What’s a prez to do? Monroe's doctrine

If colleges had had yearbooks when James Monroe attended William and Mary, he would not have been voted Most Likely to Assert. He was presentable—tall and sturdy—and capable, but he lacked the obvious ambition of the likes of Alexander Hamilton, his near age peer, or the declamatory power of a Patrick Henry, a Monroe mentor in Virginia politics. Monroe succeeded by getting things done in a modest and sometimes unassuming manner.

He became president by impressing his Virginia elders. Washington made him minister to France. Jefferson sent him to Paris to purchase New Orleans and he came home with Louisiana. Madison appointed him secretary of state, which set Monroe up as favorite to succeed Madison as president. Monroe did so easily, for the opposition Federalist party was falling apart and nothing had emerged to replace it. So easily was Monroe elected, in fact, that he proclaimed an “era of good feelings" in American politics. 

The era turned out to be a moment. A financial panic in 1819 produced distress across the land. The issue of slavery, largely quiescent in national politics since the adoption of the Constitution, burst into the open upon the application of Missouri for admission as a state with a constitution allowing slavery. Opponents of slavery decried the expansion of the evil institution; northerners worried that Missouri with slavery would bolster the strength of the slaveholding South in Congress. A two-year battle, which Monroe largely left to Congress, resulted in the Missouri Compromise: Missouri admitted as a slave state but most of the rest of the trans-Mississippi region closed to slavery.

It was in foreign affairs that Monroe made his lasting mark. Yet what that mark should be wasn't immediately obvious. The 1810s and 1820s saw the liberation of much of Central and South America from Spanish colonial control. Americans generally applauded this outcome as extending the sphere of republicanism. Britain liked it for weakening the Spanish empire and opening the Americas to British trade. 

The British government proposed a joint statement of purpose by Britain and the United States to the effect that other European powers, notably France and Russia, must not think of the formerly Spanish colonies as targets of opportunity. They should mind their own business and keep clear of the Americas.

The proposal sounded reasonable. The outcome it sought—the Americas largely free from European control— suited the interest of the United States, which would secure its position as the dominant power in the western hemisphere. The United States lacked the navy to enforce any such statement; the British were offering their fleet, the most powerful in the world.

Monroe was cautious. He consulted Jefferson and Madison. They favored the idea. This was significant, in that Jefferson had long distrusted the British, and Madison had fought a war against them.

John Quincy Adams, Monroe's secretary of state, offered different counsel. Adams knew that George Canning, the British foreign minister, was neither a fool nor a philanthropist. Canning wouldn't propose anything that didn't suit Britain's interest. Canning was trying to drag America into a policy that would serve Britain first and foremost. By offering what seemed a favor to the United States, Canning might be setting America up for a British claim of quid pro quo.

Better, concluded Adams, for the United States to steal Britain's thunder and by itself warn off the European powers. “It would be more candid as well as more dignified to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man of war,” Adams reasoned. President Monroe should make a statement of his own, on the lines of the British proposal but leaving Britain out of it.

And so Monroe did, in his annual message to Congress in December 1823. After describing an exchange with the government of Russia regarding that country’s ambitions on the Pacific coast of North America, the president declared, “The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

This one sentence didn’t seem like much on first reading, but it proved to have more significance than anything else in the six-thousand-word message. The normally unassertive Monroe was asserting something huge here. He was posting a “Keep Out” sign on the Americas, claiming that the American republics constituted a world apart from the monarchies of Europe. 

Monroe’s statement was especially bold in that the United States had no power to back it up. The president, following Adams, reckoned that the British would enforce his no-trespassing rule. Having lost the colonies that became the United States, the British had no desire to establish new American colonies; they merely wanted new customers, which American republics would provide but American colonies of Britain’s European rivals would not.

Monroe’s proclamation wasn’t spoken of as a “doctrine” of American foreign policy—a presidential statement of American interest and purpose—for decades after its articulation. Eventually, though, the United States grew powerful enough to defend the principle without British help and referred to it regularly as settled policy. The Monroe Doctrine was cited to support Cuban nationalists against Spain, leading to the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Monroe Doctrine warned Germany against conducting naval operations in American waters during World War I. Opponents of American entry into World War II said the United States had enough to do defending the Monroe Doctrine in the western hemisphere. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Monroe’s keep-out demand was cited against the Soviets for their placing offensive missiles in Cuba.

By then other presidents had doctrines of their own. The Truman Doctrine, promising America support for countries struggling against communism, became a mainstay of American Cold War policy. The Nixon Doctrine said American allies would receive American aid but would have to supply their own troops against insurgents and revolutionaries. The Carter Doctrine told the Soviets to stay away from the Persian Gulf and its oil fields. The Reagan Doctrine justified arms and funding for right-wing fighters against left-wing regimes.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the doctrines was that they had no standing in law, either domestic or international. Congress wasn’t consulted, merely informed. Other countries weren’t required or asked to agree.

And yet they defined much of American policy toward the world. In doing so they expanded the reach of the presidency beyond anything the framers of the Constitution intended—and even beyond what the normally unassertive James Monroe anticipated from that single sentence in his annual message in 1823.