No, don't bring back the Monroe Doctrine

It's a means of self-delusion

This is one of America Explained’s regular deep dives into an issue in U.S. foreign policy. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss the next one. For a related post, see ‘No, don’t invade Mexico’ - one of my favorite America Explained posts of 2023.

In the summer of 2021, Washington, DC went crazy. The cause? Two Iranian navy ships were going to make a port call in Venezuela.

According to U.S. intelligence, one of the ships was carrying fast-attack boats which were being delivered to Caracas as part of an arms deal with Iran. Uproar ensued, and the Biden administration kicked into high gear - including seeming to threaten some kind of military response to prevent the deal going through:

“The delivery of such weapons would be a provocative act and understood as a threat to our partners in the Western Hemisphere,” the senior administration official said in a statement to POLITICO. “We would reserve the right to take appropriate measures in coordination with our partners to deter the transit or delivery of such weapons.”

The White House is pressuring Caracas and Havana over diplomatic channels not to allow the vessels to dock in their countries, said two defense officials and a congressional official, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. Biden officials are also proactively reaching out to other governments in the region to ensure they will turn away the ships, the congressional official said.

Eventually, the pressure seemed to work, and the Iranian navy ships went somewhere else instead. But the incident highlighted the extent to which the United States sees the Western Hemisphere as the place where it calls the shots and has an effective right to veto the foreign and defense policy of smaller countries.

This idea is sometimes referred to as the “Monroe doctrine”, and recently it has been experiencing renewed popularity. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says that his foreign policy would be based on a “modern Monroe Doctrine”, meaning “don’t mess with our Homeland or our periphery”. Ron DeSantis has likewise said that “we need a 21st century version of the Monroe Doctrine”, which one columnist explained was necessary “as China begins reaching into the United States’ home region”. Trump even invoked the doctrine during a speech to the UN General Assembly when he was in office.

You might by now have noticed a pattern: it’s mostly Republicans talking about the Monroe Doctrine and using it to criticize Democrats and a more nebulous set of “globalists”. This kind of partisan usage of the term is actually the norm throughout American history, as Jay Sexton has written in an excellent book (which you can get a flavor of in this great article). At first the doctrine was simply “Monroe’s Doctrine” (named after James Monroe, who first announced it) and only later lost the possessive apostrophe to become the “Monroe Doctrine”, something all Americans were meant to adhere to. But even then it was usually invoked as a cudgel to batter some domestic opponent for not doing enough to defend America’s interests in the Western hemisphere.

Understanding the “Monroe Doctrine” as primarily a partisan cudgel provides important insights. Viewed this way, you notice that the reason Republicans like to talk about it is because it is a smart-sounding way to accuse Democrats of being weak and prioritizing the interests of some fancy-schmancy “liberal international order” over the concrete security needs of America in its own backyard. You also notice that libertarians are very fond of the idea too, because a foreign policy focused just on the Western hemisphere would be less expensive and require a smaller government than a “globalist” one in which America sees itself as having interests all over the world. You can draw a direct line between the “America First”-ism of Charles Lindbergh, who wanted the U.S. to stay out of World War II and also invoked the Monroe Doctrine, and the America Firsters of today.

Important though this insight is, I think there’s also another role that the Monroe Doctrine plays in U.S. foreign policy discourse, one which is discussed less often. And that is the way that it allows Americans to talk euphemistically about their sphere of influence while pretending that they don’t have one.

Spheres of influence are controversial

About a year before the Iran-Venezuela ship controversy, there was a debate in the U.S. establishment foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs. The debate was over whether it made sense for the world to be divided into “spheres of influence” among the great powers. On one side, Graham Allison argued that the United States could ultimately not prevent Russia and China from using their power “to demand deference from other states in their own regions or exert predominant control there”. On the other side, Hal Brands argued that even as China got stronger and Russia got more determined to rebuild its empire, the United States was still powerful enough to stop them both - and that it should try.

These two positions track fairly accurately the history of American attitudes towards spheres of influence since it became a global power. But after World War II, Brands’ view won out, and America set about creating a “liberal international order”. One of the reasons for this was because American policymakers came to believe that the division of the world into antagonistic economic and security blocs had been a key cause of World War II and that peace could only be nurtured through free trade and political independence for all. In theory at least, spheres of influence would have no place in such a system - and the United States set about fairly consistently trying to undermine the Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe and prevent China from establishing one through the wars in Vietnam and Korea.

At the same time, there was a large fly in this ointment - and this was the fact that the United States quite clearly had a sphere of influence of its own in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. has intervened readily in Latin American and Caribbean affairs for centuries now, and continues to claim a right to place limits on the foreign and defense policies of nations in the region to this day, as the furore over the Iranian attack boats shows.

The morality of the spheres

“But,” retort American policy intellectuals, “that’s not a sphere of influence - that’s ‘the Monroe Doctrine’!”. And here we get to one of the purposes that the doctrine serves. The idea of a “sphere of influence” cuts against what is supposed to be the central framing narrative of post-war American foreign policy, the “liberal international order”. It’s helpful to have a euphemistic way to talk about it in order to minimize the charge of hypocrisy. If anyone insists on noticing the hypocrisy anyway, the next line of defense is to say that America’s administration of its sphere has been far superior to that of any other superpower - an argument deployed by Brands in the piece cited above:

Of course, that intellectual tradition did not stop the United States from building its own sphere of influence in Latin America from the early nineteenth century onward, nor did it prevent it from drawing large chunks of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East into a global sphere of influence after World War II. Yet the same tradition has led the United States to run its sphere of influence far more progressively than past great powers, which is why far more countries have sought to join that sphere than to leave it. And since hypocrisy is another venerable tradition in global affairs, it is not surprising that Americans would establish their own, relatively enlightened sphere of influence while denying the legitimacy of everyone else’s.

I think that it’s important to reckon with this argument, too. I understand that insisting on drawing an analogy between America in Latin America and Russia in Eastern Europe can seem like a pedantic academic insistence on both-sides-ism. Russia invading Ukraine and murdering thousands of people is not the same as America stopping Venezuela from buying some fast-attack boats. On the other hand, as someone who sincerely believes the United States is a powerful force for good in the world, I think it’s important to point out when American policymakers are engaged in self-delusion and hypocrisy to such an extent that they begin to look ridiculous in the eyes of other nations.

Brands is very unusual among American policy intellectuals in that he is willing to effectively say: “No, you can’t have a sphere of influence, but we can because we say we’re better than you - so suck it!”. I think it’s fairly obvious why this is not a particularly common line of argument from American policy thinkers. But it’s equally obvious that Washington would not stand idly by while Mexico established a security partnership with China, or Canada decided to host Russian military bases.

You can, of course, argue that America is doing the Lord’s work by preventing the encroachment of authoritarianism into the Western Hemisphere. The regime in Venezuela is despicable and I do not wish it well. But America has security partnerships with plenty of despicable countries as well, many of them outside its own hemisphere. And in the past it has been perfectly willing to act against - even overthrow - democratically elected Western Hemisphere governments who looked like they might get too cozy with a foreign superpower. So what exactly is the organizing principle here?

Invoking “the Monroe Doctrine” might seem to provide one, but it doesn’t. Instead, it just makes Americans look heavy-handed and hypocritical. What American policymakers need instead is to take concrete actions to demonstrate the supposedly benign nature of its special role in the Western Hemisphere. But the Republicans who are currently trying to resurrect the Monroe doctrine are actually doing the opposite - they’re talking about invading Mexico and a highly coercive approach to hemispheric migration issues. They’re trying to assert a version of the Monroe Doctrine in line with one of its most sweeping definitions, that of Secretary of State Richard Olney, who declared in 1895: “To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition”.

Ultimately, morality and power politics are never a stable mix. Power is needed to uphold morality, but generating and maintaining power often involves acting immorally. There will always be spheres of influence, but no sphere of influence will ever be truly just. But trying to achieve some measure of justice in a world of imperfection involves at least being clear-eyed about the problem, not deceiving yourself with a just-so narrative. So no, let’s not bring back the “Monroe doctrine” - now or ever.