Christopher Nichols (4:05)

Great to be back on with you, Don. Thanks for having me.

Don Wildman (4:07)

The origin, expansion and modern legacy of the modern Doctrine. A lot to cover here. Let's start with a speech I've mentioned here. When James Monroe gives that speech that introduces this policy, it is 1823. What was happening in the world at that time that alarmed him and his people? What was the problem he was trying to solve?

Christopher Nichols (4:26)

This is the perfect question to start with. So it's the historical context of the Monroe Doctrine is essential to understand why it happened in 1823, what it meant in its moment, and then gives us some grounding for where it went afterwards and the sort of winding path that it took. So the first piece of the puzzle here is the hemisphere and it's the roiling revolutions going on in Central and South America as the Bolivarian Revolution seek to overturn Spanish rule. American diplomats are kind of twisted in knots. There's a sense, a broader sense that historians have found, particularly at the local level all across the US of a real sympathy for the so called sister republics in the hemisphere But. But of course, the US Military doesn't have the capacity to project a lot of power down through Latin America. And there's the troubling issue of what happens if Spain tries to recolonize and the US Would have to use force. So the intricate, tricky question is, how can the US show its sympathy for the revolutions in the hemisphere and perhaps even protect the revolutionaries, while at the same time not taking a disproportionate risk? And then there's another piece here, an unfortunate piece from the modern sensibility. Most American politicians don't think that the kind of mix of races and peoples and groups and Catholicism in Central and South America has the makings for legitimate, effective democratic governance. So there's some skepticism in that way, too. Now you broaden the lens out a little bit. Outside the hemisphere, what else is going on? After the Napoleonic Wars, a group called the Holy alliance has come together, particularly Russia and the American political imaginary. And they have just asserted, just a few years before the Monroe Doctrine in 1821, that Russia has a right to all of the coastal waters and land on the Pacific northwest above the 51st parallel. They want that for whaling and shipping and eventually perhaps for colonization. And they in fact, want to have ports as far south as San Francisco. So American policymakers are looking around, and so are British policymakers, and they're seeing a potential threat from Europe in the hemisphere in the north, and a potential threat from Europe in the south as revolutions are going on. I'll add one more piece of There's a revolution going on in Greece in this period for roughly nine years. The Greeks are rebelling against the Ottoman Empire, also on democratic grounds. And they, like their Latin American compatriots, are coming to the American Congress and saying, you first revolutionaries who threw off the shackles of empire. We need your help. And again, there's a lot of sympathy, but then a lot of recognition that this could get the US into some really troubling kinds of situations.

Don Wildman (6:59)

Yeah, it's very interesting time, place we're talking about here because, I mean, not basically a decade earlier, the British come to the United States and burn our capital down. You know, this was The War of 1812 was just a few years earlier. It's incredible to think about that. You know, I often do when on these podcasts, try to place myself at that time. And that's like being in the, you know, the aughts of 2000s. You know, it's that recently that this happened. And yet here we are now trying to figure out some diplomatic Way to deal with the fact that we're going to rely on the British a lot in this situation is the upshot of all of this. So interesting. But really what we're talking about, it's.

Christopher Nichols (7:36)

Actually like, if you just to extend your recent metaphor, it's more like the beginning of the pandemic in our imaginary. I mean, it's that recent, that level of trouble and tumult, and then it's immediate ramifications. I mean, there's lots of other pieces here. How does the US get the Spanish out of Florida in this moment? The Spanish have claims all the way to the West Coast. And John Quincy Adams, who's so critical in writing the Monroe Doctrine, his kind of grand strategy is to get the Spanish out, try to get these European empires out, and protect the fledgling republic, to keep moving. And that's all happening. That's 1819, and the Monroe Doctrine is 1823. So it's just. It's astonishing how much has changed and changing in this moment, and American policymakers are struggling to keep up. Really.

Don Wildman (8:16)

Yeah. I mean, in the broadest historical perspective of this time, it's really the emergence of republicanism, which we are, you know, versus monarchism. Right. I mean, that's basically the struggle, the friction that's going on in the. In the early 19th century. But I'm wondering how articulated that was in the thinking at the time. Are we really getting together and saying, gosh, we have to push this thing like we do later in the Cold War, the other side of this conversation, as a matter of fact, or is this really just about, you know, figuring out future markets for us? What are the factors at hand here?

Christopher Nichols (8:52)

I love this sort of framing question. So what's interesting is we have the records. We do know what a lot of these folks were thinking. So in the cabinet meetings that proceed in the fall into the December speech, the cabinet meetings of the Monroe administration, we see them debating this, and we can find Monroe actually also reaching out in letters to figures like Jefferson to ask, you know, should the US Work with the British, Another monarchy. Right. And one who the US has recently fought against the Spanish and these other powers. So they're closely aligned in wanting to keep Europe from recolonizing South America, for instance. But whether or not the US should do that on its own or with a close ally now and to recover a kind of alliance system that was sort of imagined around the Revolutionary era, it's possible the US would get back to being closer with its English brethren. That's a key element of the debate here, and you see this through the rest of US history. So pointing to the Cold War is really astute. You know, would the US have a binding collective security kind of agreement? Would the US Agree to. So this is the proposal the British bring to American diplomats like John Quincy Adams. George Canning, their foreign secretary, comes to him and says, let's have a, let's have a two nation assertion that no further colonization will happen in South America. And the British Navy will back this up. That's the, in one way, that's the origin the Monroe Doctrine. And the Cabinet comes together, they debate this. Jefferson actually says, hey, you should probably do it with the British. And Monroe's leaning that way, and so are a few other figures. But John Quincy Adams is staunch, no, we can't do it. And he has a kind of realist perspective here and he says, look, the reality on the ground is the Spanish can't win this war, not in the long term. And you see that in the Monroe Doctrine. I can read a quote in a minute. And that eventually persuades the Cabinet that they don't need the British. The British are going to support them de facto no matter what the US does. So there's that piece of it. And then the Republican piece I think is really fascinating. So there's a real fellow sister Republic sensibility, as I said. You'll love this historian by the name of Caitlin Fitz did all this grounded research. And there's a Bolivarian baby boom in the US in the 1820s. Tons of people here in central Ohio are naming their children Bolivar or Simone. There are towns named after. You could search for it now, but I encourage listeners to, to search for it. So there's thousands of towns and children named after Bolivar. If you want evidence that average people, people of color, formerly enslaved, people that knew immigrants were feeling this sensibility, this fellow Republican sensibility, you need go no further than they're literally naming their children after the heroes of the revolution. So yes, it's a Republican sensibility, but. But the question is, does the US have the capacity to support it with military force? And will these kind of bluster filled declarations be effective in warding off actual, you know, know, actual military action or staunch diplomatic action? And John Quincy Adams thinks, yes, a unilateral assertion is the way to go. Monroe and some others think a sort of more of an alliance system is the way to go. And you can see this sort of play out through the rest of time. And this is why I think historians, diplomatic historians, love the Monroe Doctrine because there's so many different Monroe doctrines. You can interpret it as an isolationist document, an interventionist document, a hands off or a, or a, or a, or a stepping inward policing kind of thing. And it all starts with these debates in the Cabinet in that moment.

Don Wildman (12:04)

And it becomes other kinds of doctrines. The Truman Doctrine. I mean, it really becomes, becomes this through line for American foreign policy through so much. When you read this document, which you can do on the Archives nationalarchives.org or at least part of it, it reads, first of all, very verbose, very difficult to get through it. It's the message, the annual message to Congress, which later is called the State of the Union Address at the time. Hard to read this thing. It's so complex. But what you really get from it is how carefully it's being written. You know, it's is, it's rather mild mannered in its proclamation. And part of the reason for that is that we recognize, certainly Monroe recognizes that we're fairly weak in the situation. We're going to be making some, some bold ideas happen, but we don't have the oomph to back it up. We don't have the army and Navy. That was a big factor in this. And I question its timing because of that. It's very interesting that we're, that we're seeking to do this at a time when we really can't force it on anybody.

Christopher Nichols (13:00)

Yeah, I think you're right. And I'll pull a few of those quotes so listeners can think this through with us. In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. So that's classic Washington and Jefferson. We're not going to meddle in Europe. There's a real old World, New world divide. And then they goes on to say, we owe it therefore to candor and the amicable relations existing between the US and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and comfort. Though that sounds rather anodyne and moderate. That's basically saying we'll declare war on you if you try to colonize the hemisphere. And really that's also about extending monarchy. So back to your point about a sort of republican government versus monarchical systems or tyranny as they would have referred to it. And then there's a bunch else. But the key other element is that with the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall interfere. And that also suggests the US won't come in and directly support the revolutionaries against Spain. But they are saying, hey, if Russia wants in, or France is attempting to come in, which is a piece of this holy alliance puzzle that's happening, the US Will object to that. So the US won't interfere if it's what's happening now, but will object to any further escalation. Essentially, it's a hard document to parse. And I think that's, as you say, very carefully written about maintaining neutrality. And it's an extension of those early formative principles for US Foreign policy, which is what I've written a lot about. So it goes from Washington in 1796 to Jefferson in 1801. There's a continuity through different parties thing, no entanglement, neutrality. Just keep this fledgling weak nation growing without getting too involved. And then this 1823 Monroe Doctrine move is the first assertion beyond that, and it suggests the US is going to take a more proactive role in the hemisphere. But it's still cautious. It's still, you know, carefully worded. And it, and it's. And it's a nation that recognizes, you know, that it's weakness rather than its strength, which we.

Don Wildman (15:02)

Sure.

Christopher Nichols (15:03)

It's hard for us to read back into the past and recognize just how tenuous this project was. By the 1820s. It's, you know, as you just said, the war with the British is in recent memory. The capital was burned. I mean, this is not a strong.

Don Wildman (15:14)

State at this moment. It's one way to look at a pivotal moment in our history when the early Republicans years are transitioning. You know, you still have the last kind of, you know, Founding father President James Monroe in power. And at this moment, he's consulting these famous personalities, as you've suggested. Jefferson, Adams, then John Quincy, you know, John Adams son, John Quincy Adams, who he leans on heavily, who is his Secretary of State. It's a really interesting pivot that. That history is having, is making right now.

Christopher Nichols (15:46)

Totally. And I'll just add one addendum. So, yeah, he consults John Adams, and John Quincy Adams is the Secretary of State. And, you know, one argument for what's going on this moment is John Quincy Adams is setting himself up for a run for the presidency the next year.

Don Wildman (15:58)

Oh, interesting. Okay. You suggest that the John Quincy Adams and John Adams's dad were very opposed to Jefferson and Monroe. In terms of how this was. Was it as dramatic as that or was this kind of like, hey guys, this is really difficult. It's Small, small baby steps here.

Christopher Nichols (16:16)

It's pretty dramatic. So really in his terms, Monroe is thinking by the late 1810s that he wants to be the US foreign policy, to take a more assertive role in the world. And he's sympathetic to the revolutionaries, particularly in South America. And a first version of the Monroe Doctrine, in fact, that Monroe's hand largely writes is stronger. It's not what you see in the final version that you were just describing that has this sort of more moderate and kind of ponderous tone that's more John Quincy Adams stripping out some of the most assertive elements. And let's, let's take off the veil. What's really going on there? John Quincy Adams strategy for diplomacy is one on one correspondence and strong statements outside of public, the public, sort of public, diplomatic and public rhetoric realm. Monroe really wants to have it in public. So, you know, if you look at the memoirs and the writings of John Quincy Adams, for instance, what he's doing in this moment is writing a really strongly worded letter to the Russians. And we have that. And that letter to the Russians says, we will not let you take this territory in the Pacific Northwest. You absolutely cannot intervene in South America along with France and Austria and Prussia in the Holy Alliance. Now, whether or not they would have done that is a question historians have pondered a bit and it doesn't seem that likely. But if they had, well, Quincy Adams wanted to put them on notice, but not in public, in private. Monroe is much more comfortable now at the end of his second term saying, I'm going to put this all out there and have a kind of Monroe Doctrine. He winds up with that, but a more moderate version.

Don Wildman (17:46)

Why were the colonies falling apart for the Spanish? What was happening? Was it really the rise of republicanism and was there that kind of resistance or had they just worn out their welcome?

Christopher Nichols (17:57)

It's a couple things. Well, one, there have been sort of periodic uprisings basically since the era of the American Revolution. So from the 1780s and 1790s, the Spanish have had a hard time keeping a cap on their colonies throughout the hemisphere. Yeah, by the 1810s, what the problem is, the Spanish are involved in the Napoleonic wars and their eyes are on that. And so then at the end of that conflict in 1814, 1815, as the Peace is happening right before Waterloo, the Spanish monarchy is basically, is falling and there's a civil war happening within Spain. So France comes in to help reinstall that monarchy and there's really no central government for South America at that point. At which point the revolutionaries are emboldened and they call them rump governments and juntas form. And so pretty quickly there's no more capacity for Spanish rule because they're focusing on the peninsula. And that lack of control then leads to the questions that American policymakers have. Okay, what happens if they try to reimpose control, send over fleets and ships? And they're going to need the French since they needed the French to help them reinstall the monarchy. So that's a sort of threat perception model of what's going on in the US side in Central and South America you've got militia groups and all kinds of other groups. It's a pretty messy conflict. So from the US side looking at it, it looks like it reifies the problems of will these people be capable of democratic self government? I should say something like 15 new governments form in just the first decade there and the US is the first country to recognize them. So unlike the moment of the Haitian Revolution, for instance, when the US sort of covers itself with ignominy by not through generally a racist lens, not recognizing the Haitian Revolution, this is not true with the revolutions in Central and South America.

Don Wildman (19:47)

Interesting. You want to know where the Avenue of Americas comes from in Manhattan? It's this mindset, it's this idea that we're. There's something new and exciting and freedom is flourishing in the South America and we want to be part of that. That's the idealistic side of this. But there's also the national security side of this. They're worried about colonies being re empowered south of us.

Christopher Nichols (20:06)

And there's the classic driver, trade, commerce and trade. Right. That there's a lot of trade to happen. And that's why the British Navy supports the Monroe Doctrine.

Don Wildman (20:13)

Exactly. And all this is channeled into this big speech, 1823 to Congress which is made. And at that point nothing really happens after that. You know, I mean that's the anti climax of this. The proclamation is made and then there's a good 20 years before anything even, even comes up in any kind of controversial way. And that is 1845 in Texas, which we will talk about after this short break.

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Tara Davis Woodhull (22:37)

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Christopher Nichols (22:42)

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Don Wildman (23:33)

Okay, we're back to discuss the history and very considerable impact of the Monroe Doctrine with Professor Christopher Nichols. Chris, after the Proclamation happened in 1823, message to Congress. Not much to report until decades later. Meanwhile, the forces of Manifest Destiny have taken hold and quite successfully. We are determined to acquire a full sized continent in the 1840s. Texas annexation becomes the hot button issue and the Mexican American war is fought. 1845-48 results in the Treaty of Hidalgo and the acquisition of the American Southwest in California. Now we have real influence in this world. We got size, we got geography. Oh my goodness. And in the decades after the Civil War, we really start to flex. Let's first discuss the Venezuelan crisis of 1895, which I mentioned in the opening, and how that morphs into the Spanish American war after that, 1898. What is the Venezuelan crisis?

Christopher Nichols (24:29)

So in very brief, it's a contest over the boundaries of Venezuela. And the US takes the side of Venezuela against British Guiana, which is still within the Commonwealth of Britain. And they're looking at a long standing set of disputes that go back to this earlier period. A question of what line was agreed on between those countries in about 1814 and 1815. But the bigger, broader set of questions is will the US defend Venezuela and what form would that defense take the Republic of Venezuela? And so the short answer, the sort of key diplomatic piece is the US winds up issuing the new Secretary of State in 1895, ends up issuing what's called the 20 inch gun memo, which is a 12,000 word memo which argues that the US has the right through the Monroe Doctrine to intervene and to support Venezuela. And that direct assertion of the Monroe Doctrine through diplomacy with the major power of the world, British, is this turning point in US diplomats using the Monroe Doctrine. So as you said about the Mexican American War, Polk wrote about Mr. Monroe's document or doctrine, but he didn't invoke it in the way that the, that that we see Olney doing in the Cleveland administration. And the big picture thing here is that if you go to newspapers in summer or fall of 1895, you find people crying out for war with Britain for transgressing the sovereign rights of Venezuela. I mean, it really was front page news. It sounds like nothing to us today. Most people don't know about it. But Venezuela all the way up through 2026 has been critical to the American imaginary about its role in the hemisphere, the access to resources, a democratic republic, that kind of thing.

Don Wildman (26:07)

What were the resources? This is long, long before oil comes along.

Christopher Nichols (26:11)

Totally.

Don Wildman (26:12)

Yeah.

Christopher Nichols (26:12)

So in the Orinoco Valley, there's gold. There's gold in them thar hills. Right. And so that's central piece of it, the, it's gold. There's also other minerals, and that's a piece of what geologists are talking about today. In fact, that there may be rare earth minerals in Venezuela because of all of this sort of tar, the oil tariff. Those fields also have lots of other kinds of assets to exploit.

Don Wildman (26:35)

Interesting. This really has an effect on British American relations. Right. I mean, it really tilts things.

Christopher Nichols (26:41)

So for, for a second it, it looks like an outright conflict. They're really staring down each other, both administrations, Salisbury and Grover Cleveland. And then they step back and what the British at first say we don't recognize Monroe Doctrine. It's second, in 1896, they say, okay, we will submit to international binding arbitration for this dispute, which is a, which is understood to be by policymakers at the moment, a tacit agreement that the US had had a right to the Monroe Doctrine. What does that mean? It means that the British recognize the US as a sphere of influence in the hemisphere and that the US Has a role to play in the sovereign relations of other countries within the hemisphere. That's a really big kind of assertion and one that Washington and Jefferson weren't making. Right. And even the Monroe Doctrine originally didn't quite go that far. Right now the US is meddling in Venezuela's to help, ostensibly to help Venezuela on its boundary crisis with another major power.

Don Wildman (27:33)

And are they citing this at this early time? Are they citing the actual dopamine?

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Yes.

Christopher Nichols (27:38)

All over the place. Yes, yes, yes. It's amazing. So I wrote about this in my book Promise and Peril. I mean, you can keyword search it now. You'll find Monroe all over there. And guess what? It's the, it's the imperialists, the soon to be next generation Republicans, not the abolitionist Republicans who fought the Civil War, but they're the next generation ones and they're the ones who are beginning to articulate an expanded and updated Monroe Doctrine. That's what we get when we get to Teddy Roosevelt.

Don Wildman (28:02)

Wow. So it had been taught in the schools. I mean, this was really an important document. Even though it hadn't been really instated anywhere to this point. People were really aware of its historical significance and the context it gave them for foreign policy decisions. Yep.

Christopher Nichols (28:17)

Political elites for sure. And then by 1895, 1896. Now this is in public discourse. Now people think about Ed Monroe Doctrine as something you use as a touch point to justify foreign.

Don Wildman (28:26)

Interesting, interesting. The ball really starts to roll in 1898, of course, as America begins flirting with its own empire, imperialism in the old model. We kick out the now very ailing Spanish empire, take control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam in the Philippines, and the Philippines in the Pacific. This will also spur the annexation of Hawaii as a forward base in the Pacific. Listen to our recent episode on that. We, we will land after all of this with Teddy Roosevelt, who really takes the Monroe Doctrine on. And it's called the roosevelt corollary. In 1904, it asserts the U.S. s right to intervene in Latin America to prevent European intervention. This is extraordinary. I mean, this is. When we talk about Teddy Roosevelt being the guy who really, you know, flexes America on the. On the foreign scene. This is his moment, isn't it?

Christopher Nichols (29:18)

Totally. Right, yeah. So the Corollary extends the Monroe Doctrine in a heretofore unimagined way. It says the US not only will help Venezuela with its boundaries, like in 1895, 96, or support, say, a humanitarian, ish, revolution in 1898, but now the US will act as a kind of hemispheric constable or policeman.

Don Wildman (29:43)

Yeah.

Christopher Nichols (29:43)

And that. That means going directly into those countries. And what you see in the next evolutions of that is US Marines at customs houses making sure debts are paid. And the driver of this is another Venezuela crisis in 1901, 1902, when. When Venezuela couldn't pay back its debts, or seemingly couldn't, you had German and British warships circling around. And Roosevelt and others in his administration saw that as one, a security threat because they wanted to build the Isthmian Canal, what became the Panama Canal. And so they didn't want major foreign vessels, naval action in the area. They saw that as a direct affront to American control of a canal. But more so they argued, and this is what the corollary argues, that the US has the appropriate role to police the hemisphere and make sure that there's sort of good governance in the hemisphere. And if you think about all the rest of the interventions through the present that are governed by this logic, they.

Don Wildman (30:35)

Use that language, police force, et cetera.

Christopher Nichols (30:37)

Yeah. You see some of the political cartoons about the Roosevelt Corollary, call it the World constable. That's like the language that they were using in that moment. And I pulled for our conversation, actually how he described this. Two years after the Venezuela crisis in Congress, Roosevelt said, in asserting The Monroe Doctrine. In taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela and Panama, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large in the Western Hemisphere. The adherence of the U.S. to the Monroe Doctrine may force the U.S. however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. That's 1904.

Don Wildman (31:15)

Further American involvement comes along pretty soon afterwards. Haiti, as you mentioned, 1915 to 1934, we, we occupy there. Nicaragua, 1912 to 1933. Dominican Republic, 1916 to 24. We had wanted to annex that for a while there back way back when. That's just a few of these Caribbean, Latin American places. America becomes very close to becoming this major global power way beyond, you know, our original idea of ourselves. That comes to flower, of course, after World War I, and we've really done that. But. But all of this is basically the vacuum that's been created by these monarchies not being able to keep up with their own colonies, right?

Christopher Nichols (32:00)

Yes, the monarchies. And it's also the fits and starts of these new republics. You know, they're trying to build government, trying to, you know, taking out debt, expanding, industrializing, all of those things. And, you know, and they take different trajectories. And so working through that, the US winds up taking a. Taking on a bigger role that it didn't necessarily have to do. So that one. These are all conflicts of choice or interventions of choice. I think the thing I would add to what you just said too, and I was just at a conference talking to some folks doing public history, thinking about what is an empire. You know, if you look at this sort of circa 1898 to 1914 period to the beginning of the Great War, the US is intervening and has troops all over the place, as you were noting, and even into the 1930s. I mean, if you've got Marines and customs houses all throughout the Caribbean and have. Have a significant military naval presence, you know, all along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, having just acquired colonies and territories as far ranging as the Philippines and Puerto Rico. So really spreading across both major oceans. Whatever you think of it, the US Actually is that world power. You said almost, or it's getting there, but actually in this period, it really is. And then I think the next critical questions for policymakers and in terms of applying the Monroe Doctrine is are there broader principles to guide this than intervention or police power? And so you get. In the 30s. I don't want to fast forward the story too much, but you Get a good neighbor policy under fdr. You get ideas about Pan Americanism. Come back. These had been there in the 19th century. And you get real pushback from Latin American countries. Lawyers and sort of legal thinkers throughout, particularly Argentine jurists, push back in international law and say, hey, we have sovereignty here. You can't just come in and take over our customs house or rearrange our political system. And you see the long tail of that is the nationalization of lots of industries later in the 20th century when American corporations had had a monopoly, whether it's United Fruit or oil and Exxon, that kind of thing. So really, you've got the US Intervening all over the place. You don't need the Roosevelt Corollary to push this along. But the Roosevelt Corollary really throws gas on the fire of it and amplifying it.

Don Wildman (34:07)

We're talking about this. I am anyway, in idealistic terms, political idealism, when in fact it's a very economically driven dynamic. I guess why this thing really matters to America is that we're, you know, our markets are growing so huge, not to mention our banking industry. You know, we're, we're lending a lot of money out all over the place. All of that is happening in the early 20th century. What, what this conversation wants to nail down or means to nail down is that it's an extraordinary thing that a 1823 document and policy really extends throughout the entirety of the 1800s, let alone the 1900s, as we're about to do. Discuss when we come back.

Tara Davis Woodhull (34:50)

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Don Wildman (35:55)

Chris Many Americans forget how close we came to being a colonial empire of our own in the European model after the Spanish American War, right through to World War I. But post depression 1930s, things start to change in a big way. One of the lesser known developments in that era. Tell me how the Good Neighbor policy under FDR reframed the use of the Monroe Doctrine.

Christopher Nichols (36:20)

So the Monroe Doctrine isn't really being applied very actively to justify interventions in the 20s into the 30s. But there are still US Marines and forces all throughout the Caribbean, Pacific and Atlantic. Starting in the. At the end of the Hoover years and into the FDR years, American policymakers, diplomats primarily, come together for Pan American conferences and start thinking about ways to end kind of anti Americanism or at least push back against it in the hemisphere. So famous Argentine jurist Manuel Ugarte referred to the US in the 1920s as the new Rome in the hemisphere. The new Rome didn't need to conquer them. It had already conquered them in part through law and through trade in the 30s. The sensibility is, okay, how do we, how do we maintain the trade in the context of the Depression and get fellow feeling back, so to, so to speak. So the American policymakers gather, and one of the first moves here, and this we should note, comes from pressure from, like the naacp, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, to pull the Marines out of places like Haiti. So by 1934, you're seeing most of the US forces that were, were there in the hemisphere pulling out. And that's a sign in 1933 and 34, in several conferences in Montevideo and elsewhere, of a kind of Pan American sentiment that the U.S. is behind. And so the U.S. is stopping this kind of rash interventionism or leaving its troops and base structures and meddling and attempting a more harmonious path, if you will. Of course, there's a realpolitik to this. As you think about the 30s, right? There's the Depression, peace and trade, and then there's the roiling problems in the world system. The US wants its close allies close, and they certainly don't want, by the end of the 30s, you know, large German or Japanese presence or even any in the hemisphere. So you see also sort of incentives for diplomacy throughout the hemisphere to, to ward off foreign powers. And this is a precursor to the Cold War, where the same sorts of sensibilities exist, except they're a little bit less good neighbor and a little bit more interventionist. Mm.

Don Wildman (38:20)

Well, and you mentioned, as the rise of communism starts, it spreads around the world. It's so attractive to developing post colonial economies struggling in a capitalist market, especially in, in the, in the Western Hemisphere. It kind of. This all re. Energizes the Monroe Doctrine for the United States. How so? Exactly?

Christopher Nichols (38:39)

So you see, for instance in policy planning documents when the US is involved in the 1954 coup in Guatemala against Jacobo Arbenz, that this is an extension of a Monroe Doctrine sensibility to overturn regimes that aren't favorable to the U.S. right. So this is the. It's a cold war. No, we will have no communists. But that sensibility becomes, and this is what lots of critics of US foreign policy then and now think, it becomes one of supporting dictators. So the terms that some scholars use are Frankenstein dictators. They're like a little bit of lots of different political philosophies, but at the end of the day they're more authoritarian, but they're relatively pro us. So you see coups later on in Chile, earlier on in Guatemala, and again in policy planning. The thinking is that this is an extension of the Monroe Doctrine. You also see other figures using the Monroe Doctrine in their speeches and thinking. I think the archetype of this, the best example that you always see come up, is the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Bay of Pigs, that the US can send in proxy forces to attempt to overturn a regime. And then the very idea of a quarantine of Cuba in the context of having Russian nuclear weapons put there is inherently a kind of Teddy Roosevelt police power action. Right? It's saying, we're not going to directly attack you, but in international law, a blockade is war. So they call it a quarantine. And JFK is very knowledgeable about this. And there's a bunch of quotes journalists try to pin JFK down. This is the fascinating thing. So, Mr. President, what does this mean for the Monroe Doctrine? Does this mean they'll do this elsewhere, et cetera? He doesn't ever answer back using the Monroe Doctrine, at least not, not that I've been able to find in my research. But he's being asked about it all the time. And you find it coming up in policy planning. So it's absolutely in that moment. But when you see people in public talk about, oh, they asserted or invoked the Monroe Doctrine, not literally, just sort of atmospherically to shape what was done in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Don Wildman (40:33)

Right. I mean, what was once stopping colonialism is now stopping socialism. Right? I mean, is it literally like that or is that called out as Hypocrisy right there.

Christopher Nichols (40:43)

That's exactly the same principle like monarchy is wrong and colonialism is wrong and communism is wrong. And they're all antithetical to, in this sense, in the Cold War sense, you know, human freedom and flourishing.

Don Wildman (40:53)

Right.

Christopher Nichols (40:53)

You need rights and abilities to flourish to, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. It might not be property per se, but. But you need all of those things in a kind of republican sensibility. That's the optimistic, idealistic side.

Don Wildman (41:05)

Right.

Christopher Nichols (41:05)

The other side is, you know, the sort of Cold War battle for hearts and minds. That's a sort of guise for the other pieces of it. And just like with colonialism, trade, acquisition of territory, all that stuff. I mean, I think the, you know, what we're coming up with in this conversation is it's the messy middle. It's the idealism mixed with the sort of realpolitik. Right, right.

Don Wildman (41:24)

But it's also an old document. You know, that's amazing to me. Did. Did true.

Christopher Nichols (41:29)

When.

Don Wildman (41:30)

When the Truman Doctrine happened, which is essentially the domino, you know, addressing the domino theory, was he invoking the Monroe Doctrine in his speeches and so forth? Was that part of it?

Christopher Nichols (41:41)

You don't see the Monroe Doctrine in his speeches in that moment. I mean, the critical thing. I'm glad you raised that. The critical thing about the truman doctrine in 1947 as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine is it's the first time there's a US Foreign policy doctrine that extends that logic to Europe. So it says the US Will send aid to Turkey and Greece, significant amounts of aid to combat what they see as subterfuge by communist and socialist agents at turning over their governments. Right. And illegitimately. If you want another piece of the puzzle, Eisenhower in 1958 has an Eisenhower Doctrine which extends the same kind of thinking to the Middle east and says, you know, if there's subversion, the US Will step up to stop that communist subversion of legitimate governments and even to the point of using force. Wow.

Don Wildman (42:26)

It's. It's like you could just play a game of, like, you've got Washington's Farewell Address, you've got the. The Monroe Doctrine, 1823, and then you've got Roosevelt's corollary, and then you've got the Truman Doctrine. Eisenhower's in there as well, and here we are. I mean, that's what's so amazing, the through line you can draw.

Christopher Nichols (42:45)

Absolutely. I mean, it's an amazing through line to think about the rise of US power. So the 1823 weak state by 1947, 1958, strong state, strong military coming out of World War II, preeminent economy in the world. And so those theories of choices are about, you know, backstopping freedom globally, are about extending commercial capacities, you know, but they also come at a huge cost. If you think about Washington's injunction against standing armies, for instance.

Don Wildman (43:10)

Right.

Christopher Nichols (43:11)

He never envisioned, could never have envisioned, you know, where we are today with 800 bases around the world, an enormous military. Right. The huge deficit spending to keep up this military. That's, that's the, the, the unwritten corollary of all these corollaries, if you will, is the rise of the military industrial complex to backstop these kinds of claims and actions worldwide, which are both for good and for ill. Right.

Don Wildman (43:33)

I think that's mostly because we justify it with the economic intervention. We want to spread the free markets to other places. And, and that kind of subsumed would be the right verb for that. Subsumed the Monroe Doctrine in defense of capitalism.

Christopher Nichols (43:48)

That is correct, I think. But you could also blend the democratic capitalism there in the thinking of American policymakers. You know, it's a, particularly the Cold War, a very close alignment of the belief that political and economic freedoms go hand in hand and that communism's fatal flaw for policymakers is that it distances the two, that in fact you have a kind of one party system and no real economic freedoms. And so the thinking from like Walt Rostow and modernization theory and the US being involved all over Central and South America again in the 60s is you have to jumpstart the economy so that they have a flourishing form of capitalism and that flourishing form of capitalism will then align political freedoms with those economic freedoms. Actually China today proves the fallacy of that. Right, but that was the thinking then.

Don Wildman (44:36)

Has the Monroe Doctrine faded in this post Cold War world we live in? How relevant is it today?

Christopher Nichols (44:43)

I think it's quite relevant. Obviously it's relevant because it was invoked in the national security strategy of 2026 and the actions in Venezuela by the Trump administration. So for starters, it's, it's highly relevant in our current moment. If you go back to the end of the Cold War, there are several uses of it. Grenada under Reagan arguing that needing to get Marxists out, the US could intervene and should intervene. You see Manuel Noriega at the end of the Cold War in 1989, the US goes in under the Bush administration and pulls him out a head of state, in fact, although not the same sort of head of state as Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, in that case, noriega was a governing general running a junta, not elected. Maduro has been elected, although his elections have been disputed. So you see the Monroe Doctrine in those moments. One thing that's interesting to open up the lens here, I think that's useful thinking about our current moment is in the end of the Cold War, when Noriega was taken by the Bush administration and charged with arms trafficking and narco trafficking. Almost every Latin American country that issued a statement on the topic rejected it and said, the US shouldn't be intervening in this way. This is the old, you know, the old intervention of Teddy Roosevelt and colonialism and we won't have it anymore. This is the end of that.

Don Wildman (45:49)

Right.

Christopher Nichols (45:49)

We're post Cold War now. Come back to our current moment in 2026. There's a real split between Latin American countries on whether or not the Trump administration should have overthrown Maduro. That's largely an artifact of how much Maduro has and his government has alienated other, other governments across Latin America. But it also tells you something about our current era. And I'm not sure what it is, but just that countries are mixed in their thinking about even interventions very close to them. And that's a fascinating way to think about sort of the police power element of the Monroe doctrine in its 20th century form. And then it also gets back to the very first question, how relevant is the 1823 version? And I would say it's quite relevant thinking about American foreign policy debates. It's relevant because it was an assertion that said stay out rather than go in. All of the later forms are versions of going in, and they're hotly debated and contested. But the earliest one was we've got your back, so stay out. But it wasn't, we will do something based on that. There's no protocol policy process laid out in there. That's one of the vagaries that's a problem or a strength if you're John Quincy Adams and James Monroe.

Don Wildman (46:56)

Well, you have the nation building problem that we learned from Iraq. And in the modern version of any kind of Truman Doctrine application, you end up in that situation, which is really not a good idea. We've learned over and over again. So Venezuela really sits. The modern version of Venezuela really is an anomaly to everything we've talked about as far as the traditional view of this.

Christopher Nichols (47:18)

It absolutely is. And I'll tick off a few other historical anomalies of the current moment. So in all those years of interventions that we've talked about where the US Transgressed against the sovereign rights of other countries. For its own reasons, the US never bombed a capital in South America until January 2026. In all of the regime change that the US did in all those years, the US never took an elected head of state again disputed from their country. Noriega is the only other example. So if you're talking about what's unprecedented in all the years of all the interventions and war on the ground, that never happened either. So several of these aspects are fascinating and unprecedented in terms of this long history of how the Monroe Doctrine has been implemented. And you could argue that this Trump corollary is the most assertive and unilateral of any of them.

Don Wildman (48:04)

Hmm. It's surprising they haven't used that language more, you know, and, and tried to place that in the context, but they really don't. It's not. You don't hear much of the idealism of the, of the Monroe Doctrine being said.

Christopher Nichols (48:14)

And that's the thing that stands out to my historian's ear. Regardless of politics, in the older versions, when the Monroe Doctrine was invoked, or even when it was just the shaping effect, it was almost always about those Republican principles. And that's what they were contesting in the John Quincy Adams, James Monroe discussion. Now, who's the US's allies and how will that play out? Those are open questions from 1823 on. But that the US would be a kind of juggernaut train to use William James kind of language from circa 1900, pushing forward democratic ideals and beliefs throughout the hemisphere first and then worldwide was not really in doubt. It was the question of what shape that should take. That we're not hearing that much today is rather striking because that's been such a strong throughline of the rhetoric from the 19th century onward.

Don Wildman (48:58)

Yeah.

Christopher Nichols (48:58)

Even as it took different forms.

Don Wildman (49:00)

Well, we'll have to see if the legacy of this policy will be continued stability of our sphere of influence or whether it will proceed to undermine the very security James Monroe and John Quincy Adams sought to ensure yet to come. Professor Christopher Nichols teaches at the Ohio State University in Columbus. He occupies the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security and writes books like the two I cited at the top, Rethinking American Grand Strategy and Promise and Peril America at the dawn of the Golden Age. What's new on your docket, Chris?

Christopher Nichols (49:29)

Working on that topic that we discussed before the election of 1952 and how Ike won and what that transformation meant, but I'm also working on. This will interest you. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

Don Wildman (49:39)

Oh, interesting.

Christopher Nichols (49:40)

And thinking of it as a policy, a foreign policy document, as in reshaping the US's relationship to indigenous people, the British, the Spanish, as the US expanded. My argument is we should understand the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinances, the three main founding documents. So I'm working on a book on that.

Don Wildman (49:57)

Yeah, major in history, kids.

Christopher Nichols (49:59)

All right.

Don Wildman (49:59)

Nice to see you again, Chris.

Christopher Nichols (50:00)

Bye.

Don Wildman (50:00)

Bye.

Christopher Nichols (50:01)

Nice to see you.

Don Wildman (50:04)

Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.

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