The Monroe Doctrine

DEC 02 1823 · 12:00

Samuel F. B. Morse, portrait of President James Monroe (1819). Place: Washington, D.C. Figures: James Monroe, US President · John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, principal drafter · George Canning, British Foreign Secretary, the silent enabler Adams Writes for Monroe The Spanish American republics, independent since the 1810s, are nominally unrecognized by the Holy Alliance, which has spent the Congress era (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) suppressing liberal revolts in Italy and Spain. Rumors circulate in 1823 that France, fresh from restoring Ferdinand VII in Madrid, may turn next to the Americas. Canning proposes a joint Anglo-American declaration against any such intervention. Adams talks Monroe out of it: a joint declaration would tie the United States to British policy. A unilateral declaration commits the United States to nothing it does not already wish to do. On 2 December 1823, Monroe's seventh annual message to Congress contains, scattered across several paragraphs, what later generations will read as a single doctrine. The Western Hemisphere is closed to further European colonization. Any attempt by a European power to extend its system to any portion of this hemisphere will be regarded as dangerous to our peace and safety. In exchange the United States will not interfere in existing European colonies or in the internal affairs of Europe itself. Words First, Navy Later The doctrine in 1823 is rhetorical. The US Navy has perhaps a dozen frigates; the Royal Navy, which actually keeps the European powers out of the Americas, has roughly six hundred warships. For the first half-century the doctrine works because British interests align with American ones: London wants Latin American markets open, not reabsorbed into closed Iberian empires. By the 1890s the calculation reverses. The Venezuela boundary crisis of 1895 sees Secretary of State Olney inform Britain that the United States is practically sovereign on this continent. Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 corollary adds an interventionist right: the United States may itself intervene in Latin American states whose internal disorder might invite European involvement. The Westphalian principle (sovereign equality among states) is now modified for one hemisphere by a single regional hegemon. The Concert of Europe's right of intervention against revolution has been transplanted to the New World with the polarity reversed. Video: The doctrine's enforcement puzzle: a US Navy of a dozen frigates, a Royal Navy that quietly aligned with the policy for fifty years.