Monroe Doctrine

Monroe Doctrine (1823).The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed the United States as guardian of the Americas while pledging no U.S. political intervention in Europe. President James Monroe's annual message to Congress, delivered on 2 December 1823, declared the American republics free from further colonization by European powers and, in exchange, promised no U.S. interference with existing European possessions.

The origins of the Monroe Doctrine date to the end of the Napoleonic wars. The victorious European powers, leery of liberal ideas that had culminated in the French Revolution followed by war, seemed determined to revive monarchical government. By early 1823, Americans feared that France had agreed to restore the Spanish monarchy in exchange for Cuba. In August, British Foreign Secretary George Canning recommended a joint Anglo‐American statement opposing intervention in Spanish America. But Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, warning Monroe that such a joint declaration would constitute an American renunciation of all hemispheric expansion as well, persuaded the president to announce a unilateral American policy in his annual message to Congress. The United States should act alone, Adams declared, rather than “come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man‐of‐war.”

The Monroe Doctrine drew mixed reactions. The European powers were too preoccupied with other matters to pay much attention. Latin American spokesmen sought formal alliances with the United States, but Adams refused. Canning was incensed at U.S. pretensions and boasted that he had already secured a noninterventionist pledge from France. As American power grew, however, American presidents increasingly asserted the doctrine to justify U.S. commercial and territorial expansion. In the 1840s, President James Knox Polk articulated what later became known as the Polk Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in opposing British claims in the Pacific Northwest. The following decade, Americans for the first time referred to the doctrine by name in arguing against British claims in Central America. During the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward referred to Monroe's principles in denouncing French intervention in Mexico. Almost thirty years later, in 1895, President Grover Cleveland again identified U.S. security with restraining European intervention in Latin America. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt broadened the doctrine with a corollary that proclaimed the right of the United States to police the Western Hemisphere in cases of “chronic wrongdoing” or “impotence.” Under the Roosevelt Corollary, the doctrine served as a justification for U.S. intervention in the Caribbean area through the 1920s and became hotly contested within Latin America.

During the Cold War, American presidents occasionally invoked the Monroe Doctrine in security matters. In the Cuban missile crisis, James Monroe made the cover of Time magazine as President John F. Kennedy resisted Soviet intrusions in Cuba. The doctrine was also invoked by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the Monroe Doctrine became somewhat irrelevant, and American presidents seldom referred to it.
See also Early Republic, Era of the; Expansionism; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin America.

Bibliography

Dexter Perkins , A History of the Monroe Doctrine, 1955.
Ernest R. May , The Making of the Monroe Doctrine, 1975.
Gaddis Smith , The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1994, 1994.

Howard Jones