue from trade flowing through that country’s ports to repay the bankers. Geopolitical thinkers like TR objected to this practice because it left an extraregional navy in possession of territory in the Americas—territory it might later decide to keep, despite the ostensibly temporary nature of the operation. A hostile power could then build a naval base from which ships of war could menace the sea lanes leading to the Isthmus of Panama, where the Canal would one day run.

The crisis in Santo Domingo fit the paradigm perfectly—and precipitated the Roosevelt Corollary. TR’s logic may sound paranoid, but such intrigues had happened in Asia and Africa time and again during the age of imperialism. It could happen in the Americas.

To head off creeping encroachment in southern waters, Roosevelt proclaimed an “international police power,” a limited right of intervention that Washington might wield if a Caribbean debtor government proved unable or unwilling to fulfill its........

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