Commentary
“[T]he American continents ... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers .... [W]e should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety,”
declared President James Monroe on Dec. 2, 1823.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal almost two hundred years later, Walter Russell Mead—George Kennan like—warns: “From Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, American interests are under threat as virtually every country in Latin America suffers from major and growing social, political and economic distress” and Latin America’s “ties with Russia and China are booming.” The Monroe Doctrine is dying.
Mead notes that China’s trade with Latin America has grown from $18 billion in 2002 to more than $450 billion today. Chinese state-owned companies are mining lithium in Bolivia, developing ports at both ends of the Panama Canal, have at least 11 space facilities in the region for surveillance and tracking capabilities, and are constructing intelligence facilities in
Cuba. The revelation of China’s “spy base” in Cuba caused Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher to
remark that “This is an attempt by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] to turn the Monroe Doctrine into the Mao doctrine.” Meanwhile, Mead reports, Russia “has resumed its Cold War efforts to subsidize” Cuba’s economy. Even Iran is getting into the act with a series of presidential visits to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that followed a visit to the region by Iran’s navy. “The steady incursions of U.S. rivals into the Western Hemisphere would have touched off a political firestorm at any time since James Monroe issued his famous doctrine,” Mead writes, but the “reaction from the Biden administration is a yawn.”
Mead blames not just the Biden administration but the entire American foreign policy establishment for its “post-Cold War complacency about America’s rivals.” That post-Cold War complacency that suggested that we were at the “end of history” and that the era of great power wars was over led to the notion that the Monroe Doctrine was no longer relevant. Indeed, in 2013 then-Secretary of State John Kerry proudly
proclaimed to the Organization of American States that “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” Kerry’s statement was an invitation to European and Asian powers to extend their influence into the Western Hemisphere, which is precisely what they did.
Mead more fundamentally blames this worsening situation on what he describes as a “generational failure of American foreign policy” that involves “the fixation on grandiose and vague global goals at the expense of American national interests as traditionally understood.” Climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion are not traditional American interests; they are the “grandiose and vague global goals” that both the Obama and Biden administrations fixated on, to the neglect of the most “traditional” of American interests—enforcing the Monroe Doctrine.
“Monroe had it right,” Mead contends. “The safety and security of the U.S. require that no hostile powers turn the Western Hemisphere into an arena of geopolitical rivalry.” Trouble in this hemisphere, Mead writes, “could soon undermine America’s ability to face challenges farther afield.” Some of those challenges involve the very same powers who are geopolitically active in Latin America. And Mead doesn’t even mention the growing problem on our southern border which resembles an invasion that the Biden administration has aided and abetted.
“It is impossible,” Monroe wrote, “that the ... powers should extend their political system to any portion of either [American] continent without endangering our peace and happiness .... It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference.” Unfortunately, that is precisely what the Biden administration is doing now.
