On December 25, the Boston Globe published an article entitled "The Monroe Doctrine Will Not Die Easily", written by Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The following is an excerpt from the full text:
Over the course of 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has been hailed as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, while also being reviled as an instrument of imperialism.
In the absence of an explicit declaration, the United States has sought to turn the Monroe Doctrine into a global principle. Not only do we assert our right to intervene in places like Africa and the Middle East, but we also oppose other major powers doing the same. Today, we apply the Monroe Doctrine principle of "stand by and we will take care of it" to much of the world.
To mark this month's anniversary, members of Congress have introduced resolutions that proclaim the eternal value of the Monroe Doctrine. of the sponsors of these resolutions.
Republican Senator Pete Ricketts said, "For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has been a warning about foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere. These warnings are especially pertinent today in light of the current threats from hostile countries such as Russia and Iran. ”
Some Latin Americans disagree. According to the Mexican newspaper Yucatán**, the Monroe Doctrine began "against European colonialism, but it has been used throughout history to justify U.S. intervention in Latin America." The Dominican Republic columnist called the Monroe Doctrine "an expansionist policy aimed at protecting the economic interests of the United States in the Western Hemisphere."
John F. Kennedy** was asked to invoke this doctrine during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but he scoffed at the idea and asked, "What the hell is the Monroe Doctrine?"”
When Secretary of State John Kerry told West Point cadets in 2013 that "the Monroe Doctrine era is gone," the cadets cheered him loudly.
But wait, in 2018 when John Bolton, Trump's adviser, told Miami listeners that "the Monroe Doctrine will still prevail," he received an equally loud cheer.
Despite being called the Monroe Doctrine, it did not originate from the ideas of James Monroe**. His secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, feared at the time that European powers might seek to recapture their newly independent colonies in Latin America. So he secretly inserted a few lines into Monroe's 1823 year-end address to Congress. Monroe declared that Latin American countries "will henceforth no longer be regarded as colonized by any European power......We will see their attempts to apply their own system to any part of the Western Hemisphere as a threat to our peace and security".
In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt expanded this doctrine to the extreme. He asserted that the United States had the right to intervene in any Latin American country convicted of a "chronic crime" by the United States, even if the crime had nothing to do with external interference. In what came to be known as the "Roosevelt Corollary," he declared that "America's insistence on the Monroe Doctrine could compel the United States to exercise international police powers in the event of such crimes or omissions, however reluctantly."
Over the next 10 years, the declaration — not codified in international law or endorsed by any other country — was used as a justification for sending U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti.
In the years following World War I, the United States moved away from this kind of fanfare of power during the three conservative Republican terms. The United States announced in 1928 that it would no longer intervene in Latin America except to prevent the entry of foreign powers. This was the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt**'s later "good-neighborly" policy toward Latin America. At the time, the Monroe Doctrine was moribund.
The cold snap of the Cold War has revived it. At a Latin American conference in 1954, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles won a resolution authorizing the United States to launch a strike against any country ruled by the "international communist movement." Three months later, he used the resolution to plot the overthrow of the leftist in Guatemala.
The Monroe Doctrine is a classic discourse on the sphere of influence of a great power (i.e., the determination to influence the politics of neighboring countries). The United States, however, does not recognize the right of other powers to do so. For example, we condemn Iran's support for armed groups outside its borders. Many in Washington believe that the Monroe Doctrine is an ever-useful tool. This is widely validated in places south of the Rio Grande. If the United States had insisted on applying it to other continents, the response would not have been very different. (Compiled by Cao Weiguo).