Monroe Doctrine

• 1. Introduction

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  The Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy position that has shaped the fate of nations across two continents for more than two centuries. On the 2nd of December 1823, President James Monroe stood before Congress and delivered his seventh annual State of the Union address. Buried within its diplomatic language was a warning to the world: the Americas were closed to further European colonization, and any attempt to extend European power into the hemisphere would be treated as a hostile act against the United States itself.

  What makes this declaration so remarkable is the gap between its ambition and the power behind it. When Monroe spoke those words, the United States had neither a credible navy nor a significant army. The European empires that Monroe was warning off controlled far more of the American continent than the young republic ever had. The man who actually wrote much of the doctrine was not Monroe at all, but his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, a future president in his own right.

  The name "Monroe Doctrine" did not even exist until 1850, more than two decades after the speech. And yet this unnamed, largely unenforceable declaration would go on to justify military interventions across Latin America, a confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a 2025 National Security Strategy that still invokes Monroe's words by name. How did a speech that the world initially ignored become the cornerstone of American grand strategy? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Adams and the Origins

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  John Quincy Adams was the chief architect of the doctrine's text, and understanding him is essential to understanding what the doctrine was actually meant to do. As secretary of state, Adams was working within a world transformed by the Napoleonic Wars, which had run from 1803 to 1815. In their aftermath, Prussia, Austria, and Russia formed the Holy Alliance to defend monarchism across Europe, and the alliance authorized military incursions to restore Bourbon rule over Spain and its colonies.

  Alexander Hamilton, writing in The Federalist Papers decades before Monroe's speech, had already wanted the United States to become strong enough to keep European powers out of the Americas. Hamilton expected the country to act one day as an intermediary between European powers and newly independent states nearby. That vision was still far from reality in 1823, but Adams gave it formal shape.

  Britain plays a quietly crucial role in this story. British foreign policy was compatible with the doctrine's general objectives because Britain's fast-growing industries needed markets in Latin America. If the newly independent Spanish colonies were reconquered, British merchants would be locked out by Spanish mercantilist policies. Britain even offered to issue a joint statement with the United States, but the U.S. declined, partly because of the recent War of 1812 and partly due to a separate provocation: the Russian Ukase of 1821, which asserted Russian rights over the Pacific Northwest and barred non-Russian ships from its coast. Adams crafted a response that addressed all of these pressures at once, laying the groundwork for a doctrine that was more about American security than Latin American liberation.

• 3. Words Without Force

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  Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria was furious when Monroe's address reached Europe. He wrote privately that it was a "new act of revolt" that would give "new strength to the apostles of sedition" across the continent. His anger, however, did not translate into compliance, because Metternich and the other European chancellors quickly grasped what Monroe's speech could not hide: the United States had no real military muscle.

  For much of the 19th century, it was the Royal Navy, not the U.S. Navy, that enforced the doctrine's spirit. Britain did so not out of solidarity but out of commercial self-interest, as part of the wider Pax Britannica policy that included defending freedom of the seas. In early 1833, Britain reasserted sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, a direct violation of the doctrine, and the United States took no action. Historian George C. Herring wrote that this inaction "confirmed Latin American and especially Argentine suspicions of the United States."

  The limits became even clearer between 1838 and 1850, when the French navy, and then a combined British and French force, blockaded the Río de la Plata of Argentina. Again, Washington did nothing. The doctrine was invoked selectively and inconsistently, and Latin American leaders noticed. In 1826, Simón Bolívar called the First Pan-American meeting in Panama. John A. Crow, author of The Epic of Latin America, records that Bolívar and his allies saw the Monroe Doctrine as nothing more than "a tool of national policy", never intended as a charter for joint hemispheric action. Diego Portales, a Chilean businessman and government minister, put it bluntly in a private letter: "But we have to be very careful: for the Americans of the north, the only Americans are themselves".

• 4. The Doctrine Finds Its Teeth

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  France gave the doctrine its first real test of strength. In 1862, forces under Napoleon III invaded and conquered Mexico, placing the Austrian archduke Maximilian I on a puppet throne. Washington denounced the invasion as a violation of the doctrine but could do nothing because the American Civil War was consuming the country's military. This episode was the first time Monroe's statement was widely called a "doctrine" at all.

  Once the Civil War ended in 1865, the United States moved quickly. Secretary of State William H. Seward helped persuade Napoleon III to withdraw his forces, and Mexican nationalists then captured and executed Maximilian. In 1868, Seward proclaimed that the "Monroe doctrine, which eight years ago was merely a theory, is now an irreversible fact."

  The Venezuelan crisis of 1895 became what one account describes as "one of the most momentous episodes in the history of Anglo-American relations." Venezuela hired former U.S. ambassador William Lindsay Scruggs to argue that Britain was violating the doctrine in a territorial dispute over the Essequibo region. Secretary of State Richard Olney, acting for President Grover Cleveland, sent Britain a note on the 20th of July 1895 stating that "The United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury objected sharply, but by eventually stepping back, Britain tacitly acknowledged U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. The arbitration tribunal, sitting in Paris, issued its final decision on the 3rd of October 1899: Britain received almost 90% of the disputed territory and all of the gold mines, a result that bitterly disappointed Venezuela. But the episode had established something more consequential: the U.S. as a genuine hemispheric power willing to confront a European empire directly.

• 5. Roosevelt's Corollary

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  Theodore Roosevelt transformed the doctrine from a shield into a sword. Before he became president, Roosevelt had used the doctrine's logic to justify supporting Cuba's fight for independence from Spain in 1898. The resulting Spanish-American War ended with a peace treaty requiring Spain to cede Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the United States in exchange for $20 million.

  The Venezuela crisis of 1902-1903, in which Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuela over unpaid debts, convinced Roosevelt that the United States needed a more muscular policy. In 1904, he added the Roosevelt Corollary to the doctrine, asserting the right of the U.S. to intervene in Latin America in cases of what he called "flagrant and chronic wrongdoing" to prevent European creditors from doing so themselves. This was also called the big stick ideology, after Roosevelt's famous phrase, "speak softly and carry a big stick".

  Argentine foreign minister Luis María Drago had proposed an alternative approach on the 29th of December 1902: no European power should ever use force to collect a debt from an American nation. Roosevelt rejected Drago's principle outright, declaring that the U.S. did not guarantee any state against punishment if it "misconducts itself". The distinction matters: Drago was defending Latin American sovereignty; Roosevelt was claiming the right to police it.

  What followed was a wave of direct military interventions. U.S. marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1935, the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, and Nicaragua in two separate stretches between 1912 and 1933. The Platt Amendment effectively made Cuba a U.S. protectorate, granting Washington the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and the authority to lease land for naval bases, including Guantánamo Bay. Critics called the United States a "hemispheric policeman"; Christopher Coyne has argued that the Corollary began the second phase of what he terms "American Liberal Empire".

• 6. From Good Neighbor to Cold War

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  Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy of 1933 marked a genuine shift in tone. The U.S. affirmed a new interpretation of the doctrine, co-founding the Organization of American States and moving toward multilateralism and non-intervention. The Clark Memorandum, written on the 17th of December 1928 by Calvin Coolidge's undersecretary of state J. Reuben Clark and officially released in 1930, had helped lay the groundwork by arguing that the Roosevelt Corollary was not actually sanctioned by the Monroe Doctrine.

  World War II then stretched the doctrine's geography in unexpected directions. When Germany occupied Denmark, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine to occupy Greenland, preventing its use as a German base. A 1940 national survey had found that 81% of Americans supported defending Canada, with support dropping to 59% for Greenland. The U.S. military stayed in Greenland after the war, and by 1948 Denmark had abandoned attempts to persuade it to leave. As of 2025, the U.S. Space Force maintains Pituffik Space Base on the island.

  The Cold War ended the Good Neighbor era. As Soviet influence spread, the United States argued that communism represented exactly the kind of foreign power the Monroe Doctrine was designed to exclude. At a news conference on the 29th of August 1962, President John F. Kennedy stated that the doctrine meant the U.S. would "oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere" and explicitly connected this to events in Cuba. Weeks later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy cited the doctrine as legal grounds for confronting the Soviet Union over the installation of ballistic missiles on Cuban soil. CIA director Robert Gates defended the covert training of Contra guerrillas in Honduras in 1984 by arguing that abandoning the operation would mean abandoning the Monroe Doctrine entirely.

• 7. Criticism and the Doctrine's Shadow

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  Historian Jay Sexton has observed that the tactics used to implement the doctrine were modeled after those of European imperial powers during the 17th and 18th centuries. American historian William Appleman Williams described the doctrine as a form of "imperial anti-colonialism": it opposed European empire while building an American one. Noam Chomsky has argued that the doctrine functioned in practice as a declaration of hegemony and a right to unilateral intervention.

  Latin American intellectuals developed their own critique from within. After 1898, jurists in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, including Luis María Drago, Alejandro Álvarez, and Baltasar Brum, worked to reinterpret the doctrine in terms of multilateralism. They proposed an alternative history as well, attributing the non-colonization principle to Manuel Torres rather than to Monroe. Their interpretation gained official U.S. endorsement only with Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, and even then it did not last.

  Australia offers a striking parallel. In the early 1900s, Australia's opposition to threatening powers in the Pacific islands was described by figures including Otto von Bismarck and Billy Hughes as an "Australasian Monroe Doctrine" or "Pacific Monroe Doctrine". The comparison resurfaced in the 2020s as Australia shifted its attention to Chinese influence in Pacific island nations.

  In November 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States that the "era of the Monroe Doctrine is over." Several commentators noted that Kerry's vision of mutual partnership was actually closer to what James Monroe himself had in mind than most of what came after. The 2025 National Security Strategy tells a different story: it called on the United States to "reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere", and announced a formal "Trump Corollary" to accompany it. Following the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a January 2026 raid, President Trump claimed the action as an application of the doctrine, giving it a new name: the "Donroe Doctrine".