What the Monroe Doctrine Actually Said and Why It Still Matters

The most famous foreign policy statement in American history was not a speech, a treaty or a declaration. It was a few paragraphs in the middle of a long annual message to Congress, the sort of document in which a President reports on the state of the finances and the condition of the Navy, and which nobody in the room expected to be quoted for two centuries. Nobody called it a doctrine at the time. The name came later, after other men had decided it would look better with a title.

Today the Monroe Doctrine gets used as a rhetorical punching bag by people who have not read it and as a magic wand by people who have read only the headline. Both are mistakes. The text is shorter and more modest than either side thinks. The history of what later presidents did with it is longer and messier. And the core idea, that a hostile outside power building a presence in our neighborhood is a vital American concern, has survived every attempt to bury it. So let's go to the source, read it in order, and see what holds up.

The world of 1823

In the early 1820s the map of the Western Hemisphere was changing fast. Spain's American colonies had been fighting for independence, and by 1822 the United States had begun to recognize several of the new republics. In Europe, the conservative monarchies of the Holy Alliance, Russia, Austria and Prussia, were committed to putting down revolutions. In April 1823 France sent an army into Spain to restore the king to his full powers. Americans reasonably asked whether the next step would be to send an army across the Atlantic to restore Spanish rule in the new republics.

There was a second problem in the Pacific Northwest. In 1821 Russia had issued a decree claiming the coast down to the 51st parallel and closing the nearby waters to foreign ships. The United States had its own ambitions on that coast and no wish to see a European empire dig in there.

Then came an offer. In the summer of 1823 George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, proposed to the American minister in London that the two countries issue a joint statement opposing any European move to take over the former Spanish colonies. Britain had its own reasons: it wanted the new markets to remain open, and it did not want the Holy Alliance in its commercial backyard. The offer reached President James Monroe, who consulted two former Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Both were inclined to accept.

John Quincy Adams makes the call

The man who argued against the joint statement was Monroe's Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. His objection was a matter of dignity and strategy. If the United States signed a joint declaration with Britain, he argued, it would appear as a junior partner, in his image a small boat trailing in the wake of a British warship. He preferred to make the statement alone, in America's own voice, in a form that bound the United States to nothing it could not control. Adams also noted that the declaration should not commit the United States never to acquire territory itself, which Canning's version would have done. He wanted to keep the door open.

Adams won the argument. That is the first thing to understand about the Doctrine. It was not a stray idea of a President's. It was the considered product of a careful and rather cynical statesman who wanted to speak for America without being tied to anybody's apron strings. Conservatives of every stripe should have a soft spot for that instinct.

What the message actually said

On December 2, 1823, Monroe delivered his seventh annual message to Congress. The relevant passages contain three principles, and I will paraphrase them closely, so you can compare them with the text, which is easy to find.

1. The Americas are closed to new colonization. The American continents, by the free and independent condition they had assumed and maintained, were no longer to be considered subjects for future colonization by any European power.
2. Europe's political system must not be extended to this hemisphere. Any attempt by the European powers to extend their system to any portion of the hemisphere would be regarded as dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.
3. The United States will stay out of Europe's affairs. The message said that America had not interfered with existing European colonies and would not, and that it took no part in the wars of European powers in matters relating to themselves.

That is the whole thing, and notice what it is not. It does not claim any right to govern Latin America. It does not authorize the United States to intervene in the internal politics of its neighbors. It does not give America a right to take territory. It is a warning addressed to Europe: don't try to recolonize this hemisphere, and we won't meddle in yours. It was a doctrine of mutual non-interference, drawn along the line of an ocean.

A hard truth went along with it. In 1823 the United States had a tiny navy, and the real enforcement came from the fact that the British Navy also did not want the Holy Alliance in the Americas. The Doctrine was a bold statement sheltered by someone else's fleet. That is not a reason to sneer at it. Weak countries have always found it convenient to say a true thing at the right time.

The Doctrine grows

Over the next century and more, presidents found the Monroe Doctrine useful and stretched it. Three episodes show the arc.

France in Mexico, 1860s. While the United States was fighting its Civil War, Napoleon III of France put Archduke Maximilian of Austria on a throne in Mexico in 1864, backed by French troops. The American government protested but could not act. When the Civil War ended in 1865, Secretary of State William Seward pressed France to leave, and the Union Army on the border made the point. French troops withdrew by 1867, and Maximilian was executed by Mexican forces that year. It was a textbook use of the Doctrine as written: no European monarchy was going to plant itself in the hemisphere.

Venezuela, 1895. A boundary dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the edge of British Guiana flared up, and Secretary of State Richard Olney sent a forceful note in July 1895 asserting, in effect, that the United States was practically sovereign on the continent in matters of this kind. President Grover Cleveland followed in December by asking Congress to fund a commission to determine the boundary and declaring that any British attempt to take land beyond it would be resisted. War scares followed on both sides. Britain, which had other worries, agreed to arbitration, and an arbitral tribunal in Paris ruled in 1899 in a way that gave Britain most of the disputed land. The episode showed that a great power had come to accept the principle, but it also showed how far the Doctrine had been stretched: from a warning against new colonies to an American claim to arbitrate disputes between Europeans and Latin Americans.

The Roosevelt Corollary, 1904. In 1902 and 1903 Britain, Germany and Italy had blockaded Venezuela's ports to collect debts. Roosevelt worried that European creditors would use unpaid bills as a pretext for planting themselves in the hemisphere. In his annual message of December 6, 1904, he declared that "chronic wrongdoing" by a Latin American state might force the United States to exercise an "international police power." In effect: we will not let Europe collect by force, so we will do the collecting ourselves. The first application came in 1905, when the United States took control of customs collection in the Dominican Republic. Over the next decades, the corollary was used to justify landings, occupations and financial control in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

Here is the point I want you to see: the corollary is not in the Doctrine. It is a different thing. Monroe said Europe should keep out. Roosevelt said America would step in. Those are not the same sentence. A conservative, who is supposed to care about what the text says, should be willing to say so.

The retreat and the revival

By the late 1920s the corollary had worn out its welcome, in Latin America and with many Americans. A memorandum prepared in the State Department by Under Secretary J. Reuben Clark in 1928 argued that the corollary was not a legitimate consequence of the Monroe Doctrine, which was concerned with Europe, not with relations among American states. In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt announced the Good Neighbor policy, and the United States signed a convention at Montevideo that year affirming the principle that no state has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.

The core of the Doctrine, however, never went away. In January 1917 the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a coded telegram to Mexico proposing a military alliance and holding out the prospect that Mexico would recover Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if Germany won. British intelligence intercepted it and passed it to Washington, which made it public in March 1917, and it helped turn American opinion toward war. That is what a hostile outside power in the hemisphere looks like in practice, and it is why the principle did not go out of date.

The Cold War brought the Doctrine back in full. After Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959 and aligned his island with Moscow, the hemisphere had a Soviet partner ninety miles from Florida. In October 1962 the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba led to the confrontation described in Thirteen Days in October and What the Quarantine Teaches About Resolve. President Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine, the Organization of American States voted to support it, and the settlement included an American pledge not to invade Cuba. Critics of the Cold War era point out that the same logic was used to justify other interventions, including the CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, which the Eisenhower administration justified on grounds of Communist influence. That is a real controversy, and a fair account should say so. Reagan's actions in Grenada and Central America, discussed in How the Reagan Doctrine Turned Containment Into Rollback, were part of the same story.

The objections, stated fairly

Here is the strongest case against the Doctrine, as its critics would put it. It was an assertion of American dominance wrapped in the language of protection. Latin American governments never asked for it, and many resented it. In the Corollary years it served as cover for occupations that did lasting damage to America's reputation. And in a world of global trade, finance and communications, the idea that a hemisphere can be fenced off is an anachronism.

The answers come in four parts.

1. Read the 1823 text and do not blame it for what came after. The abuses of the corollary era are real. They are not in the Doctrine.
2. The core principle is about security, not conquest. A country has always had an interest in preventing a hostile power from gaining military bases in its neighborhood. Every major power behaves this way. Russia reacts to missiles near its borders. China has its own sphere. The United States would be the odd one out if it did not.
3. Latin American governments themselves have invoked outside help at various times. The point is not that every request is wise, but that sovereignty cuts both ways. The doctrine is best understood as a refusal to let any outside empire decide the hemisphere's fate.
4. Economic and strategic ties matter now as they did then. The question is not whether trade should be allowed. It is whether a government hostile to us should be permitted to own the ports, bases and chokepoints that could be used against us in a crisis. For one example of how that logic played out in the case of the canal, see The Panama Canal From Teddy Roosevelt to the Treaties Fight of 1978, and for the larger point that commerce is never separate from strategy, see Trade Is Foreign Policy and Every President Has Treated It That Way.

Why it still matters

Here is what to carry away. The Monroe Doctrine at its best is a statement of a simple, durable proposition: we do not want a hostile outside power building strength in our neighborhood, and we are willing to say so. It does not require us to govern anybody. It does not require us to invade anybody. It requires a country that knows its own interests and a government that says what they are before the crisis, rather than after. The stronger the statement, the better the deterrent, which is the lesson of Why Deterrence Is a Promise You Have to Be Willing to Keep.

And the line between the Doctrine and the corollary is the line every conservative should watch. Prevent others from planting themselves in the hemisphere, yes. Take on the job of running the neighbors' affairs, no. The first is defense. The second is empire, and empire is expensive, bad for the taxpayer and bad for the soul.

The bottom line

• The 1823 message was a warning to European powers, written by John Quincy Adams and delivered by Monroe, and it promised that America would stay out of Europe's affairs.
• It did not claim a right to run Latin America. That came later, with the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, which was an addition and not part of the original text.
• The core idea, that a hostile outside power in our hemisphere is a vital American concern, has held up from Napoleon III to the Zimmermann telegram to the Cuban missile crisis.
• Demand that any use of the doctrine be tied to a real security threat and a clear aim, not to ambition.
• When someone calls the Doctrine dead or imperial, ask them to read the three principles. Then ask which of them they disagree with.