COMMENTARY President Trump may be following a brazen and brutish version of the Monroe Doctrine on issues like Greenland — but the world shouldn't be shocked that it still lingers in U.S. policy.
The world is shocked to see a 21st-century U.S. head of state embrace the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.
It shouldn’t be.
As President Donald Trump marauds through the western hemisphere — demanding ownership of Greenland while working out his infantile peace-prize envy issues — we need to remember how stubbornly the idea that President James Monroe first laid out two centuries ago always keeps informing America’s Americas policy.
Sure, Trump is following it in especially brazen and brutish ways. The man's also re-decorated the Oval Office in especially brazen and brutish ways.
But even before Trump, even when Washington thought the Monroe Doctrine was no longer a guiding hemispheric principle ... it actually was, lurking just beneath the surface like an Everglades alligator.
It’s time we stopped denying that reality if we want to stop Trump from turning the Monroe Doctrine into an inter-American Godzilla again.
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For starters, we need to recall what the Monroe Doctrine actually means.
And I’d suggest you go not to a U.S. history textbook or a Ken Burns documentary, but to the movie Animal House.
Find the scene where fraternity brothers Boone and Otter watch an ROTC officer bully one of their freshman pledges.
Otter: “He can’t do that to our pledges!”
Boone: “Only we can do that to our pledges!”
There you have the Monroe Doctrine:
America is supposed to keep Old World imperialism out of the Americas — they can’t do that to our pledges! — but America is free to practice its own imperialism in the Americas — only we can do that to our pledges!
Trump is simply reminding the world how often and how easily the U.S. has become the very thing Monroe’s original doctrine had sought to stand up to.
Monroe was concerned with just the first part when, in 1823, he warned European powers that their centuries-long colonization orgy in the western hemisphere was over — and the U.S. would ensure it.
He seemed to assert an admirable notion: America — itself having thrown off the yoke of British colonialism — identified with its newly independent neighbors and had their backs.
Bad example
But Monroe also seemed to assert the U.S.’s hemispheric hegemony — and in turn suggest a less admirable notion: the U.S.’s hemispheric carte blanche.
That led, inevitably, to the Manifest Destiny crusade — and the Mexican-American War of 1846, when the U.S. baldly seized more than half of Mexico’s territory.
A U.S. Army lieutenant who took part in the conquest, Ulysses S. Grant, called it “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Grant — who became the hero of the Civil War and himself president — also called the Mexican adventure “an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies.”
The U.S. had become the very thing Monroe’s original doctrine had sought to stand up to.
The Spanish-American War of 1898, which made Puerto Rico a U.S. territory and kept Cuba under Washington’s thumb for three decades, was a reminder.
So was the Panama Canal project, which saw President Teddy Roosevelt summon U.S. military muscle to effectively purloin Panama from Colombia in 1903.
In the 20th century, the U.S. swung the Monroe cudgel more covertly, especially to overthrow inconvenient Latin American leaders like Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz and Chile’s Salvador Allende.
Even well-intentioned and successful soft power initiatives often had Monroe Doctrine effects.
At the turn of the century, the Washington Consensus and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promoted post-Cold War free-market democracy in Latin America. For too many Latin Americans, though, they also widened the region's criminal chasm between rich and poor.
That helped bring left-wing, anti-U.S. regimes like Venezuela’s to power in the early 21st century. Meanwhile, an American voter backlash against the kind of U.S.-led globalization that NAFTA represented would help bring Trump to power.
And now, by seizing Venezuela’s oil, lunging for Greenland’s minerals and threatening to retake the Panama Canal, Trump is simply restoring the more overt application of the Monroe Doctrine that Grant witnessed.
He is, in Grant’s words, following the bad example of the old European monarchies who once had America and the Americas in their clutches.
The irony is that the new European monarchies (and republics) have banded together — successfully, it appears — to block Trump’s acquisition of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
They’re mad that a U.S. leader would still invoke the Monroe Doctrine.
But they shouldn’t be shocked.
