According to Michael Sexton in these pages, “since the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed in 1823 by the US, it has designated both North and South America to be US spheres of influence” (“Only US and Russian can end the bloodshed in Ukraine”, 28/2).
Nor is Sexton alone: from the moment Donald Trump announced his stance on Ukraine, the Monroe Doctrine has been presented in publications that range from The Washington Post to Foreign Affairs as legitimating efforts by great powers to carve up the world.
Claiming that president James Monroe asserted an American “sphere of influence” is obviously anachronistic: the term was coined only in 1869 and it was not until the 1880s that the concept entered widespread use. What is more important, however, is that sweeping assertions about the doctrine are both factually misleading and misinterpret the lessons of its evolution.
That three, non-consecutive, paragraphs in Monroe’s end-of-year message to congress would acquire far-reaching symbolic importance was hardly apparent.
Tucked away in a 6397-word address that covered issues such as the operations of the Post Office and repairs to the Cumberland Road, the 954 words that eventually became known as the Monroe Doctrine were a response to immediate fears and pressures.
With memories of the War of 1812 still fresh, the concerns partly reflected anxieties about Britain’s intentions. The main trigger, however, was the Holy Alliance’s Troppau Circular of 1820, in which Europe’s reactionary monarchies – Austria, Russia, Prussia and later France – agreed to suppress any liberal reforms. In April 1823, France, acting on the Troppau commitments, intervened to quash the Spanish constitutionalists and restore King Ferdinand VII.
France’s move shocked Washington. A cabinet discussion concluded that the Holy Alliance would reduce South America to “subjection by military force”, readily suppressing constitutional governments that were no stronger than “Chinese shadows”, flickering “on the stage (before) passing off like Banquo’s descendants in Macbeth”.
Public opinion echoed the anxiety. When the South American states won their independence, a wave of enthusiasm had swept the US: “Behold!” Thomas Jefferson exclaimed, “another example of man … bursting the chains of his oppressor”. Now that triumph was seen as a possibly fleeting moment in a still undecided struggle between a liberal “New World” and a reactionary “Old World”.
The conservative powers, John Calhoun argued, “are on one side, and we the other, of political systems wholly irreconcilable. The two cannot exist together: one or the other must gain the ascendancy.” That is why Monroe’s 1823 message asserted that “the political system of the allied powers is essentially different from that of America”; the message’s “one object” was consequently to ensure South America’s new nations could freely choose to “be governed by republican institutions”.
That principle was the antithesis of treating those nations as subordinates, much less conquering them as Vladimir Putin seeks to do in Ukraine. And while it would take too long to recount the principle’s tumultuous, often inconsistent, application in the 19th century, it is a striking fact that South American liberals were among its staunchest supporters.
To say that is not to deny that the US did intervene, including by force, in South America. But despite myriad attempts to reinterpret the doctrine, its anti-colonial character was always vigorously reasserted – not least, late in the century, by the powerful Anti-Imperialist League, whose supporters included former presidents from both parties.
A material change did occur, however, with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, whom Trump venerates. Convinced that the great global conflict was not between monarchical and republican systems of government but between “manly” civilised peoples and their “impotent” and uncivilised counterparts, Roosevelt was stung by British criticisms that the US did not do enough to “enforce any order” in South America.
His closest advisers recommended announcing a “Roosevelt Doctrine” that would reflect his 1905 inaugural address, in which he stated: “We have become a great nation … and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.”
But always the canny politician, he sought to present the principle that “chronic wrongdoing … in the Western Hemisphere … (may) force the United States … to exercise an international police power” as a mere “corollary of the Monroe Doctrine”.
Congress soon forced him to back down. Nothing, he said, “could be further from the truth” than the idea that his so-called corollary “implied … a right to exercise some kind of protectorate over the countries to whose territory that doctrine applies”. Indeed, after that, the term “Monroe Doctrine” virtually disappeared from Roosevelt’s vocabulary.
However, the “clarification” didn’t eliminate his imperialist instincts. Denounced by Mark Twain as “insane” – “always showing off (in) a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for an audience” – he multiplied his interventions while claiming they would restore peace, thus allowing the US to disengage.
The results were disastrous. Cavalierly ignoring national rights and aspirations bred unending conflicts, dragging subsequent administrations, however reluctantly, into quagmires.
To make things worse, Roosevelt’s ardent protectionism, which was integral to his “new nationalism”, along with his oft-repeated belief that “reciprocity must be treated as the handmaiden of protection”, shattered relations with Canada, provoked tariff escalation across the continent and legitimated moves towards closed trading blocs worldwide.
It is true that Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
But it is also true that by effectively excluding China from a process that dismembered its territory, those negotiations encouraged the Japanese imperialism that culminated in the horrors of the Pacific War.
In the end, they proved to be another example of what historian Jeremi Suri has described as Roosevelt’s “intoxication with power and exaggerated sense of his own superhuman capabilities” – as were his aspirations to commercial and political supremacy over America’s neighbours.
It took until the administration of his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for those aspirations to be decisively ditched and a gradual process of trade liberalisation set under way. Any notion that US policy reflected spheres of influence vanished then, too, with the clearest sign of change being the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947.
Drawing the lessons of the 1930s, Harry Truman argued that the conflict between freedom and dictatorship had to be seen in global, not local, terms. Whatever its triumphs and tragedies in South America and elsewhere, it was a sense of that global struggle, not a hemispheric mindset, that subsequently shaped US foreign policy.
All that now seems behind us, with potentially ominous consequences. We are, in other words, confronted with a drastic change, not with the reinstatement of longstanding, broadly accepted, doctrines.
There are, for sure, conservatives who endorse that change; and they are of course free to argue their case. But what they should not be free to do is to caricature history – as the left so often does. Learning from the past is hard enough; it is impossible when we distort it.
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