Monroe at 200: Does Monroe Doctrine tell us anything about modern US foreign policy?
It is 200 years since the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe, gave his annual State of the Union address to Congress and articulated his world view
Anniversaries are objectively meaningless, the happenstance outcome of a particular method of measuring time. But they matter to the human mind, which means that they matter, full stop.
December 2 this year was the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, the foundational principle of US foreign policy set out by President James Monroe in his seventh State of the Union address. It declared that the age of European colonialism was over, and that thenceforth any engagement by external powers with events in the Americas—North and South—would be regarded as a potentially hostile act against the United States. Its flipside, its pay-off, was that the US would take no part in the affairs of Europe, nor interfere with the remaining European colonies in the Americas. These were principally the Spanish possessions of Bolivia, which would become independent in 1825, Cuba and the British colonies in the West Indies.
Monroe’s proposition was, at first, largely ineffective; the United States was not a major player on the world stage. The Austrian statesman Prince Metternich regarded it as an impertinence, but it suited British interests in preserving peace and free trade, especially around the British possessions in the Caribbean. And, just as it intertwined with the maintenance of the Pax Britannica, so too it became an analogue of the growing notion of “manifest destiny” within North America: the idea, given a name by publisher John O’Sullivan in 1845, that the United States was destined to control and make in its own image the whole continent of North America. But Monroe and his successors had neither the diplomatic nor the military clout to enforce the doctrine with much impact.
The real importance of the Monroe Doctrine has the ways in which it has been reinvented by successive generations of US politicians. It lapsed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 which saw Cuba secede from Spain after three wars of independence and the US seize Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines; but it went on to develop, with the so-called Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, as an instrument of American domination of central America in the 20th century. Yet it showed its versatility in providing the perfect template for the isolationism of the period leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Historian Jay Sexton has called the doctrine an “invented tradition”, which encapsulates the ways in which it has been used by the foreign policy profession over the last two centuries. During the Cold War, its justification for the US policing its own backyard underpinned repeated attempts to depose Fidel Castro’s régime in Cuba and saw covert or overt US intervention in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada and the Dominican Republic. Further afield, America was involved in coups d’état in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, every time favouring an authoritarian right-wing régime which was friendly to US interests over governments which it feared might be “soft” on communism. We are revisiting many of these decisions in light of the death this week of Dr Henry Kissinger.
The guiding spirit of the Monroe Doctrine has been division: between domestic and international, between neighbouring and far-off, between convenience and principle. Tacitly it underlay much of President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy expressed in his inaugural address in 2017. Trump’s administration wound down the US deployment in Afghanistan, striking a deal with the Taliban and setting a withdrawal date for May 2021; at the same time, the president repeatedly emphasised the need for other NATO member states to contribute more to the Alliance and be less reliant on the US as a lender of last-resort security.
In economic terms, Trump introduced tariffs and other trade measures to protect US industry, targeting goods from China and the EU among others. Again, this was consistent with the Monroe Doctrine’s sense of shutting out the world beyond its immediate sphere of influence. He also imposed harsh sanctions on Venezuela, and in 2019 described military intervention to dislodge President Nicolás Maduro as “an option”.
For two hundred years, then, the Monroe Doctrine has provided a framework for a hard-eyed, transactional approach to foreign policy. It is far more nuanced than James Monroe can ever have anticipated.
For the past three years, President Biden has moved in the opposite direction, seeking to repair the United States’ alliances with European nations, standing firmly with Israel, especially after the attacks of 7 October, and reaffirming the close relationships with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
But there is a presidential election in 12 months’ time. Current opinion polls, working on the assumption that the Republican contender will be Donald J. Trump, show a result which is heart-stoppingly close, frequently within the statistical margin of error. (It is worth noting that Biden does not perform significantly better against other potential GOP runners.) There is, therefore, perhaps a 50/50 chance that US foreign policy is about to undergo another dramatic change of direction.
Could Monroe at 200 be the pattern for the next presidency? There are certainly stark choices ahead. The aggressive posture of Xi Jinping’s China threatens Taiwan directly and must be causing unease in Seoul and Manila; the Jared Kushner-brokered Abraham Accords lie in the shadow of the Gaza conflict; Russian forces remain entrenched in eastern Ukraine with no sign of an end to the conflict; and Iran remains a defiantly destabilising force in the Middle East. Will DC look inwards or outwards? The world waits.