‘The Monroe Doctrine’

‘Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America': A 200th-anniversary reminder that the era of the Monroe Doctrine is far from over.

President Cleveland twisting the tail of the British Lion; cartoon in Puck by J.S. Pughe, 1895. Public Domain

In 2013, then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. More on that in a bit.

James Monroe, America’s fifth president (1817–1825), learned statecraft from America’s first four presidents, and as the last of the Founding Fathers, Monroe carried obvious heft on matters of policy. So, the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine this year is as good a reason as any to read (or reread) historian Jay Sexton’s satisfying book “The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America.” Dexter Perkins’s early 20th century three-volume work on the doctrine is meant for historians. Mr. Sexton’s early 21st century effort brims with insight, is more of a political economic analysis, and is, comfortingly, more accessible.

James Monroe, 1819, by Samuel Finley Breese Morse. White House Historical Association. Public Domain

Monroe’s Dec. 2, 1823, State of the Union Address, which is 6,397 words long, dwelt on domestic issues, including the state of public finances. Yet its 954 words (three paragraphs) on foreign affairs, with ideas on republicanism, nonintervention, patriotism, anticolonialism, and nationalism provoke thought even today. In terms of sheer pluck, amid European monarchical and imperial dominance, it was, as Mr. Sexton puts it, akin to “the hitchhiker dictating directions to the driver.”

Mr. Sexton sums up the doctrine as one that “unilaterally asserted 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 colonization by any European powers.’” When America’s federalism was yet to establish itself, European intervention felt threatening because, Mr. Sexton says, Monroe “linked foreign dangers to internal vulnerabilities.” Colonial Europe’s roving eye might “inflame domestic conflict” threatening the union from within.

But Mr. Sexton warns against projecting modern understanding back onto early history because American nation-building of that era was too complex to capture through sweeping political theorizing; each state was almost a nation unto itself.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, one of the authors of the Monroe Doctrine, 1816, by Charles Robert Leslie. Public Domain

In method and message, the Monroe Doctrine was unique. Delivered to domestic audiences of squabbling states, still referring to themselves in the plural as “these United States,” it was also for international audiences. Outward facing but inward looking, it prohibited (outlined what Europe shouldn’t do) rather than prescribed (left unsaid what Europe should do). Its open-ended nature made it more an ethos than an event, a contested process that evolved, shaping America’s rise as the preeminent power of the 20th century.

What did this elasticity mean? To generations of Americans, the doctrine embodied fundamental principles of statecraft, even if they disagreed over its meaning, purpose, and application. Mr. Sexton cautions against referring to it in the singular: “There would be many Monroe Doctrines as foreign-policy perspectives.” Other countries fashioned their own versions to try and direct American power toward their objectives.

So, the Monroe Doctrine isn’t a tablet of stone, scrupulously followed by Monroe’s successors. It’s a living, breathing philosophy, absorbing and accommodating geopolitical changes, challenges, and compulsions. In a sense, Monroe didn’t create a “doctrine.” That would be left to later Americans, competing and arguing as they laid claim to the mantle of 1823. Besides, it was co-drafted by John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, and William Wirt. It was a product of collectively perceived threat and aspiration.

Americans had no intention, as Kentucky statesman Henry Clay feared in 1820, of remaining, as Mr. Sexton states, “independent colonies of England—politically free, commercially slaves.” What followed was a delicate balancing between Anglophobia and Anglophilia (anti-English versus pro-English) on one front and between union at home (states jostling in the wake of the American Revolution) and independence abroad. America’s foreign and domestic components were, as Mr. Sexton says, “halves of the same whole.”

In Victor Gillam's 1896 political cartoon, Uncle Sam stands with a rifle between the outrageously dressed European figures and the native-dress-wearing representatives of Nicaragua and Venezuela. Public Domain

Mr. Sexton explains that the doctrine shaped history bidirectionally. Horizontally, it became “American shorthand for a hemisphere (and, ultimately a world) cleared of the British Empire.” Vertically, it heralded America’s assertiveness in the global north.

Mr. Sexton clarifies that the final paragraph of the 1823 message “rarely considered part of the Monroe Doctrine, celebrated the American tradition of expansion” but stopped short of an overt call for expansion. Monroe’s successors, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, to name a few, interpreted the doctrine as a call for an aggressive or expansionist foreign policy. The Lincoln administration never invoked the doctrine with the British or the French but made clear that pro-Confederacy acts on their part would be considered hostile to America.

So, the doctrine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries owed more to the Civil War era than to, as Mr. Sexton states, “the increasingly distant world of 1823.” Over time, policymakers invoked it on behalf of policies that went beyond “the limited and ambiguous course articulated by Monroe himself.” What’s more, successive Senate debates linked it not with a political party or with specific individuals, but with a broader Americanism.

Jay Sexton, author of “The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America.” Hill and Wang

Eventually, this bred an explicitly interventionist Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, a version 2.0 of sorts, under Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. No one applauded that more than Britain, a vastly diminished 20th-century force, now spared responsibility as protector-defender, in a hemisphere it had no longer the power to police. A more assured America had taken on that mantle.

To Mr. Sexton, Roosevelt’s successors were less inhibited because regional instability had increased, and domestic constraints had decreased. And Mr. Sexton says that it was “none other than a Democratic president and apostle of self-determination, Woodrow Wilson, who ordered the most interventions of the era.” This proved true whether it was intervention in Mexico, Cuba, Latin America, or the Caribbean. As the 20th century wore on, the doctrine grew so exalted that the statesmen of 1823 became the diplomatic counterparts to the Founding Fathers of the 1787 Constitution.

A Doctrine for the 21st Century?

Mr. Sexton’s conclusion attempts to contemporize the document, albeit too briefly. Perhaps that’s for another book: how the Monroe Doctrine shaped and still shapes contemporary statecraft. Regardless, it would be wrong to imagine that it’s an anachronism, belonging only on the bookshelves of historians.

A Senate Foreign Relations Committee resolution introduced in October 2023 reaffirms the Monroe Doctrine as an “enduring principle of U.S. foreign policy.” It affirms “U.S. concerns about present-day Russian, Chinese, and Iranian malign influence in the Western Hemisphere … For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has warned foreign powers about meddling. … These warnings are particularly relevant today. … It is critical that the U.S. strengthens our regional cooperation with democratic neighbors to prevent our adversaries from spreading their malign influence.”

This resolution doesn’t wallow in platitudinal homage. Unlike the doctrine it salutes, the resolution calls for action, even as some pacifists are calling for a watering down, if not a rewriting, of the doctrine, and as some combative others are issuing a contrarian cry, for Russia and China to develop their own analog and to forbid U.S. presence on the continent of Eurasia.

Ten years after Mr. Kerry prematurely announced the obituary of the Monroe Doctrine, it appears that its time is far from over.

Cover of “The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America.” by Jay Sexton. Hill and Wang

‘The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America’ By Jay Sexton Hill and Wang, March 15, 2011 Hardcover: 304 pages

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