Civilization and its Discontents

Americans love invasions. Trump and his Republicans are on the warpath this week against Venezuela. We’ve heard precious little criticism from either party of Donald Trump’s recognition of “self-declared” president Juan Guaido. Democrats generally remained silent in 2009 when Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported a coup in Honduras. And today the “liberal” press still loves US interventions. The New York Times is all but calling for a US coup in Venezuela (“That Mr. Maduro must go has been obvious for some time.”) and the Washington Post ran an editorial by Guaido calling Maduro a “usurper.”

So it was really only a minor, and extremely temporary, aberration in 2013 when Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States (OAS) that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” As the UPI reported: “Kerry’s declaration of the end of the Monroe Doctrine era was greeted with hesitant applause among the OAS delegates.”

The OAS had every reason to be suspicious.

It may be useful to recall what the Monroe Doctrine really was — just a few sentences in President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress:

“We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

Students are taught that the Monroe Doctrine declared that American interests in the Western Hemisphere consisted mainly of the benevolent protection of smaller countries from aggression by the world’s colonial superpowers — France, England, and Spain. Monroe’s assertion that “we have not interfered and shall not interfere” was as quickly abandoned as it was declared. Scarcely twenty years later the United States invaded Mexico. Monroe’s Doctrine, seen in historical light, was actually a declaration that the US fully intended to get into the superpower business itself.

Since then the Doctrine has been interpreted to mean that the US has every right to interfere in its neighbor’s affairs — and the protection of neighbors has nothing to do with it. As the list below shows, there hasn’t been a decade in which the United States didn’t interfere by invasion or imposition of dictatorships.

And we wonder why we have so many refugees at our southern border.

Still not convinced the US is a malevolent imperialist nation? Stephen Kinzer’s book The True Flag is an account of the moment the United States fully embraced Imperialism and never looked back.

One scholar has documented exactly how we have lived up to Monroe’s promise that “we have not interfered and shall not interfere.” I’ll bet you didn’t learn this in Social Studies class: