The good, the bad, and the ugly of the Monroe Doctrine

On 2 December 1823, James Monroe indissolubly linked his name with US foreign policy. This was the day on which the ‘Era of Good Feelings’ president delivered his seventh annual message to Congress, enshrining the principles of anti-colonialism, non-interventionism and the non-transfer of colonial possessions in a doctrine.

Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria called it a ‘memorable promise’. Over time, Americans read it as ‘holy writ’. Others scoffed. The Monroe Doctrine, Otto von Bismarck growled, ‘is a species of arrogance peculiarly American and inexcusable’. From the Iron Chancellor’s vantage, Americans neither possessed the military capabilities to enforce the doctrine nor coherently interpreted it. Granted, British naval power upheld Monroe’s proclamation until the 1890s, and Monroe’s successors selectively deployed it. Since December 1823, however, the Monroe Doctrine has uniquely captured the American mind, becoming the great tenet of US statecraft.

The Monroe Doctrine has endured for over three quarters of America’s lifespan and shaped the nation’s role in the Western Hemisphere. Through its adherence to the doctrine, the United States has defined itself as the ‘good neighbour’, the ‘bad neighbour’, and the ‘ugly neighbour’. At its best, the United States has fostered effective hemispheric defence and Pan-American cooperation. At its worst, the United States has engaged in unilateral interventions and half-hearted imperialism. At its ugliest, the United States has sacrificed ideals for national security, resulting in those tragic times when its national interest could not be reconciled with ‘the spirit of 1823’.

Creating a distinctive politico-geographical system where New World republics prospered free from Old World predations proved rhetorically easy but practically hard. The Monroe Doctrine’s full potential was only realised a century after its enunciation. The interwar years set the stage. The Marines briefly returned to Honduras and Nicaragua to restore order, but Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover ultimately reduced US forces in Central America and the Caribbean. Hoover, for his part, engineered America’s exit from Nicaragua and Haiti, even releasing the Clark Memorandum to repudiate the Roosevelt Corollary. The United States also participated in over three dozen hemisphere-related conferences. At the Sixth International Conference of American States in Havana, Cuba, Coolidge promoted self-government, peace and deeper inter-American integration. Or, as the New York Times headline flashed: ‘New World Ties Put First.’

Constructing Pan-Americanism transcended administrations. President Franklin D. Roosevelt accelerated Republican trends, but he pursued his own style of diplomatic, economic and military initiatives. He envisioned a new hemisphere before reaching the presidency. His 1929 article in Foreign Affairs denounced the interventionism of his Progressive forebears, and his 1932 Democratic National Platform called for ‘cooperation with Nations of the Western Hemisphere to maintain the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine’. In office, Roosevelt orchestrated his hemispheric vision with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. Their ‘Good Neighbour’ approach was an especially good idea once a world war loomed.

The Good Neighbour Policy rejected American unilateralism, fostered Latin American buy-in, and transformed the Monroe Doctrine into a collaborative framework for hemispheric defence. At the 1933 Pan-American Conference, Roosevelt conjured the doctrine’s spirit to formally renounce the right of unilateral intervention, a convention that the 1936 Buenos Aires protocol reinforced. His administration repealed the Platt Amendment on Cuba, ended the Haitian occupation, and revised America’s treaty with Panama. He brokered new trade agreements and undertook personal visits to strengthen regional ties. The New Dealer even deftly managed Mexico’s nationalisation of its oil industry to rescue his preparations for war. In sum, Roosevelt’s diplomatic and economic policies produced the trust, networks and institutional habits that enabled rapid wartime mobilisation.

Building security, solidarity and stability in the Western Hemisphere necessitated tact and strategic thinking. Roosevelt demonstrated each in responding to the Axis threat. The arsenal of democracy and the Monroe Doctrine, he argued, were inseparable. The United States, in turn, fashioned a perimeter of hemispheric defence that ranged from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, extending out to Greenland and the Galápagos Islands. Roosevelt’s dominant hemisphere-wide military posture inspired the current strategic map. The Department of War’s concept of Greater North America, which spans from Greenland to the Andes Mountains, owes much to it. In the end, the Good Neighbour policy served both idealistic and hard power aims. The Western Hemisphere was never more cohesive.

The excesses and mistakes are legion. The Monroe Doctrine’s negative connotations mostly derive from the interventionist manifestations of the Roosevelt Corollary. James K. Polk had used the doctrine in his bid for westward expansion. But Franklin’s distant cousin, Theodore, established a corollary premised on American responsibility for hemispheric order, transforming the United States from bodyguard into police officer. Despite the notoriety, however, Roosevelt conducted two interventions of note: operating the Dominican custom houses and installing the Provisional Government in Cuba under the Platt Amendment.

Still, the Progressive Era witnessed gunboat diplomacy and the doctrine’s coercive edge. Indeed, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson exemplified ‘bad neighbours’. The United States sent its armed forces into Latin America and the Caribbean nearly 20 times from Taft’s administration until the advent of the Good Neighbour era, including Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama.

The history of the Monroe Doctrine reveals an unpleasant aspect of American power. Statecraft is tragic: policymakers act in shades of grey. Forced to choose between ideals and security, decision-makers will elect the latter, often betraying both in the process, leading to unintended consequences. As historians, we must carefully reconstruct those decisions, not because we extract a morality tale, but because we profit from understanding both the beliefs that drove policymakers and why they made their choices.

Cold War calculations defiled the doctrine under grim circumstances. Preventing communism in the Western Hemisphere resulted in the United States supporting right-wing dictatorships, arming anti-communist guerrillas and precipitating coups. Contested and controversial, these familiar episodes remain lightning rods in the historiography. Although the well-known covert operations in Guatemala and Chile invite continuous debate, Lyndon Johnson’s Operation Power Pack in the Dominican Republic and Ronald Reagan’s Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada deserve further scholarly inquiry. Moreover, Reagan’s Central American policy, as much as Cuba’s revolutionary foreign policy, demands critical re-examination. Simplistic narratives of Yankee imperialism do not suffice in the context of legitimate extra- and intra-hemispheric threats. 

Belief in the Monroe Doctrine is an inescapable reflection of the American psyche. Enforcing the great American tenet has defined US superpowerdom. In October 1962, the world itself went to the brink over the doctrine in the Caribbean. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy and his advisers debated whether to invoke the doctrine explicitly against the Soviet Union as a catalyst for action. In retrospect, perhaps these were peculiar conversations to hold amid a nuclear standoff. But such deliberations in an apocalyptic crisis bring the doctrine’s true nature to the fore.

Would the United States have behaved any differently over the last two centuries if the Monroe Doctrine had never been conceived? Unlikely. America resides in the Americas, where American identity and interests are eternally bound, lest tectonic forces intervene. The United States has been the ‘good neighbour’, the ‘bad neighbour’, and the ‘ugly neighbour’, all of which tell a history of promise and peril.