I know OBs are just dying for an answer to that question. I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading lately on a surprisingly fascinating period of American history — the Jacksonian Era — that was formerly a sort of blind spot for me. One of the things we hear a lot about from that time was “the Monroe Doctrine.” So exactly what was the doctrine and how did it come about? This is what I’ve gathered and it’s more interesting than I would have thought, just when we were starting to assert ourselves in the world stage:
1. The Spanish monarchy was royally (no pun intended) pissed off that it had lost its colonies due to revolutions in South and Central America and Mexico in the early 1800s and it wanted them back.
2. Spain was willing to enlist the aid of the other monarchies in France and Russia in order to grab those colonies back and to push back against the “republican revolutions” that had started with the American Revolution and then had swept southward through the rest of the North, Central, and South America.
3. The British wanted to maintain their monopoly on international trade and did not want any other European countries interfering with that in the Western Hemisphere. They tried to enlist the U.S. in a joint declaration to that effect.
4. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James Monroe were having none of that, while still agreeing with the British in principle. So they basically told the British to get lost and created their own declaration (“doctrine”) telling Europe and Russia that America would stay out of European affairs but they’d better stay the hell out of the Western Hemisphere in the future. Monroe announced the doctrine to Congress in his December 2, 1823 “state of the union” address.
Of course World Wars I and II and the Cuban Missile Crisis put all of those assumptions to the test in the 20th Century.
1. The Spanish monarchy was royally (no pun intended) pissed off that it had lost its colonies due to revolutions in South and Central America and Mexico in the early 1800s and it wanted them back.
2. Spain was willing to enlist the aid of the other monarchies in France and Russia in order to grab those colonies back and to push back against the “republican revolutions” that had started with the American Revolution and then had swept southward through the rest of the North, Central, and South America.
3. The British wanted to maintain their monopoly on international trade and did not want any other European countries interfering with that in the Western Hemisphere. They tried to enlist the U.S. in a joint declaration to that effect.
4. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and President James Monroe were having none of that, while still agreeing with the British in principle. So they basically told the British to get lost and created their own declaration (“doctrine”) telling Europe and Russia that America would stay out of European affairs but they’d better stay the hell out of the Western Hemisphere in the future. Monroe announced the doctrine to Congress in his December 2, 1823 “state of the union” address.
Of course World Wars I and II and the Cuban Missile Crisis put all of those assumptions to the test in the 20th Century.
