Is the monroe doctrine dead?10

Let me assure you that any report that you may have read concerning the death of the Monroe Doctrine was greatly exaggerated.

Carl Vinson, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Is the Monroe Doctrine outdated? Not by a long sight. It cannot be possibly regarded as dead. Has it been put in the hands of an inter-American committee? Or does it have the pristine vigor with which President James Monroe challenged the threats of banded European powers to recapture the colonies that had revolted against Spain? That is one of the questions posed by the Soviet presence in Cuba.

In 1825, President Monroe told the monarchs of the Holly Alliance “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”.

The doctrine worked – with the blessing of the British fleet. And when Napoleon III set up Archduke Maximilian an Emperor of Mexico during our Civil War, it worked again, this time supported by a 50,000 army of observation moved to the Mexican border, as soon as the war had ended.

President Cleveland vigorously invoked the Monroe Doctrine in 1895 against Britain in a dispute over the boundaries between British Guyana and Venezuela, and the British consented to put all the disputed territory under arbitration.

At this time Cleveland wrote that the doctrine “cannot become obsolete while our Republic endures”. Perhaps not – but it did change. Still its importance has been as great as that of any principle in America.

Originally the United States did not object, in theory, when European Nations resorted to debt collecting by force against defaulting Latin American states. But it did not fail to grasp the danger of such expeditions. The Caribbean became recognized as a particularly sensitive area, and President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 produced a variant on the doctrine, which became known as the Roosevelt (or Caribbean).

Flagrant cases of chronic wrongdoing or governmental impotence, said Roosevelt, may ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the western hemisphere the adherence of the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, to the exercise of an international police power. The power was exercised in a number of Caribbean nations – Cuba (where it was provided for by the treaty of 1903), Santo Domingo, Haiti and Nicaragua among them.

The idea of the United States as international policeman was, of course, not popular in Latin America, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating the nation “to the policy of the good neighbor”, moved rapidly toward the renunciation of “armed intervention”.

So the Americas moved by degrees toward common measures for defense and mutual assistance. In 1939, when the war broke out in Europe, the Act of Panama set up a neutral zone on the seas (sometimes called the Pan-American Security Zone, but more commonly “chastity belt”).

Measures for defense against the Axis powers were concerted (with some feet-dragging) and the destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain was billed as a measure for hemispheric protection.

With the war’s end, the hemisphere moved to a treaty of mutual defense and establishment of the Organization of American States. These provide for consultation and joint action. There has been rather more consultation than action.

Feeling against intervention, joint or single, is strong in Latin America, as well as fear of the Yankee “Colossus of the North”. Some are afraid lest it should apply the Monroe Doctrine independent of and even opposing the Charter of the United Nations.

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