Over at The National Interest the libertarian foreign-policy analyst Ted Galen Carpenter urges the Trump administration to enforce the Monroe Doctrine while respecting a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine in Eastern Europe. In effect he espouses informal spheres of interest in which a great power enjoys primacy in its geographic environs and outside great powers more or less desist from interfering. Carpenter is especially critical of post-Cold War America for “enlarging” NATO to Russia’s frontiers—and creating a permanent irritant in relations between Moscow and the West.
Read the whole thing.
My major critique of Carpenter’s article is that he deploys the phrase Monroe Doctrine rather cavalierly. The Monroe Doctrine underwent many phases from the 1820s, when President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams enunciated it, until the 1920s, when the State Department disavowed the Theodore Roosevelt “Corollary” to the doctrine. Which Monroe Doctrine does he want to enforce? The basic principle—no outside control of American territory—endured through all variants of the doctrine. But the United States overlaid it with new claims and privileges as the 19th century went on. I’ve given the three main versions of the doctrine the cutesy labels “Free-rider” (1820s-1880s); “Strongman” (1890s); and “Constable” (1900s-1920s).
During the Free-rider phase Great Britain’s Royal Navy ruled the waves and kept fellow empires out of the New World. Doing so suited London’s interests, and that coincidence allowed Washington to free-ride on British-supplied maritime security. But Washington enforced the doctrine more vigorously as American power waxed. It did so because it could. In essence the original Monroe Doctrine said hands off the New World: European empires could not reconquer Latin American states that had won their independence, or reassert their rule by proxy.
By the 1890s, though, during the doctrine’s Strongman phase, the Grover Cleveland administration had the temerity to inform Great Britain that the United States’ “fiat” was “law” throughout the hemisphere. It made the rules and others obeyed. TR announced his Corollary a decade later, asserting a less bellicose, quasi-legal U.S. right to intervene in Latin American affairs when weak Caribbean governments could not or would not repay their debts to European creditors. Europeans had a habit of seizing the customhouses in debtor states to repay their bankers—and thus of seizing American ground that they could then keep as naval stations astride the approaches to the Panama Canal (once it was finished). Roosevelt wanted Washington to act as an international Constable to prevent that from happening.
TR’s successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, interpreted their prerogatives under the Corollary to the nth degree. For instance, Washington took to insisting on a right of first refusal before Latin American governments concluded loan agreements with Europeans. It would forbid loans that might lead to a default—and to a loss of Western Hemisphere territory to Europeans. The paternalism of the post-Roosevelt Roosevelt Corollary, and the hard feelings it stirred in Latin America, finally induced the United States to set it aside in favor of hemispheric defense—a sort of effort at an inter-American Monroe Doctrine. All Americans, North, Central, and South, could agree that imperial rule needed to be fended off. But an overbearing United States also needed to remain in check.
Carpenter points to a recent deployment of Russian bombers as one move Washington needs to curtail under the Monroe Doctrine today. But it is doubtful in the extreme that Moscow means to occupy Venezuela or reduce it to a subservient state reminiscent of Cold War Cuba, a Soviet client. So let me put it to Ted Carpenter: how does the Monroe Doctrine apply today, and which version does he want to apply? And should Washington grant Moscow (or Beijing, or Tehran) similar liberties in their own near abroads
