The Monroe Doctrine Is Not Dead

Secretary of State Kerry gave a speech saying the Monroe Doctrine was over, by which he meant it is currently fashionable to speak in non-interventionist terms while retaining the prerogative to intervene. As long as security remains a critical part of U.S. foreign policy, then some version of the Monroe Doctrine will persist.

We can, however, publicly pretend it is not there. From the speech:

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans visit Havana, and hundreds of millions of dollars in trade and remittances flow from the United States to Cuba. We are committed to this human interchange, and in the United States we believe that our people are actually our best ambassadors. They are ambassadors of our ideals, of our values, of our beliefs.

I wonder what the response was in the room as he said this? The United States is committed to the precise opposite of what he claims. If the U.S. did not consider itself a hemispheric police officer, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt's interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, then why would it actively block travel to Cuba, as it does now?

There's lots of nice stuff about cooperation in the speech, which is good, but it is not the same as truly rejecting unilateral action on behalf of U.S. interests, often phrased in terms of what the offending party is doing wrong. The U.S. does so a lot, though admittedly not as much as in TR's time, when imperialism was seen as a good thing.

We're in a funny time where both the left in Latin America and the U.S. government keep saying the hegemonic period of the United States is done. And they're both wrong. True, the U.S. does not invade the same way it used to, but the unilateral use of power--either overtly or behind the scenes--is far from gone. The U.S. is doing so on a constant basis, and not just in Cuba. The U.S. has far more power than any Latin American country, in virtually any sense of the term, and it consistently uses that power. If anything, we should be very surprised if it didn't. It is important to note as well that choosing not to use that power all the time is not a sign of the doctrine's demise. Even in the its heydays of intervention the U.S. selectively decided when to invoke it, sometimes to the frustration of Latin American leaders who wanted it.

In a way, this has become an intellectual game. The Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed dead not too long after it was pronounced. In 1863, someone even felt obliged to write a book refuting the idea that the Monroe Doctrine had died.  In the 1930s it was common for even prominent U.S. politicians to say the doctrine was dead. Khrushchev declared the doctrine to be dead in 1960. Historian Gaddis Smith said it died at the end of the Cold War. As he was dying in 2011, Hugo Chávez said it was dead. And now John Kerry.