https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-monroe-doctrine-is-200-and-should-not-reach-201/
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 17, 2023;
reprinted with permission.
David Swanson is the author of the new book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace It With.
The Monroe Doctrine was and is a justification for actions, some good, some indifferent, but the overwhelming bulk reprehensible. The Monroe Doctrine remains in place, both explicitly and dressed up in novel language. Additional doctrines have been built on its foundations.
Here are the words of the Monroe Doctrine, as carefully selected from President James Monroe’s State of the Union Address 200 years ago on December 2, 1823:“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.”
These were the words later labeled the “Monroe Doctrine.”
They were lifted from a speech that said a great deal in favor of peaceful
negotiations with European governments, while celebrating as beyond question
the violent conquering and occupying of what the speech called the
“uninhabited” lands of North America. Neither of those topics was new. What was
new was the idea of opposing further colonization of the Americas by Europeans
on the basis of a distinction between the bad governance of European nations
and the good governance of those in the American continents. This speech, even
while repeatedly using the phrase “the civilized world” to refer to Europe and
those things created by Europe, also draws a distinction between the type of
governments in the Americas and the less-desirable type in at least some
European nations. One can find here the ancestor of the recently advertised war
of democracies against autocracies.
The Doctrine of Discovery — the idea that a European nation
can claim any land not yet claimed by other European nations, regardless of
what people already live there — dates back to the fifteenth century and the
Catholic church. But it was put into U.S. law in 1823, the same year as
Monroe’s fateful speech. It was put there by Monroe’s lifelong friend, U.S.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. The United States considered itself,
perhaps alone outside of Europe, as possessing the same discovery privileges as
European nations. (Perhaps coincidentally, in December 2022 almost every nation
on Earth signed an agreement to set aside 30% of the Earth’s land and sea for
wildlife by the year 2030. Exceptions: the United States and the Vatican.)
In cabinet meetings leading up to Monroe’s 1823 State of the
Union, there was much discussion of adding Cuba and Texas to the United States.
It was generally believed that these places would want to join. This was in
line with these cabinet members’ common practice of discussing expansion, not
as colonialism or imperialism, but as anti-colonial self-determination. By
opposing European colonialism, and by believing that anyone free to choose
would choose to become part of the United States, these men were able to
understand imperialism as anti-imperialism.
We have in Monroe’s speech a formalization of the idea that
“defense” of the United States includes defense of things far from the United
States that the U.S. government declares an important “interest” in. This
practice continues explicitly, normally, and respectably to this day. The “2022
National Defense Strategy of the United States,” to take one example of
thousands, refers consistently to defending U.S. “interests” and “values,”
which are described as existing abroad and including allied nations, and as
being distinct from the United States or the “homeland.” This was not brand new
with the Monroe Doctrine. Had it been, President Monroe could not have stated
in the same speech that, “the usual force
has been maintained in the Mediterranean Sea, the Pacific
Ocean, and along the Atlantic coast, and has afforded the necessary protection
to our commerce in those seas.” Monroe, who had bought the Louisiana Purchase
from Napoleon for President Thomas Jefferson, had later expanded U.S. claims
westward to the Pacific and in the first sentence of the Monroe Doctrine was
opposing Russian colonization in a part of North America far removed from the
western border of Missouri or Illinois. The practice of treating anything
placed under the vague heading of “interests” as justifying war was
strengthened by the Monroe Doctrine and later by the doctrines and practices
built on its foundation.
We also have, in the language surrounding the Doctrine, the
definition as a threat to U.S. “interests” of the possibility that “the allied
powers should extend their political system to any portion of either [American]
continent.” The allied powers, the Holy Alliance, or the Grand Alliance, was an
alliance of monarchist governments in Prussia, Austria, and Russia, which stood
for the divine right of kings, and against democracy and secularism. Weapons
shipments to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia in 2022, in the name of
defending democracy from Russian autocracy, are part of a long and mostly
unbroken tradition stretching back to the Monroe Doctrine. That Ukraine may not
be much of a democracy, and that the U.S. government arms, trains, and funds
the militaries of most of the most oppressive governments on Earth are
consistent with past hypocrisies of both speech and action. The slaveholding
United States of Monroe’s day was even less of a democracy than is today’s
United States. The Native American governments that go unmentioned in Monroe’s
remarks, but which could look forward to being destroyed by Western expansion
(some of which governments had been as much an inspiration for the creation of
the U.S. government as had anything in Europe), were often more democratic than
the Latin American nations Monroe was claiming to defend but which the U.S.
government would often do the opposite of defending.
Those weapons shipments to Ukraine, sanctions against
Russia, and U.S. troops based throughout Europe are, at the same time, a
violation of the tradition supported in Monroe’s speech of staying out of
European wars even if, as Monroe said, Spain “could never subdue” the
anti-democratic forces of that day. This isolationist tradition, long
influential and successful, and still not eliminated, was largely undone by
U.S. entry into the first two world wars, since which time U.S. military bases,
as well as the U.S. government’s understanding of its “interests,” have never
left Europe. Yet in 2000, Patrick Buchanan ran for U.S. president on a platform
of supporting the Monroe Doctrine’s demand for isolationism and avoidance of
foreign wars.
The Monroe Doctrine also advanced the idea, still very much
alive today, that a U.S. president, rather than the U.S. Congress, can
determine where and over what the United States will go to war — and not just a
particular immediate war, but any number of future wars. The Monroe Doctrine
is, in fact, an early example of the all-purpose “authorization for the use of
military force” pre-approving any number of wars, and of the phenomenon much
beloved by U.S. media outlets today of “drawing a red line.” As tensions grow
between the United States and any other country, it has been common for years
for the U.S. media to insist that the U.S. president “draw a red line”
committing the United States to war, in violation not only of the treaties that
ban warmaking, and not only of the idea expressed so well in the same speech
that contains the Monroe Doctrine that the people should decide the course of
the government, but also of the Constitutional bestowal of war powers on the
Congress. Examples of demands for and insistence on following through on “red
lines” in U.S. media include the ideas that:
President Barack Obama would launch a major war on Syria if
Syria used chemical weapons,
President Donald Trump would attack Iran if Iranian proxies
attacked U.S. interests,
President Biden would directly attack Russia with U.S.
troops if Russia attacked a NATO member.
David Swanson is the author of the new book The Monroe
Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace It With.
No comments:
Post a Comment