It’s Time to Bring Back the Monroe Doctrine

The United States has had a complicated relationship with Latin America. From sponsoring death squads to orchestrating coups for the financial interest of multinational corporations, the U.S. has a record of treating the region as its playground, with little regard for local institutions or the will and well-being of the people.

Given that history, many are in favor of seeing America withdraw from the region and focus on its own affairs — part of the growing movement against neocon global interventionism.

But every issue has its extremes, and just as serving as global policeman is detrimental to both the U.S. and the smaller nations we bully, so is the opposite extreme of total isolationism unwise.

The reality is that America has a legitimate interest in maintaining influence in Latin America — and in keeping the region free of rival foreign influences.

Specifically, the United States is right to seek to assert its influence in the Western Hemisphere over the growing presence of Russia — and especially of China.

As The New American has previously documented, the Russo-Chinese world order has worked assiduously to bring Latin American states such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, Brazil, and Argentina into its orbit through a combination of economic deals, financial handouts, and military partnerships.

Given that Russia and China have the avowed aim of shattering U.S. hegemony, the growing influence of those two states in our backyard is a clear threat to our national interests and national security.

Russia and China have plenty of apologists inside the United States who rebuke America for caring if those two states gain a foothold on this side of the world. Yet those apologists show their one-sided stripes in defending Russia and China’s claims to regional dominance. Why should Russia be conceded the right to flex itself in Ukraine and Crimea, and China in Taiwan and the South China Sea, but the U.S. not be allowed to do the same in Latin America?

After all, there are enormous national security implications to China creating alliances with our neighbors. Remember the immense threat the Cuban Missile Crisis posed to the nation? Imagine that scenario playing out again, with Chinese missiles on the Mexican side of the southern border pointing at Texas or Arizona.

President James Monroe, a founding father, was correct in articulating his Monroe Doctrine, which posits that foreign intervention in the Americas is a potentially hostile act against the United States.

As Monroe argued in an address to Congress in 1823, in words primarily authored by then-Vice President John Quincy Adams, the fifth president of the American Republic declared:

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.

… 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.

Some voices in America are beginning to realize the perilous situation in which the country is beginning to find itself as it loses ground in Latin America to China and Russia. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said on the presidential campaign trail that he advocates for a 21st-century Monroe Doctrine to counter China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere.

What exactly would a modern-day Monroe Doctrine look like?

The U.S. must place a renewed focus on cultivating partnerships with key states, building mutual interests and winning their favor away from Beijing and Moscow. While America should be weary of engaging in the same kind of violent regime change in the region that has earned it much scorn over the last century, it should be willing to implement the principles of unrestricted warfare that China has so successfully used, using information warfare and leveraging institutions of influence to make Latin American states more amenable to the United States.

Finally, America should be willing to flex its military might, as Beijing has repeatedly done in the South China Sea, to make clear that it will not tolerate any form of military presence on this side of the world.