Monroe Doctrine

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MONROE DOCTRINE

MONROE DOCTRINE. Four years after the ratification of the Adams-Onís Transcontinental Treaty, President James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in a message to Congress in December 1823. While few countries paid much attention to its pronouncement, the doctrine captured the American belief that the New and Old Worlds greatly differed and that the United States had a special role to play. It presaged Manifest Destiny, and, as the years passed, the Monroe Doctrine increasingly became a tenet of American foreign policy, although its international acceptance and significance is still debated.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution (1787– 1799) and the Napoleonic Wars (1805–1814), conservative European powers—Russia, Prussia, Austria, and, to a lesser extent, England—sought to prop up the old monarchies and stamp out revolution. The result, in 1813, was the Quadruple Alliance, which France joined after Louis XVIII returned to Paris.

At this time, Spanish America was throwing off its imperial yoke. Inspiring nationalists like Simón Bolívar, José San Martín, and Bernardo O'Higgins led their respective peoples to independence. The situation then became very complicated. At first, the U.S. government welcomed these independence movements, hoping to establish commercial ties and open new markets for American goods. France then invaded Spain and acted, at least initially, as if it would seek to reestablish Spain's former colonial empire in the Americas. There were even rumors that Spain would cede Cuba to France for its help in reestablishing Spain's empire in the New World! The British also had cause to oppose any reestablishment of Spain's empire, because Great Britain had moved to a concept of maintaining an informal empire—based on trade and avoiding the costs of a more formal empire, which included stationing of troops and maintaining of bases—in Latin America, China, and elsewhere. Britain therefore wanted to economically exploit these newly independent lands.

So the British foreign minister, George Canning, suggested that the United States stand against such foreign intervention in the Americas, and with much input from the American Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, Monroe worked out his doctrine. To be sure, Monroe's warning against European intervention in the Americas only had force, if it had any force, because of British naval power and behind-the-scenes support. Still, the American people enthusiastically received the message, although it had little practical influence at the time.

Over the years, the Monroe Doctrine became a tenet of American foreign policy, and there were additions by later presidents. On 2 December 1845, President James K. Polk reiterated the principles of Monroe in his condemnation of the intrigues of Great Britain and France in seeking to prevent the annexation of Texas to the United States and in contesting with Great Britain over the vast Oregon Territory ("54?40? or fight!"). And, on 29 April 1848, Polk declared that an English or Spanish protectorate over the Mexican Yucatan would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine principles and could compel the United States to assume control over that area. Polk thus made the doctrine the basis for expansion, although ultimately he took no such action. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), France tried to establish an empire in Mexico under Austrian Archduke Maximilian. As the North's victory became assured, the U.S. secretary of state used this power to rebuff the French and helped cause France to withdraw its troops; the regime in Mexico collapsed.

One of the more dramatic extensions of the doctrine was President Grover Cleveland's assertion that its principles compelled Great Britain to arbitrate a boundary dispute with Venezuela over the limitations of British Guiana. Cleveland's views produced a diplomatic crisis, but British moderation helped bring about a peaceful solution. And, later, President Theodore Roosevelt expanded upon Cleveland's views to produce the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The joint intervention of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy against Venezuela looking to recover unpaid loans upset many in the United States. President Roosevelt on the one hand believed that such bills needed to be paid, but did not want foreign intervention to compel timely repayment. So he moved to the position that the United States must assume a measure of control over more unruly Latin American states to prevent European action. Although Senate approval of this corollary was delayed for three years until 1907, Roosevelt produced a view that seemingly justified frequent American interventions in Caribbean affairs, which certainly smacked of imperialism and "White Man's Burden," and did not burnish the image of the United States with its southern neighbors.

During the two decades following World War I (1914–1918), a change took place. Increasing resentment against American interference in the affairs of the republics of Latin America helped bring about the liquidations of U.S. interventions in Santo Domingo in 1924 and in Haiti in 1934. The intervention in Nicaragua begun in Calvin Coolidge's presidency was relatively short-lived. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave proof of this retreat from an expansive view of the Monroe Doctrine by pledging against armed intervention, and by signing a treaty not to intervene in the internal and external affairs of various Latin American countries at the seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 1933.

The Monroe Doctrine never obtained a true international status. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson, to win over domestic opponents to his cherished League of Nations covenant, incorporated into the language of the document an article declaring that nothing therein affected the validity of a regional understanding such as the Monroe Doctrine. It was not clear that this either met with European support or placated more nationalistic supporters of Monroe's principles in the United States.

In more modern times, the Monroe Doctrine has undergone change. The Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, called to strengthen arrangements for collective security in the Western Hemisphere during World War II (1939–1945) and to discuss problems resulting from Argentina's neutrality against the Axis powers, met in February 1945. Participants adopted the Act of Chapultepec, which broadened the Monroe Doctrine with the principle that an attack on any country of the hemisphere would be viewed as an act of aggression against all countries of the hemisphere. The act also had a provision for negotiation of a defense treaty among American states after the war. Meeting at Petrópolis, out-side Rio de Janeiro, from 15 August through 2 September 1947, the United States and nineteen Latin American republics (Canada was a member of the British Commonwealth and did not directly participate) drew up the so-called Rio Pact, a permanent defensive military alliance that legally sanctioned the principle from the Act of Chapultepec and foreshadowed the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization two years later.

The United States would justify its action in Guatemala in 1954, its continuing opposition to Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba, and its intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965 with the view that communism as a movement was foreign to the Americas. This provided the basis for intervention reaching back as far as the Monroe Doctrine and as recent as the Rio Pact.

In the end, the Monroe Doctrine as an international policy has only been as effective as the United States' power to support it.