The Monroe Doctrine, the foundation for U.S. foreign policy in the western hemisphere throughout most of its history, was declared on December 2, 1823, by President James Monroe (1817 – 1825) in his annual message to Congress. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century the remarkable success of movements for independence in Spanish America set the foundation for the Doctrine. By the end of 1822 Spain was driven from its major colonies in North and South America by nationalist insurgencies. European powers now remained in control of only Belize, Bolivia, and the Guianas. But, fearing that European powers might move to restore Spain to its colonies, the Monroe administration felt compelled to issue a formal declaration regarding U.S. policy. Four principles formed the Monroe Doctrine. The Americas were no longer to be considered objects for future colonization or control by any European power. The political systems of the European powers were alien to the United States and any attempt to export it to the Americas would be considered dangerous to American interests. The United States would not interfere with the existing colonies or dependencies of the European powers. Finally, the Monroe Doctrine reaffirmed that the United States would not take part in the wars of the European powers. Great Britain earlier had prodded the Monroe administration to make a similar but joint declaration on preserving the independence of the new Latin American republics. Under the influence of John Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848), Monroe rejected the idea, reasoning that the United States would then be cast as the junior partner of Britain, overshadowed by its vastly superior naval power. Furthermore, the motives of the United States diverged significantly from those of Britain. The British were intensely interested in expanding their already valuable trading links with independent Latin America — ties that would be jeopardized if Spain and its mercantilist policies were restored. Although Monroe was certainly aware of the commercial value of Latin America, he placed security and ideological considerations above economic interests when he framed his declaration. Although the Monroe Doctrine declared unilateral U.S. protection over the entire Western Hemisphere, the United States did not have the military or economic muscle to support such an ambitious policy at that time. Not surprisingly the European powers ignored the Doctrine when it suited them. However, by the end of the American Civil War (1861 – 1865), the United States had considerable military and economic resources at its disposal. In the first major application of the Monroe Doctrine, U.S. forces massed in 1867 on the Rio Grande River to support U.S. demands that France abandon its puppet regime in Mexico, headed by the Hapsburg prince, Maximilian. France eventually complied, marking a significant victory for U.S. coercive diplomacy.
The Maximilian affair demonstrated that the fortunes of the Monroe Doctrine were closely linked to the expansion of U.S. power. Indeed, as American industrial development and trading and investment ties with Latin America grew in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States became more willing not only to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, but also to add to its self-assumed rights and responsibilities. Latin America's subservience to the United States was amply demonstrated in 1904, when President Theodore Roosevelt (1901 – 1909) developed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries political, economic, and social instability plagued much of Latin America. In these perilous conditions, durable and enforceable economic transactions between Latin American and European parties often foundered. Latin American politicians frequently treated European investors capriciously, while European traders and bankers often cheated or exploited their Latin American customers. The European powers increasingly intervened to resolve disputes involving their nations, as when the dictator of Venezuela refused to honor debts owed to European citizens. In response, Germany and Britain blockaded Venezuelan ports and attacked Venezuelan harbor defenses and naval assets. Such incidents were the proximate cause of Roosevelt's decision to revise the Monroe Doctrine, although it is true that the American president was already disposed to expand American power whenever and wherever possible. The Roosevelt Corollary, which was included in a message to Congress in December 1904, reiterated that the Monroe Doctrine forbade European intervention in Latin American affairs. However, Latin American states had to honor their obligations to foreign nationals and governments. Roosevelt declared that the United States would act as hemispheric policeman, forcing Latin American governments to put their economic houses in order and pay their debts, eliminating the need for European intervention. Over the next three decades, U.S. forces took control of the governments and customs houses of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and most of Central America. Although this forceful intervention produced a measure of economic and political stability to the region, it aroused increased and intense resentment among the local populace, which viewed the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary as pretexts for the pursuit of U.S. interests in the region. The presidential administrations of Herbert Hoover (1929 – 1933) and Franklin Roosevelt (1933 – 1945) responded to brewing anti-U.S. nationalism. In 1930 the Hoover administration renounced the Roosevelt Corollary by declaring that the Monroe Doctrine did not justify U.S. intervention in the domestic affairs of Latin America, however turbulent they might be. For his part, Roosevelt withdrew American military forces from Central America and the Caribbean, replacing troops with the "Good Neighbor Policy." None of these new policies had an immediate and substantive impact on the U.S. tendency for unilateral intervention in Latin America. Rather, they marked a change in U.S. strategies and rhetoric. Thus when the Cold War began the United States moved to combat Soviet subversion in the region, both real and imagined. The United States sponsored a failed invasion of Cuba (1960); engineered the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973), and trained and armed counter-revolutionary forces in Nicaragua. When the end Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) removed the strategic rationale for intervention, U.S. policy began to move away its long-standing commitment to unilateralism. As the U.S. contemplated armed intervention in Haiti in 1994 to restore democratic government, it sought formal authorization from the United Nations. This dramatic embrace of multilateralism reflected the increased efforts of the United States during the 1990s to pursue both its ideals and its interests through international institutions, both regional (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and global (the United Nations, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, etc.) The question that remained unanswered at the beginning of the twenty-first century was whether the unilateralism of the Monroe Doctrine will revive — in whole or in part — if multilateralism failed to meet perceived American goals in Latin America. See also: General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, James Monroe, North American Free Trade Agreement
Cashman, Sean Dennis. America Ascendant: From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR in the Century of American Power, 1901 – 1945. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Dent, David W. The Legacy of the Monroe Doctrine: A Reference Guide to U.S. Involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Kinzer, Stephen and Stephen Z. Schlesinger. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Lafeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993. May, Ernest R. The Making of the Monroe Doctrine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Scott, James. After the End: Making US Foreign Policy in the Post – Cold War World. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Smith, Gaddis. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945 – 1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
although the monroe doctrine declared unilateral u.s. protection over the entire western hemisphere, the united states did not have the military or economic muscle to support such an ambitious policy at that time. not surprisingly the european powers ignored the doctrine when it suited them.Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History Cite this article
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Monroe Doctrine. In his message of 2 December 1823, President James Monroe articulated two principles that by the 1850s were regarded as the basis for the so‐called Monroe Doctrine. The first stipulated that the “American Continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European Power.” The second embodied Monroe's support for the newly independent Latin American republics by stating that the American and European political systems were “essentially different,” and that the United States would consider efforts by European nations “to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
James K. Polk, in the 1840s, was the first president to invoke Monroe's message as a form of policy justification, but his conduct did not immediately set a precedent. For much of the nineteenth century the Monroe Doctrine was ignored or violated far more than it was observed. U.S. acquiescence in such developments as the British occupation of the Falkland Islands (1833), British activities in the Central American isthmus throughout the 1850s, Spain's reannexation of Santo Domingo in 1861, and France's installation of a Bourbon monarch in Mexico in the 1860s were hardly in accord with the principles of 1823.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in response to rising concerns about European imperialism coupled with a more assertive sense of American nationalism, the United States began to invoke the Monroe Doctrine more consistently. This was particularly so in 1895, when the Cleveland administration insisted, successfully, that Great Britain submit to arbitration a long‐standing boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. On that occasion Secretary of State Richard Olney formulated the first major corollary to the 1823 message by asserting that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.”
After the turn of the century, the United States redefined the Monroe Doctrine in ways that were also intended to justify greater U.S. activity in the Americas. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt, anxious that financial malfeasance in the nations of Central America and the Caribbean might provoke intervention by European creditor nations, announced a second major corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to the effect that no American nation could use the doctrine “as a shield to protect it from the consequences of its own misdeeds against foreign nations.” In effect, this required the United States to intervene in the affairs of other American nations. Acting on this basis, the United States took over the management of the finances of the Dominican Republic (in 1907) and of Nicaragua (in 1911), and in 1915 it actually occupied the republic of Haiti.
The assumptions behind the “Roosevelt corollary,” although repudiated in the 1930s in favor of Franklin D. Roosevelt's “Good Neighbor” policy, continued to influence U.S. policy in the Americas through the 1980s. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson, U.S. presidents have sought to reconcile the regional principles of the doctrine with the increasingly global reach of their foreign policies. Worried about aggression from Nazi Germany, Franklin Roosevelt even expanded the doctrine to include both Canada and Greenland.
In the early years of the Cold War after 1945, the United States internationalized the democratic and noninterventionist principles of the Monroe Doctrine in the Truman Doctrine of 1947, while at the same time it preserved its regional hegemony in the Americas through the framework of the Rio Pact (1947) and the Organization of American States (1948). The concern to keep communism out of the Americas subsequently led to U.S. intervention in various forms in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), and Grenada (1983), as well as to active involvement in the insurgencies in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In each case the United States either overthrew, or attempted to overthrow, left‐wing regimes in order to replace them with dictatorial governments whose members supported U.S. priorities. Critics argued that these repressive governments violated the principles that Monroe had proclaimed in 1823.
The most serious crisis of the Monroe Doctrine occurred in Communist Cuba in 1962. As early as 1960, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev openly proclaimed that the Monroe Doctrine was dead. Two years later, Khrushchev installed intermediate‐range missiles on the island to protect Fidel Castro's regime. Throughout the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis, which was eventually resolved by the removal of the missiles, President John F. Kennedy did not invoke the Monroe Doctrine in defense of his actions, but concern for its traditions was never far from his mind.
Dexter Perkins , A History of the Monroe Doctrine , 1941; rev. ed. 1955.
Gaddis Smith , The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine 1945–1993 , 1994.
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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.
Dozer, Donald Marquand, ed. The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance. rev. ed. Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1976.
Merk, Frederick. The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843–1849. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.
Perkins, Dexter. A History of the Monroe Doctrine. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1963.
Smith, Gaddis. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
Charles M.Dobbs
See alsovol. 9:The Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary .
Dictionary of American History Dobbs, Charles M.Cite this article
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On December 23, 1823, in his annual message to Congress, President james monroe made a statement on foreign policy that came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. At that time the United States feared that Russia intended to establish colonies in Alaska and, more importantly, that the continental European states would intervene in Central and South America to help Spain recover its former colonies, which had won their independence in a series of wars in the early nineteenth century.
President Monroe announced that North and South America were closed to colonization, that the United States would not become involved in European wars or colonial wars in the Americas, and, most importantly, that any intervention by a European power in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere would be viewed by the United States as an unfriendly act against the United States.
Later presidents reiterated the Monroe Doctrine. In the early twentieth century, it was extended to justify U.S. intervention in the states of Latin America.
Fellow citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives:
Many important subjects will claim your attention during the present session, of which I shall endeavor to give, in aid of your deliberations, a just idea in this communication. I undertake this duty with diffidence, from the vast extent of the interests on which I have to treat and of their great importance to every portion of our Union. I enter on it with zeal from a thorough conviction that there never was a period since the establishment of our revolution when, regarding the condition of the civilized world and its bearing on us, there was greater necessity for devotion in the public servants to their respective duties, or for virtue, patriotism, and union in our constituents.
Source: James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 2 (1897), pp. 207–219.
Meeting in you a new Congress, I deem it proper to present this view of public affairs in greater detail than might otherwise be necessary. I do it, however, with peculiar satisfaction, from a knowledge that in this respect I shall comply more fully with the sound principles of our government. The people being with us exclusively the sovereign, it is indispensable that full information be laid before them on all important subjects, to enable them to exercise that high power with complete effect. If kept in the dark, they must be incompetent to it. We are all liable to error, and those who are engaged in the management of public affairs are more subject to excitement and to be led astray by their particular interests and passions than the great body of our constituents, who, living at home in the pursuit of their ordinary avocations, are calm but deeply interested spectators of events and of the conduct of those who are parties to them. To the people every department of the government and every individual in each are responsible, and the more full their information the better they can judge of the wisdom of the policy pursued and of the conduct of each in regard to it. From their dispassionate judgment much aid may always be obtained, while their approbation will form the greatest incentive and most gratifying reward for virtuous actions and the dread of their censure the best security against the abuse of their confidence. Their interests in all vital questions are the same, and the bond, by sentiment as well as by interest, will be proportionably strengthened as they are better informed of the real state of public affairs, especially in difficult conjunctures. It is by such knowledge that local prejudices and jealousies are surmounted, and that a national policy, extending its fostering care and protection to all the great interests of our Union, is formed and steadily adhered to….
At the proposal of the Russian imperial government, made through the minister of the emperor residing here, a full power and instructions have been transmitted to the minister of the United States at St. Petersburg to arrange by amicable negotiation the respective rights and interests of the two nations on the northwest coast of this continent. A similar proposal had been made by his imperial Majesty to the government of Great Britain, which has likewise been acceded to. The government of the United States has been desirous by this friendly proceeding of manifesting the great value which they have invariably attached to the friendship of the emperor and their solicitude to cultivate the best understanding with his government. In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers….
It was stated at the commencement of the last session that a great effort was then making in Spain and Portugal to improve the condition of the people of those countries, and that it appeared to be conducted with extraordinary moderation. It need scarcely be remarked that the result has been so far very different from what was then anticipated. Of events in that quarter of the globe, with which we have so much intercourse and from which we derive our origin, we have always been anxious and interested spectators. The citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow men on that side of the Atlantic. In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. In the war between those new governments and Spain, we declared our neutrality at the time of their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shall continue to adhere, provided no change shall occur which, in the judgment of the competent authorities of this government, shall make a corresponding change on the part of the United States indispensable to their security.
The late events in Spain and Portugal show that Europe is still unsettled. Of this important fact no stronger proof can be adduced than that the allied powers should have thought it proper, on any principle satisfactory to themselves, to have interposed by force in the internal concerns of Spain. To what extent such interposition may be carried, on the same principle, is a question in which all independent powers whose governments differ from theirs are interested, even those most remote, and surely none more so than the United States. Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none. But in regard to those continents, circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves in the hope that other powers will pursue the same course.