Certainly one of the central pillars of U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent national security strategy is a plan to update a greater than 200-year-old foreign policy statement often known as the Monroe Doctrine.
“After years of neglect, the USA will reassert and implement the Monroe Doctrine to revive American preeminence within the Western Hemisphere, and to guard our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” the strategy document unveiled last week states.
The document goes on to put out a “‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” that prioritizes American-led cooperative efforts to combat mass migration, drug trafficking and “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.”
The strategy marks the newest evolution of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been held up as either an argument for peace and non-intervention or justification for American imperialism — depending on how U.S. presidents interpreted it.
The implications of the doctrine were particularly felt in Latin America, where Trump is currently searching for an array of strategies — from military motion near Venezuela to financial aid for Argentina — to exert U.S. influence.
Here’s what to know in regards to the Monroe Doctrine and the way it has evolved over time.
What’s the Monroe Doctrine?
U.S. President James Monroe delivered what became often known as the Monroe Doctrine during a State of the Union address to Congress in 1823.
The text, developed by his secretary of state John Quincy Adams, asserted that countries within the western hemisphere — identified as North and South American continents — “are henceforth to not be regarded as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”
On the time, Latin American nations were establishing their independence from Spain, and so they welcomed Monroe’s statement as affirming their freedoms.
Yet Monroe also made clear he desired to see the USA as the brand new dominant power over the hemisphere, by asserting later within the speech that any “inter-dispositions” by “any European power” could be viewed as a threat to American “peace and safety.”
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This portion of Monroe’s speech wouldn’t be formalized because the Monroe Doctrine until the late 1800s, by which era the U.S. had established itself as a world power able to exerting its influence through military might. That’s when it began to be viewed as a key tenet of U.S. foreign policy.
In 1904, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt issued what became often known as the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which envisioned the U.S. as “a global police power” that may keep western hemisphere nations “stable, orderly and prosperous.”
Roosevelt had issued his corollary to make sure the U.S., not Europe, would intervene if essential and “nevertheless reluctantly” to maintain Latin American countries financially solvent.
Yet it was later used to justify multiple U.S. military interventions and occupations in Central American and Caribbean nations within the early twentieth century, in what historians have called “gunboat diplomacy” and the so-called Banana Wars.
At the identical time, Canadian politicians including then-prime minister Wilfrid Laurier were suggesting the Monroe Doctrine would protect Canada from foreign invasion since the U.S. would come to its defence.
How did the Doctrine evolve further?
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt effectively ended the Latin American interventions with the Good Neighbor policy of 1934, which sought to re-establish diplomacy and economic cooperation within the region.
Nonetheless, the Cold War saw the top of that approach and re-emergence of the Monroe Doctrine as a basis for countering communism and Soviet expansionism within the western hemisphere.
That, in turn, led to a series of U.S.-backed regime change operations in Central and South America, including the 1954 coup in Guatemala that had covert support from the CIA. The doctrine was also used to justify U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships just like the Pinochet regime in Chile.
In 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy directly cited the Monroe Doctrine in a press conference to clarify why the U.S. was searching for to “isolate the communist menace in Cuba” — culminating within the Cuban Missile Crisis that yr.
The Monroe Doctrine was also invoked by then-CIA director Robert Gates when it emerged that the U.S., with funds from secret arms sales to Iran, was training guerilla soldiers to overthrow the Sandinista socialist government in Nicaragua, in what became often known as the Iran-Contra affair.
In 2013, then-U.S. secretary of state John Kerry declared during a speech to the Organization of American States that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” which was seen as one other shift toward warming relations with Latin America.
Yet Kerry also warned during this time that the U.S. must proceed to concentrate to what is occurring in America’s “backyard.”
Why does Trump wish to bring it back?
Trump searching for to “reassert and implement the Monroe Doctrine” is further evidence of his “America First” approach to foreign policy, experts and members of his administration say.
“Past administrations perpetuated the idea that the Monroe Doctrine had expired. They were incorrect,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech on Saturday.
“The Monroe Doctrine is in effect and it’s stronger than ever under the Trump Corollary, a typical sense restoration of our power and prerogatives on this hemisphere consistent with U.S. interests.”
That strategy has been most visible in U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats within the Caribbean Sea since September, which have killed nearly 90 people up to now, in addition to a U.S. military buildup near Venezuela.
Max Cameron, a political science professor on the University of British Columbia who studies Latin America, told Global News those operations had created “a way of horror in lots of places that this can be a return to gunboat diplomacy, to the Monroe Doctrine, to the Americans treating the Caribbean as an American lake that they will control and do what they need in.”
Others have noted Trump’s recent announcement of a US$20-billion bailout for Argentina, and his support for the country’s right-wing populist President Javier Milei, as one other sign of the Monroe Doctrine at work.
Alejandro Garcia Magos, a political science lecturer on the University of Toronto, said the alliance of “ideological soulmates” Trump and Milei may counterbalance the regional influence of more leftist leaders like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“It’s a possibility for Trump to have a solid friend and ally in a region that within the last 25 years has been difficult for the American to have a solid footing in,” he told Global News.
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