This just in from Charles Edel, a longtime Team Mead associate now a Ph.D. candidate at Yale.
It’s the anniversary of the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, one of the big moments in the history of American foreign policy, and since Charlie has been studying this history very closely of late, I thought it would make sense to ask him for some thoughts for the day. Here they are:
As Walter noted on an earlier blog posting, today marks the 150th Anniversary of one of the biggest challenges to U.S. authority–John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. It also happens to be 183rd Anniversary of one of the biggest assertions of American authority–the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, several paragraphs inserted into the text of President James Monroe’s 1823 Message to Congress, proclaimed the Western Hemisphere off limits to further European encroachment and marked it out as an American sphere of influence. While the strategy announced in the message was toothless at the time–the United States did not have a credible deterrent to enforce the doctrine–its significance on the course of American history was profound and is worth remembering. Invoked by Presidents from Polk through Kennedy, Monroe’s Doctrine shaped the official policy of the country for more than a century. What’s more, its blend of realistic assessment of world politics and aspirational hopes for the United States’ future suggests some valuable lessons about how best to combine principles with policies.
The origins of the famous doctrine came about from an unlikely source. George Canning, the British Prime Minister, wondered if the U.S. would work together with England to oppose attempts by authoritarian European governments to crush the republican revolutions breaking out in the former Spanish colonies in the Western hemisphere. Testing the waters, Canning asked Richard Rush, the U.S. minister in London, “What do you thing your Government would say to going hand in hand with England in such a policy?” President Monroe wanted to accept this proposal. He asked his old mentors, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both lifelong Anglophobes, if they should join up with Great Britain. Yes, they both said. In fact, Jefferson argued that England’s proposal was the most significant event since the American Revolution and Madison, back to flights of Jeffersonian idealism, argued that teaming up with their former enemy to oppose intervention in the Western Hemisphere was “due to ourselves and to the world.” But, John Quincy Adams, America’s truculent Secretary of State, argued against “going hand in hand” with the British. Why?
First and foremost, Adams was absolutely opposed to placing the U.S. at the head of a global crusade against tyranny. In modern terminology, Adams was the opposite of a neoconservative. He was worried that overly broad commitments to advancing republicanism would entangle the US in foreign fights it had no business in. Adams wasn’t one to mine words. At the Cabinet meeting discussing the British proposal, he stated that “it would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”
But, Adams was not just a realist. He was also an idealist who possessed a judgment about the course of history; “The influence of our example has unsettled all the ancient governments of Europe. It will overthrow them all without a single exception.” In other words, the US did not need to impose democracy at the point of a gun. The power of its example was enough. The historian Felix Gilbert wrote that “America has wavered in her foreign policy between Idealism and Realism, and her great historical moments have occurred when both were combined.” This was one of them.
There were three main points in the Monroe Doctrine: Neutrality, Non-Intervention, and Anti-colonization. The first applied to America’s interactions in Europe’s affairs; the latter two to European designs on the Western Hemisphere. Taken to their logical and most forceful conclusions, these ideas meant that it was not enough to keep European power out of America; the U.S. would have to expand to preempt any Europeans bids for influence. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine in 1845, President James Polk used it to promote the United States’ aggressive territorial expansion. Claiming that present circumstances warranted an occasion “to reiterate and reaffirm the principle avowed by Mr. Monroe,” Polk continued that “it should be distinctly announced to the world as our settled policy, that no future European colony or dominion shall, with our consent, be planted or established on any part of the North American continent.” In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt would take this idea one step further, advocating that “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation.” The justification for this was “adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine.”
These subsequent transformations of Adams’ strategy were neither foreseen nor intended by Adams. But ideas have power. In this case, Adams’ vision of the United States’ long-term interests and his strategy for how to counter the various threats arrayed against those interests shaped the official policy of the country and set the U.S. on a path to continental expansion and hemispheric dominion. In so doing, they changed the landscape of both America and its foreign policy