After introducing the Donroe doctrine during a rambling news conference after the seizure of Nicolás Maduro, Trump promised that “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again”. A month earlier, the White House issued a celebratory announcement of the 203rd anniversary of the Monroe doctrine – not an anniversary noted by any previous administration, including Monroe’s. In his message, Trump announced: “I am proudly reasserting this time-honored policy.”
These announcements were followed in short order by the Maduro raid, and the threat to annex Greenland, which revealed an administration suddenly anxious over the foreign domination of this hemisphere (despite no evidence, in the Greenland case, of Russian or Chinese naval activity).
Except that Trump has read history incorrectly. Trump sees the Monroe doctrine as a military threat, a way to bully other superpowers out of the western hemisphere and plunder the Americas for any resources the US might want. But in its original formation, the Monroe doctrine was a statement of pan-American solidarity – much closer to Bad Bunny’s than Donald Trump’s.
The original doctrine, as written out by a visionary secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, is irreconcilable with the Trump administration’s interpretation of it. It was a plea to give the nations of South America a chance to develop democratic institutions of their own, away from the great powers of Europe. It was more about self-determination than dominance, and more about allies than Trump’s go-it-alone attitude. Specifically, it pulled together the United States and the United Kingdom, who only recently had been at war with each other. In its way, the Monroe doctrine showed just how much nations could accomplish when they stopped quarreling and worked toward the same ends.
There is almost a fun-house mirror quality to the way that the current version of the doctrine has been stretched out of all resemblance to the original. Words like “democracy” and “self-determination” were noticeably absent in the White House version, the Donroe doctrine. The 2 December statement was all about strength, claiming that the “mighty words” from 1823 marked the beginning of a “superpower unlike anything the world had ever known”. That statement overlooks the inconvenient fact that in 1823, the United States had no power to enforce its doctrine, and relied entirely on the British navy at a time when the American navy was a fraction the size of France’s.