Monroe Doctrine
The
Monroe Doctrine, expressed in 1823, proclaimed the
United States' opinion that
European powers should no longer colonize the
Americas or interfere with the affairs of sovereign nations located in the
Americas, such as the United States of America,
Mexico, and others. In return, the United States planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and in wars between a European power and its colonies. However, if these latter type of wars were to occur in the Americas, the U.S. would view such action as hostile toward itself.
The doctrine was issued by President
James Monroe during his seventh annual
State of the Union address to Congress. It was met first with doubt, then with enthusiasm. This was a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States.
The doctrine was conceived by its authors, especially
John Quincy Adams, as a proclamation by the United States of moral opposition to
colonialism, but has subsequently been re-interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including by President
Theodore Roosevelt as a license for the U.S. to practice its own form of colonialism (known as the
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.)
The end of the
Napoleonic Wars in 1815 marked the breakup of the Spanish Empire in the New World. Between 1815 and
1822 José de San Martín led
Argentina,
Chile and
Peru to independence, while
Simón Bolívar in
Gran Colombia guided his country out of
colonialism. The new republics sought — and expected — recognition by the
United States, and many in the United States endorsed that idea.
But President
James Monroe and his Secretary of State,
John Quincy Adams, were not willing to risk war for nations they did not know would continue to survive. Some say that from their perspective, as long as the other European powers did not intervene, the government of the United States would just let
Spain and her rebellious colonies fight it out. Others contend that by acknowledging the wars and declaring neutrality, they were recognizing the legitimacy of the new nations. This assertion is backed up by U.S. sales of naval vessels to the rebel armies.
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.
The United States was also negotiating with Spain to
purchase Florida, and once that treaty was ratified, the Monroe administration began to extend recognition to the new Latin American republics — Argentina, Chile, Peru,
Colombia and Mexico were all recognized in 1822.
In 1823, France invited Spain to restore the
Bourbon 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 get France out of the New World would be undone, and France would again be a power in the Americas.
British Foreign Minister George Canning proposed that the US and the UK 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 Russia and Mexico's efforts to extend their influence over the joint British-American claimed territory of
Oregon Country (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, regions of which were in this period variously known as
Santo Domingo and
Haiti. Both France and Spain were interested in re-claiming their territories in Hispaniola, or re-exerting their influence, although Spain was more successful in the 19th century. In practice, the U.S used the Monroe Doctrine to side with whatever side of Caribbean conflicts favoured the United States' short-term economic interests, rather than definitively drawing a barrier against European interventionism.
Although it would take decades to coalesce into a notably identifiable policy, John Quincy Adams did raise a standard of an independent U.S. foreign policy so strongly that future administrations could not ignore it. One should note, however, that the policy succeeded because it met British interests as well as those of the United States and, for the next 100 years, was secured by the backing of the
Royal Navy.
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, the U.S. obtained Cuba and
Puerto Rico from Spain after winning the
Spanish-American War.
Between 1864 and 1867,
Napoleon III invaded Mexico and set up a
puppet regime, and Americans proclaimed this as a violation of "The Doctrine" (see
Maximilian Affair). This was the first time the Monroe Doctrine was widely referred to as a "Doctrine".
In the 1870s, U.S. President
Ulysses S. Grant extended the Monroe Doctrine, saying that the U.S. will not tolerate a colony being transferred from one European country to another.
In 1895,
U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney extended the Monroe Doctrine to give the U.S. 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. Extending the Monroe Doctrine, it set forth the policy that no European power could use force against an American nation to collect debt.
In 1904, U.S. President
Theodore Roosevelt added the
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted the right of the U.S. to intervene in Latin America. This is the largest extension that has ever been added to the Monroe Doctrine.
In 1930, the
Clark Memorandum was released, concluding that the Doctrine did not give the U.S. any right to intervene in Latin American affairs when the region was not threatened by Old World powers, thereby reversing the Roosevelt Corollary.
U.S. President
John F. Kennedy at an
August 29 1962 news conference:
In present day (2006) discourse, the Monroe Doctrine is often shorthand for American colonialism in the Americas. The political meaning varies with contextual usage, and the perspective of the speaker. Generally it is used as a simplistic historical proof of modern empire, whereas
Manifest Destiny is presented as an indicator of future imperial ambitions.
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. 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."
Some have interpreted the Monroe Doctrine as
isolationist in intent - see
United States isolationism. Others allege that, in practice, the Monroe Doctrine has functioned as a declaration of
hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the nations of the Western Hemisphere - limited only by prudence, as in the case of British possessions. They point to 30 military interventions and 47 covert or indirect operations in Latin America since 1846 [
1].
Hence, much of Latin America has come to resent this "Monroe Doctrine", that has been resumed there in the phrase: "America for the Americans" (América para los Americanos), which when translated into Spanish, sounds very much like a call to share a common destiny, as the term American (
Americano) is used to name the inhabitants of the whole continent. However in English, as the term
American is related almost exclusively to the nationals of the United States, it becomes apparent that it could really imply: America (the continent) for the United States.
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 US, 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
Nicaragua in an attempt to overthrow the
Sandinista revolutionary government and its President,
Daniel Ortega. During the period of the civil war, the Contras killed an estimated 14,000 people and 150,000 were displaced. CIA director
Robert Gates vigorously defended the Contra operation, arguing that avoiding US intervention in Nicaragua would be "totally to abandon the Monroe doctrine".
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 (even though an American nation,
Argentina, attacked the possession of an existing European power,
Britain, that predated the Doctrine).
*Bemis, Samuel Flagg.
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. 1949.
*Dozer, Donald.
The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance. New York: Knopf, 1965.
*May, Ernest R.
The Making of the Monroe Doctrine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.
*Merk, Frederick.
The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843-1849. New York: Knopf, 1966.
*Murphy, Gretchen.
Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Duke University Press, 2005. Examines the cultural context of the doctrine.
*Perkins, Dexter.
The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1826. 3 vols. 1927.
*Poetker, Joel S.
The Monroe Doctrine. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Books, Inc, 1967.
*Smith, Gaddis.
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.
*
U.S. State Department: "Monroe Doctrine" — most material (as of this writing on 2-Dec-2002) was copied from this public domain source.
*
Monroe Doctrine and related resources at the Library of Congress*
Selected text from Monroe's December 2, 1823 speech
