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U.S. President James Monroe

The Monroe Doctrine is a U.S. doctrine which, on December 2, 1823, stated that European powers were no longer to colonize or interfere with the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas. The United States planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and their colonies. However, if later on, these types of wars were to occur in the Americas, the United States would view such action as hostile. President James Monroe first stated the doctrine during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress, a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States. Most recently, during the Cold War, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (added during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt) was invoked as a reason to intervene militarily in Latin America to stop the spread of Communism.

History

The doctrine's authors saw it as a proclamation by the United States of moral opposition to colonialism, but it has subsequently been re-interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including by President Theodore Roosevelt, who asserted the right of the United States to intervene to stabilize the economic affairs of small nations in the Caribbean and Central America if they were unable to pay their international debts. This interpretation, intended to forestall intervention by European powers who had lent money to said countries,^[1] has been termed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The United Kingdom was torn between monarchical principle and a desire for new markets; South America as a whole constituted, at the time, a much larger market for British goods than the United States. When Russia and France proposed that Britain join in helping Spain regain her New World colonies, Britain vetoed the idea. British naval power, commercial interests, and common cultural, philosophical, and political links to the United States contributed to the strength of the doctrine. Britain was in fact negotiating with the United States before it was announced as to whether the policies in the Monroe Doctrine should be declared jointly (see Lawson below).

The United States was also fighting with Spain to purchase Florida, and once that treaty was ratified, the Monroe administration began to extend recognition to the new Latin American nations — Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico were recognized in 1822.

In 1823, France invited Spain to restore the House of Bourbons to power, and there was talk of France and Spain warring upon the new republics with the backing of the Holy Alliance (Russia, Prussia and Austria). This news appalled the British government — all the work of James Wolfe, William Pitt and other eighteenth-century British statesmen to expel France from the New World would be undone, while markets in the former Spanish colonies that had recently become open to British trade might be closed off if Spain regained control.

British Foreign Minister George Canning proposed that the United States and the United Kingdom join to warn off France and Spain from intervention. Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison urged Monroe to accept the offer, but John Quincy Adams was more suspicious. Adams also was quite concerned about the efforts of Russia and Mexico to extend their influence over the Oregon Country, which had already been jointly claimed by the Americans and British (see New Albion).

At the Cabinet meeting of November 7, 1823, Adams argued against Canning's offer, and declared, "It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war."

He argued and finally won over the Cabinet to an independent policy. In Monroe's Annual Message to Congress on December 2, 1823, he delivered what we have come to call the Monroe Doctrine. Essentially, the United States was informing the powers of the Old World that the Americas were no longer open to European colonization, and that any effort to extend European political influence into the New World would be considered by the United States "as dangerous to our peace and safety." The United States would not interfere in European wars or internal affairs, and expected Europe to stay out of the affairs of the New World.

This explicitly stated intent was contradicted by cooperation with European powers in the repeated re-occupation of various territories of the island of Hispaniola, which had been divided between France and Spain. Both nations were interested in re-claiming their territories in Hispaniola, or re-exerting their influence. Ultimately, the new Republic of Haiti not only resisted recolonisation attempts but also gained control of the other portion of the island, controlling it until 1844 when it gained its independence as the Dominican Republic. In practice, the United States used the Monroe Doctrine to support the side of a regional conflict that favoured its short-term economic interests, rather than definitively drawing a barrier against European interventionism.

The Monroe Doctrine states three major ideas, with one more added by President Theodore Roosevelt. First, it conveys that European countries cannot colonize in any of the Americas: North, Central, or South as well as islands of the Caribbean which were considered to be a part of the Americas. Second, it enforces Washington's rule of foreign policy, in which the U.S. will only be involved in European affairs if America's rights are disturbed. Third, the U.S. will consider any attempt at colonization a threat to its national security. Roosevelt added to the doctrine, and summed up his additions with the statement, "Speak softly and carry a big stick".

A quotation from Monroe's address follows:

Legacy

The first use of the yet unnamed doctrine was in 1836 when Americans objected to Britain's alliance with Texas on the principle of the Monroe Doctrine. On December 2, 1845, U.S. President James Polk announced to Congress that the principle of the Monroe Doctrine should be strictly enforced and that the United States should aggressively expand into the West (see Manifest Destiny).

In 1852, some politicians used the principle of the Monroe Doctrine to argue for forcefully removing the Spanish from Cuba. In 1898, following the Spanish-American War, the United States obtained Puerto Rico from Spain and began an occupation of Cuba that lasted until 1902.

In 1863, French forces under Napoleon III invaded Mexico and set up a French puppet regime headed by Emperor Maximilian; Americans proclaimed this as a violation of "The Doctrine" (see Maximilian Affair), but were unable to intervene due to the American Civil War. This marked the first time the Monroe Doctrine was widely referred to as a "Doctrine"^{citation needed}. After the war, the U.S. government began to pressure Napoleon to withdraw his troops, and he did so in 1867.

In the 1870s, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant extended the Monroe Doctrine, saying that the United States would not tolerate a colony in the Americas being transferred from one European country to another.

President Grover Cleveland used it when he threatened to take strong action against the United Kingdom in 1895 if the British would not arbitrate their dispute with Venezuela. His Secretary of State, Richard Olney extended the Monroe Doctrine to give the United States the authority to mediate border disputes in South America. This is known as the Olney interpretation.

The Drago Doctrine was announced on December 29, 1902 by the Foreign Minister of Argentina, Luis Maria Drago. Extending the Monroe Doctrine, it set forth the policy that no European power could use force against an American nation to collect debt.

Roosevelt corollary

In 1904, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted the right of the United States to intervene in Latin America. This was the most significant amendment to the original doctrine and was widely opposed by critics, who argued that the Monroe Doctrine was originally meant to stop European influence in the Western Hemisphere while the Corollary much more directly asserted U.S. hegemony in that area, essentially making them a "hemispheric policeman."

Clark memorandum

In 1928, the Clark Memorandum was released, concluding that the United States need not invoke the Monroe Doctrine as a defense of its interventions in Latin America. The Memorandum argued that the United States had a self-evident right of self-defense, and that this was all that was needed to justify certain actions. The policy was announced to the public in 1930.

In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles evoked the Monroe Doctrine at the Tenth Inter-American Conference, denouncing the intervention of Soviet Communism in Guatemala. This was used to justify Operation PBSUCCESS.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy at an August 29, 1962 news conference:

Criticism

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Further information: United States non-interventionism

Many authors, including professor Noam Chomsky, argue that in practice the Monroe Doctrine has functioned as a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the Western Hemisphere — limited only by prudence, as in the case of British military. Critics including Chomsky and Butler also point to the work of mercenaries such as William Walker, who briefly installed himself as president of Nicaragua, as inspired by the Monroe Doctrine.

Many Latin American popular movements have come to resent this "Monroe Doctrine", which has been summarized there in the phrase: "America for the Americans", translated into Spanish ironically as América para los americanos. The irony lies in the fact that the Spanish term americano is, in all Latin America countries, used to name the inhabitants of North, Central and South America. However, in English, the term American is related almost exclusively to the nationals of the United States, although this wasn't always the case. Thus, while "America for the Americans" sounds very much like a call to share a common destiny, it becomes apparent that it could really imply: America (the continent) for the United States. At the turn of the century popular resentment in Latin America gave rise to a series of left of center leaders who questioned Washington's sincerity. In order to explicitly explain what is meant, the phrase is usually changed to "America for North American Americans".

Other critics have interpreted the Monroe Doctrine as isolationist in intent.

The Cold War

During the Cold War, the Monroe doctrine was applied to Latin America by the framers of U.S. foreign policy. When the Cuban Revolution established a socialist regime with ties to the Soviet Union, after trying to establish fruitful relations with the U.S., it was argued that the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine should be again invoked, this time to prevent the further spreading of Soviet-backed Communism in Latin America. During the Cold War, the United States thus often provided intelligence and military aid to Latin and South American governments that claimed or appeared to be threatened by Communist subversion. This, in turn, led to some domestic controversy within the United States, especially among some members of the left who argued that the Communist threat and Soviet influence in Latin America was greatly exaggerated. (See Operation PBSUCCESS.)

The debate over this new spirit of the Monroe Doctrine came to a head in the 1980s, as part of the Iran-Contra Affair. Among other things, it was revealed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had been covertly training "Contra" guerrilla soldiers in Honduras in an attempt to destabilize and overthrow the Sandinista revolutionary government of Nicaragua and its President, Daniel Ortega. CIA director Robert Gates vigorously defended the Contra operation, arguing that avoiding U.S. intervention in Nicaragua would be "totally to abandon the Monroe doctrine". In a case brought before the International Court of Justice by Nicaragua, however, the court ruled that the United States had exercised "unlawful use of force." The U.S. ignored the verdict. The Carter and Reagan administrations embroiled themselves in the civil war in El Salvador, again citing the Monroe Doctrine as justification. The conflict was marked by large scale human rights abuses and the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero by right-wing death squads. The Monroe Doctrine was also cited during the U.S. intervension in Guatemala and the invasion of Grenada. Critics of the Reagan administration's support for Britain in the Falklands War charge that the U.S. ignored the Monroe Doctrine in that instance.

Further reading

• Samuel Flagg Bemis. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. 1949.
• Donald Dozer. The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance. New York: Knopf, 1965.
• Leonard Axel Lawson. The Relation of British Policy to the Declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, Columbia University, 1922.
• Ernest R. May. The Making of the Monroe Doctrine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.
• Frederick Merk. The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843-1849. New York: Knopf, 1966.
• Gretchen Murphy. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Duke University Press, 2005. Examines the cultural context of the doctrine.
• Dexter Perkins. The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1826. 3 vols. 1927.
• (it) Nico Perrone. Il manifesto dell'imperialismo americano nelle borse di Londra e Parigi. In Belfagor (Italian review), 1977, iii. Examines the reactions of the European stock exchange markets.
• Joel S. Poetker. The Monroe Doctrine. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Books, Inc, 1967.
• Gaddis Smith. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945-1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Argues that the Monroe Doctrine became irrelevant after the end of the Cold War.

See also

• Good Neighbor policy

References

1. ^ Marks III, Frederick W. Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (1979)

• America.gov on Monroe Doctrine — most material (as of this writing on 2-Dec-2002) was copied from this public domain source.

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Monroe Doctrine

• Monroe Doctrine and related resources at the Library of Congress
• Selected text from Monroe's December 2, 1823 speech

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