Today's Social Studies test has only one True/False question:
The Monroe Doctrine is the international accord that declares that the United States has the sole authority for law enforcement in the Western Hemisphere. It may, at its discretion impose its authority on countries there, "up to and including" regime change.
- True
- False
Thanks for your contribution, Janet. I must admit that I had not heard of an explicitly stated 'Roosevelt Corollary' until reading your response here ... but it clearly reflects the change in our international behavior between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The only major instance that comes to mind of the US invoking the Monroe Doctrine before the 1890s was after the end of the Civil War, when Napoleon III chose to abandon Mexico, rather than face a newly 'united' United States - leaving his puppet 'Emperor' Maximillian, and wife Carlota to their fates.
Teddy, though, was a died-in-the wool imperialist, and played a part in creating a whole new wave of interventions. Even before he was president, his 'invisible hands' helped guide the US into the Spanish-American War, which netted us Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, among other spots, and made us a global power, and a Western Hemisphere hegemon. The Corollary would just be a statement of the reality he had played a part in creating.
POOR LINDSEY!
Since the Trump Administration began using the US military to sink boats in the Caribbean Sea, off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia, I have wondered how long it would be before somebody would cite the 'Monroe Doctrine' as justification.
Sure enough, last Sunday, Lindsey Graham—in his continuing futile effort win the love and respect from Trump and the others who will never offer him either—went on the Sunday morning talking head programs to defend sinking boats in international waters, killing those on board.
In addition to justifying murder on the high seas of people who are merely suspected of a crime, little Leslie cited the Monroe Doctrine as our authority to act. He gets away with this, because those who pay attention to him really have only a faint notion of what the Monroe Doctrine is, and what it is NOT.
For background, the Monroe Doctrine was a statement made by the James Monroe administration in 1823, stating that the Western Hemisphere was no longer "to be considered for future colonization by any European powers...". In exchange, the U.S. pledged not to interfere in European conflicts or with existing European colonies.
That was pretty much it - a statement of policy, and a flexing of muscles by a still young republic.
This was never a treaty, and has no standing in international law. No other countries signed on to it; nobody else was even consulted - not even the (mainly Latin-) American countries it purported to protect from colonization. It was just a line of chalk on the globe, demarcating the sides of the playground.
Nearly from inception, the Monroe Doctrine has been stretched and abused by United States to create a hegemonic rule over Latin America. Though it never gave even tacit approval for us to intervene outside our borders, successive administrations have used it to justify support for, or opposition to, governments throughout this hemisphere - in support for US companies as diverse as copper extraction to United Fruit Company (think 'banana republic'). These abuses of international law
Graham spoke of the victims of these attacks as though they were tried, convicted and sentenced to death. and defended killing them without warning, or any attempt to stop their activities short of extrajudicial execution. In response to the characterization of these attacks as murder, little Lindsey responded as though the pilots were being accused of murder, rather than those issuing the orders.
