Things somehow keep getting stupider. Donald Trump went to Davos this week, where he nursed his wound from his Great Paperclip Scare and told an audience in Switzerland that if it wasn’t for the United States, they would be speaking German.

The trip started with everyone gearing up for a U.S.-European trade war over his threats to annex Greenland—a wildly unpopular idea, even in the States, from which he promptly backed down in exchange for more or less the same deal we’ve had since 1951. It ended with the signing of the charter for Trump’s “Board of Peace,” an ersatz pay-for-play United Nations created under false pretenses over which Trump will apparently preside as chairman-for-life.

The closest thing to a clever take I have about all of this—and it’s certainly not mine alone—is that Trump is haphazardly remaking geopolitics back into the patchwork of competing empires that collapsed into two world wars a century ago. Garrett Graf calls this “watching a superpower die by suicide.” (Or, as someone else once put it: “ …the breaking of America’s Empire.”) Far from auguring a new wave of decolonization, however, Trump and his neocolonialist minions are imagining a reconsolidated world run by a handful of continental hegemons — namely Russia, China, and the U.S. — with a few subordinate regional players — Israel, possibly Argentina or Hungary — allowed to run their neighborhoods.¹ (With the “Board of Peace” thing, Trump would maybe be some kind of reality-show god-emperor, an Apprentice-coded primus inter pares handing down bullae from Mar-a-Lago.)

“We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as Stephen Miller put it. He called these, as would befit a Nazi occultist, “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” If that isn’t a gold-embossed invitation to Russia to seize as much of the former Russian Empire as it can swallow and China to annex Taiwan and the South China Sea, I don’t know what is.

Under this scheme, the U.S. gets the Western Hemisphere. What exactly counts as the Western Hemisphere is an eternal debate: Continental North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean, surely; but if Greenland, why not Iceland; if Hawai’i, why not the rest of Polynesia and parts of New Zealand? (No one except the most pedantic geographer thinks Europe and Africa west of Greenwich count.) This week, on the anniversary of his return to office, Trump shared an AI-edited photo of himself with a map indicating what he at least thinks is good for trolling purposes: the current U.S. territorial holdings, plus Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, and (it’s hard to make out²) possibly Cuba.

The justification that keeps getting trotted out for this imperial fantasy is the “Monroe Doctrine.” I have a piece coming in Foreign Policy, hopefully today or tomorrow, about the rationales for the invasion of Venezuela (spoiler alert: there’s a lot, and they’re all bs). Not sure what the editors did with it, but in the last draft I sent I called it “the so-called Monroe Doctrine.”

I did that because, while you will find no end of references to it online, and even a page with a properly ceremonial-looking antiquated document at the National Archives webpage, the “Monroe Doctrine” was never a thing, in the way that, say, the Constitution or the Emancipation Proclamation were things. It wasn’t a law, an amendment, or even a formal policy. Nor did the statements retrospectively cobbled into a doctrine have anything to do with an envisioned U.S. dominance of Latin America or any other part of the hemisphere.

Trump, however, did not come up with the idea of pretending otherwise.

What we now call the “doctrine” was a few scattered paragraphs in James Monroe’s seventh annual message to Congress in 1823 — the forerunner of today’s State of the Union addresses, delivered as a written letter. They were not written by the Fifth President either; historians are in wide agreement that the ideas in question were conceived by Monroe’s secretary of state (and soon-to-be successor), John Quincy Adams. In short, the Monroe administration was trying to answer the question of what it thought of the newly-won independence of four former Spanish colonies — Chile, Colombia³, Argentina, and Mexico⁴.

Its answer was: Good for them! They were republics now, like us. Spain shouldn’t try to take them back, nor should any other European power — most likely Britain, but also maybe France — try to recolonize them instead. All the rest of the surviving European colonies in the Americas, including Canada, Cuba, and the rest of the Caribbean, were also fine. No one thought about the Danish ice colony. Monroe and Adams also had nothing to say about the second-oldest republic in the Americas, Haiti. In fact, two years later, when France sailed gunships into Port-au-Prince harbor to extort a 150 million gold-franc indemnity for having won its independence in 1804, Adams said it was proof that the Black Republic had never really been independent in the first place.

Conspicuously absent from this somewhat mealy-mouthed set of observations was any sort of enforcement mechanism, or even much of a statement of intent of any kind. Nowhere was the notion that the U.S. should supplant Spain as the imperial power. “Observers have long had a hard time determining what, exactly, the Monroe Doctrine meant,” Greg Grandin has written. (“It might be a good thing,” he quotes Democrat Samuel Tilden, who won the popular vote in the 1876 presidential election, “if one could only find out what it was.”)