The eerie return of the 19th century foreign policy doctrine indicates a declining empire seeking to consolidate power in its own backyard
Washington warns that enemy groups south of the border are terrorising nearby areas and causing trouble. Military actions would be taken to deal with the problem, including sending the US military into the territories of another sovereign country, which is being blamed for failing to control drug cartels.
That does sound like Donald Trump, who has been accusing Mexico of failing to contain its drug cartels and threatening to send in US troops to take care of them. The US president repeated his threat after ordering the military to bomb Caracas and abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in the middle of the night.
However, I was thinking of another US president, James Monroe, of the famous Monroe Doctrine.
More than two centuries ago, in 1817, the Monroe White House complained that Seminole people were terrorising the border areas north of Spanish Florida and sent in troops to crush them. Indigenous American “terror” was the trigger, but Florida was the prize. Two years later, Spain would cede Florida to the United States.
Mexico’s independence from Spain was gained in phases throughout the 1810s, culminating in 1821. After its war with the US in the late 1840s, Mexico lost Texas, New Mexico and California. US history may not be repeating, but it’s at least rhyming today.
“We’re very friendly with [Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum], she’s a good woman,” Trump told Fox News after the operation against Maduro. “But the cartels are running Mexico. She’s not running Mexico … she’s very frightened of the cartels … And I’ve asked her numerous times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’ … Something is gonna have to be done with Mexico.”
Besides Mexico, Trump has also threatened Cuba – which is nothing new, since every US administration has coerced or threatened the island nation since John F. Kennedy – and Colombia, having put the entire region on notice with new-found undisguised aggression.
Many commentators have observed that all these and more are a part of Trump’s Monroe Doctrine 2.0. They are exactly right, perhaps more so than many realise if you consider the historical details.
The acquisition of Florida can be argued as the first territorial act of the Monroe Doctrine, which would not be so named until many years after Monroe’s death. But his predecessor, James Madison, had already enunciated the basic principles of the doctrine in relation to Florida.
Both Thomas Jefferson and Madison were worried European powers – first Spain and then potentially Britain – would control Florida and therefore stand in the way of Washington’s continental expansion. Madison had the US Congress pass a secret resolution in 1811 declaring the US would not tolerate Florida being passed on to any foreign power.
“In a sense”, historian Bradford Perkins wrote in The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Volume I: The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776 – 1865, “this resolution was a forerunner of the Monroe Doctrine, especially the portion of it that denied Europeans the right to establish colonies in the [western] hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine, however, proclaimed universal rules, whereas the resolution of 1811 dealt only with a single, specific area. Still, the two sprang from a similar spirit …”
Meanwhile, the US has always had Canada in its sights; Trump was not the first. The US fought a war with Britain for Canada in 1812. Historian Dale Copeland wrote in his recent book, A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China: ” … the war reflected the greed and ambition of certain key sections of the nation, in particular the South and West, who saw the war as an opportunity to gain land from the British in Canada and from the Spanish in Florida”.
It’s remarkable that Trump is making similar threats to those of presidents long ago against their neighbours. After all, this “Make America Great Again” president had once vowed to avoid foreign interventions.
But now, he keeps repeating he wants to make Canada America’s 51st state and take Greenland from Denmark. Some think he is joking, but many don’t.
The Monroe doctrine heralded the rise of the new American empire. Why is it being repeated by a president who is well known for his complete lack of interest in history, including that of his own country?
It’s no accident. A rising empire consolidated power on the continent, then the hemisphere and then the world. Now, an empire in decline is retreating and must consolidate in its own backyard, but this time, it’s the Chinese, not Europeans, that it needs to fight off.
