I wish a reporter would ask Trump to explain the history of the Monroe Doctrine to the American people. I’m fairly sure he hadn’t heard of it until a couple of weeks ago and would say something like, “it means I can do whatever I want.” (And then he’d drift off to something about windmills and the ballroom and the stolen election.)
And sadly, he’s not actually wrong. The Monroe Doctrine is bullshit. It was promulgated in 1827 as a response to European powers trying to claim more land in the Western hemisphere and has subsequently been used to excuse American interventionism in Latin America and elsewhere. It’s a relic of the 19th century and has no place in the current world order.
I thought this pithy analysis was pretty good:
Its invocation in the twenty-first century reflects not strategic wisdom but rather the intellectual bankruptcy of a foreign policy establishment unable to imagine alternatives to interventionism. The doctrine’s promise to keep European powers out of the Western Hemisphere has morphed into a presumptuous claim that Washington should manage all regional affairs—a mission impossible that serves neither American interests nor regional stability.
We’ve been messing around in Latin America since the 1800s. It’s almost always been a huge problem for the people who live there and bought the U.S. nothing but trouble. I find it hard to be believe that this clown car of a presidency will be the one to finally make it all work out for everyone. All Trump cares about is money, power and vengeance and the rest of them either want to punish half the people or all of the people in the region. That doesn’t offer much hope for a good outcome.
Here’s how the Trump administration sees it:
update —
