Imagine declaring like a massive geopolitical
red line across an entire hemisphere. Right.
Just drawing a line straight down the map. Exactly.
You are looking the most powerful, heavily armed
empires in the world. dead in the eye and you're
telling them to stay out of your half of the
globe. Which is a bold move. It's an insanely
bold move. Especially when you consider they
did all of this when they didn't even have a
functioning army or like a credible Navy to defend
that line. Yeah it sounds like absolute Jew political
suicide. But in 1823 the United States did exactly
that. So welcome to the deep dive. Today we've
got a massive stack of historical research government
documents and modern news reports to explore.
The Monroe Doctrine, which is arguably the most
resilient, continuously cited foreign policy
statement in American history. Yeah. And our
mission for you, our listener, is to really understand
how a single 200 year old statement. evolved
from a defensive, almost laughable bluff into
this highly controversial justification for global
dominance. And, well, more importantly, we're
going to break down exactly why this centuries
-old concept is completely dominating the geopolitical
headlines right now in 2026. Right. Think of
it like installing a base operating system on
a computer. In 1823, the code was incredibly
simple. But over two centuries, that same base
code has received rogue patches, hidden updates,
total rewrites from completely different developers
until it's suddenly running a massive global
security apparatus. I love that analogy. It's
a phenomenal case study in how political language
mutates over time. because when President James
Monroe actually gave the speech in 1823. During
his State of the Union, right? Yeah, his seventh
annual State of the Union address. But it wasn't
even called a doctrine. That label wasn't attached
to it until decades later, like around the 1850s.
Oh, wow. At the time, it wasn't some grand overarching
strategy for the United States. It was a highly
situational reaction to the geopolitics of the
post -Napoleonic world. How does a simple speech
given in the 1800s balloon into a globalism or
doctrine? Because looking at the sources, Monroe
didn't even write the core of it himself, did
he? No, he didn't. It was drafted chiefly by
his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. The
real architect behind the language. Exactly.
Adams couched it in very dense diplomatic terms.
But the core message was essentially drawing
a boundary between two distinct spheres. He declared
that the New World, meaning the Americas, and
the old world of Europe were fundamentally different.
Like completely separate ecosystems. Right. And
he said the Americas were no longer subject to
future colonization. by any European powers.
If Europe tried to control or oppress the newly
independent Spanish -American republics, the
US would view it as a hostile act. And in exchange?
In exchange, the US promised to stay completely
out of Europe's internal conflicts. I mean, I
can't imagine the European heavyweights took
kindly to a fledgling nation, telling them where
they could and couldn't build their empires.
Oh, they were furious. Prince Metternich of Austria,
who was essentially the master chess player of
European diplomacy at the time, called the Declaration
a new act of revolt by the United States. A new
act of revolt? Yeah, he believed it would embolden
conspirators and revolutionaries everywhere.
Okay, let's unpack this because this is where
I get completely stuck on the logic. You have
the 1823 United States drawing this line, but
they had just had their capital city burned to
the ground by the British during the War of 1812
a few years prior. Just a few years before, yeah.
Their standing army is practically non -existent.
Their navy is tiny. It's like a scrawny kid drawing
a line in the sand against a bunch of heavyweights.
If they couldn't actually defend this line they
just grew from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego.
How did they get away with it? Why didn't Europe
just call the bluff and march right over them?
What's fascinating here is that they got away
with it because of a massive historical irony.
The Monroe Doctrine was, for its first several
decades, actually enforced by the British Royal
Navy. Wait, what? You're telling me the British
Royal Navy enforced an American policy? The same
British Empire the U .S. had literally just fought
a war against. The very same. Why on earth would
Britain help the U .S. keep your about? Well,
it wasn't about helping the United States at
all. It was entirely about serving Britain's
own economic interests. After the Napoleonic
Wars, Broughton was establishing what we call
the Pax Britannica, this period of relative peace
where Britain was the undisputed global hegemon.
Right. But more importantly, they were rapidly
industrializing. They had factories churning
out goods and they desperately needed open markets
to sell those goods. And Latin America was suddenly
a massive new market because they were declaring
independence. from Spain. Exactly. But if Spain
managed to recapture its colonies in Latin America,
Spain would immediately reimpose mercantilist
policies. Mercantilism being like a closed loop
economy. Precisely. If Spain controls the colony,
the colony is only legally allowed to trade with
Spain. They slammed the door shut on outside
trade, hoarding all the resources and profits
for the Spanish crown. Britain could not afford
to lose that market. So Britain wanted Latin
America to remain independent just as much as
the U .S. did. Yes. But for purely economic free
trade reasons, they tacitly supported the American
declaration because the Royal Navy was already
in the Atlantic, making sure Spain couldn't send
massive armadas to take their colonies back.
So the U .S. is the scrawny kid drawing the line
in the But the biggest guy on the playground,
the British Empire, is standing right behind
him, quietly nodding. That's exactly it. And
the leaders of these newly independent Latin
American nations understood this power dynamic
perfectly. The sources feature figures like Simon
Bolivar, the great liberator of South America.
Right, very famous figure. Bolivar was a realist.
He received Monroe's speech with gratitude, sure,
but he knew the U .S. president wielded very
little actual power to protect him. He knew full
well that his continued independence relied heavily
on the British Navy. Wow. In fact, Bolivar saw
the doctrine as nothing more than a tool of U
.S. national policy, not some genuine altruistic
charter for a hemispheric corporation. But relying
on the British Navy was never going to be a permanent
solution for the United States, right? I mean,
by the time we hit the late 1800s, the US has
undergone a massive industrial revolution of
its own. Oh, absolutely. They have steel. They
have a booming economy. And they're building
a world class Navy. And that new muscle completely
changes how they use the doctrine. It's no longer
a defensive shield. It becomes an offensive weapon.
That is the crucial pivot. The sources highlight
the Venezuelan crisis of 1895 as the turning
point. Venezuela had a border dispute with Britain
over a territory called Essequibo. Venezuela
essentially hired a former U .S. ambassador to
argue that Britain's land grab was violating
the Monroe Doctrine. And the U .S. actually steps
in, but this time with real leverage. Secretary
of State Richard Olney sends a note to Britain
claiming that the United States is, quote, practically
sovereign on this continent and that its fiat
is law. Which is a staggering assertion of dominance
over an entire hemisphere. It is known as the
Olney corollary. Britain initially scoffed at
it, but because they were preoccupied with rising
tensions in Europe, they eventually backed down
and agreed to arbitration. So they essentially
folded. They did. And historians view this as
a massive tacit concession to U .S. dominance
in the Americas. But the real shift, the moment
the underlying logic of the doctrine flips completely
on its head, happens a few years later with President
Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary.
To understand why Roosevelt did this, you have
to look at how global finance worked at the time.
In the early 1900s, several Latin American countries
had taken on massive foreign debts from European
banks to build railroads and infrastructure.
What huge national loans. Exactly. And when countries
like Venezuela defaulted on those loans, European
powers, meaning Britain, Germany, Italy, they
actually sent warships to blockade their ports
to force repayment. Which prompts Argentina's
foreign minister, Luis Maria Drago, to step in.
He announces the Drago Doctrine. He argues that
no European power should be allowed to use military
force against an American nation just to collect
the financial debt. Right. Which sounds completely
aligned with the original Monroe Doctrine, right?
Keep Europe's military out of the Americas. You
would absolutely think so. It seems like a natural
extension of keeping Europe out. But Roosevelt
explicitly rejected the Drago Doctrine. Wait,
why? If the whole point is keeping European warships
away, why not support Argentina's position? Because
Roosevelt looked at the mechanics of the situation.
He reasoned that if Latin American countries
defaulted on their debts and Europe wasn't allowed
to collect, Europe would eventually just invade
and take over the territory as payment. Oh, I
see. To Roosevelt, the only way to permanently
keep Europe out was to ensure the debts were
paid. So he added his own corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine. He asserted that in cases of flagrant
and chronic wrongdoing or economic impotence
by a Latin American nation, the United States
had the right to intervene preemptively. Preemptively.
Yes. The U .S. would step in, act as an international
police power and fix the local economy to keep
European creditors away. This is the birth of
the big stick ideology. I want to use an analogy
here because the logic is so twisted. It's like
your local neighborhood watch program suddenly
deciding that to keep burglars out of the neighborhood,
they have the authority to kick down your door,
occupy your living room and forcibly audit your
taxes just to make sure the bank doesn't foreclose
on your house and sell it to a stranger. That
is an incredibly accurate comparison, especially
when you look at how the U .S. executed this
policy. It wasn't just diplomatic pressure. The
sources detail long term U .S. Marine occupations
in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.
And how did taking over a country actually pay
off a debt to a European bank? Like what were
the Marines actually doing? They were taking
over the customs houses in the early 20th century
before widespread income taxes. The primary way
a government made money was through customs duties,
tariffs on import. and exported goods at the
ports. By physically occupying the customs houses,
the U .S. military controlled the country's national
bank account. They would collect the tariffs,
slice off a percentage to pay the European banks,
and then give the rest to the local government
to run the country. But doesn't that completely
contradict the original spirit of Monroe's 1823
speech? I mean, the original was about keeping
empires out, but this sounds like building one.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, scholars
broadly agree with you. They call this era the
start of the American liberal empire. The US
effectively appointed itself the unchallengeable
hemispheric policeman. And the irony is that
even the US government eventually recognized
how far they had strayed from the original code.
In 1928, a U .S. Undersecretary of State wrote
the Clark Memorandum. It was essentially a panicked
attempt to backpedal. How do you backpedal military
occupation? By arguing a technicality. The memorandum
argued that Roosevelt's military interventions
weren't actually justified by the Monroe Doctrine
at all, but were instead based on the United
States' own inherent state rights to self -defense.
Wow, parsing words. Very much so. They tried
to artificially separate Roosevelt's aggressive
actions from Monroe's original intent, acknowledging
that Monroe was only ever talking about conflicts
between the U .S. and Europe, not the U .S. dominating
its southern neighbors. But you can't unring
that bell. The precedent of intervention was
firmly set. And as we move into the mid 20th
century, the justification for kicking down the
door shifts once again. We've gone from stopping
monarchs to collecting debts. After World War
Two, the new boogeyman becomes entirely ideological.
Right. Following a brief period in the 1930s
where Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted a good
neighbor policy of non -intervention, the geopolitical
landscape fractured with the onset of the Cold
War. Right. The U .S. versus the Soviet Union.
Exactly. And the Monroe Doctrine was radically
repurposed to justify fighting Soviet communism
anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. We see this
applied really aggressively. Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles explicitly invokes the doctrine
in 1954 to denounce what he called Soviet intervention
in Guatemala. Which directly led to a CIA -backed
coup overthrowing the democratically elected
president. Right. Then you have John F. Kennedy
citing it during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
to oppose Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.
But I want to zero in on the 1980s, because this
is where the definition of foreign interference
gets stretched to its absolute breaking point.
You're referring to Nicaragua and the Contras.
Exactly. The CIA is covertly training and funding
Contra guerrilla fighters in neighboring Honduras,
specifically to overthrow the socialist Sandinista
government inside Nicaragua. So what does this
all mean? How does a doctrine aimed at stopping
external European colonization get used to justify
funding a domestic civil war? It's like a virus
mutating to survive in a new environment. It
requires a highly elastic interpretation of the
world. During the Cold War, U .S. policymakers
argued that international communism was a monolith
controlled entirely by Moscow. So there were
no local movements. According to them, no. Therefore,
any local communist or socialist movement in
Latin America was, by definition, an extension
of Soviet power. It wasn't viewed as a domestic
revolution. It was viewed as a foreign intrusion
into the hemisphere. It's a huge leap. It was.
And when the Contra operation faced heavy congressional
scrutiny and public backlash, CIA Director Robert
Gates vigorously defended the operation by stating
that to abandon the Contras would be, quote,
totally to abandon the Monroe Doctrine. But this
is exactly where the sharpest criticisms in our
source material arise. Because at a certain point,
the justification falls apart. We read prominent
critics like Noam Chomsky, who argues that the
doctrine in practice is nothing more than a formal
decoration of hegemony. Right. And for those
listening who might be unfamiliar, hegemony isn't
just influence. It's unquestioned dominance,
where one state is so powerful it dictates the
political and economic rules for everyone else
in the system. Tomsky views the doctrine as a
blank check for the U .S. to exercise unilateral
intervention over the Americas, completely bypassing
international law. But perhaps the most cutting
description in our sources comes from historian
William Appleman Williams. Oh, I remember this
quote. Yeah, he described this entire dynamic
as imperial anti -colonialism. Imperial anti
-colonialism. It is a brilliant, completely paradoxical
phrase. We are conquering you, occupying your
ports, and funding your civil wars solely to
protect you from being conquered by someone else.
It's the logic of empire masked in the language
of liberation. Now considering all this historical
baggage, you know, the occupations, the coups,
the shifting goalposts, you might assume that
a concept from 1823 would finally be retired
in the modern era. And it almost was. Yes, very
nearly. In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry
stood in front of the Organization of American
States and explicitly declared that the era of
the Monroe Doctrine is over. He called for a
new era of mutual partnership and equality. But
the sources show that the doctrine didn't die.
In the 2020s, it experienced a massive explosive
revival. It did. And the implications of this
revival are currently shaping global security
right now in 2026. Right. And as we dive into
the recent political events involving Donald
Trump, we want to make it crystal clear to you,
our listener, that we are strictly neutral. We
are not taking sides, nor are we endorsing any
of the left -wing or right -wing viewpoints we
are about to discuss. We are simply imparting
the factual content provided in our source material.
And that context is vital because the source
material presents a stark, undeniable shift in
official U .S. policy. The Trump administration
explicitly and loudly revived the doctrine. In
2019, his national security adviser, John Bolton,
publicly embraced the term, stating they were
not afraid to use it. But the real escalation
is detailed in the 2025 national security strategy.
Yes. The text mentions the announcement of the
Trump corollary. What does that strategy document
actually say? It explicitly calls upon the United
States to reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine
to restore unquestioned U .S. preeminence in
the Western Hemisphere. It actively moves to
divide the world into spheres of influence. Meaning
specific regions where one superpower has exclusive
cultural, economic, and military sway. And this
wasn't just campaign rhetoric. It was backed
by immediate military posturing. In 2025, the
U .S. launched massive naval deployments and
military strikes against alleged drug boats in
the Caribbean. Security experts speaking to Reuters
in the BBC explicitly describe these maneuvers
not as law enforcement, but as gunboat diplomacy,
using the threat of overwhelming naval force
to intimidate regional governments. Which culminates
in the most dramatic event in our sources, the
January 2026 capture of Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro in a U .S. military raid. Yeah,
following that raid, Donald Trump claimed the
action was a direct application of this revived
policy. He stylized it as the Donro doctrine,
telling reporters that American dominance in
the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned
again. That's a staggering moment. Here's where
it gets really interesting. If we go back to
our software analogy from the beginning, this
isn't just releasing a minor patch. This is taking
a legacy software system from the 1904 Roosevelt
era, blowing the dust off it, and forcefully
rebooting it on modern hardware. Is this Don
Roe doctrine a return to Theodore Roosevelt's
big stick, or is it an entirely new beast given
the context of modern rivals like China and Russia?
This raises an important question, and the consensus
among foreign policy experts and our sources
is that it represents a fundamental paradigm
shift in how the world operates. How so? Well,
for the last 30 years, the global standard was
multilateralism. You know, multiple countries
working together through international laws,
treaties, and institutions like the UN. Right,
everybody at the table. Exactly. But by explicitly
claiming a hemisphere under the Donrow Doctrine,
the U .S. is signaling the death of multilateralism.
It is a return to a world openly carved into
defined spheres of influence, essentially acknowledging
a divided globe managed unilaterally by the U
.S., Russia and China. It is taking the implicit,
quiet dominance of the 20th century and making
it the explicit foundational law of 21st century
American strategy. It is incredible to step back
and look at the entire 200 -year arc. We started
in 1823 with a scrawny nation making a massive
bluff that only worked because the British Royal
Navy wanted free trade. Right. Then we watched
that bluff morph into Roosevelt's big stick to
audit Latin American customs houses. We saw it
mutate into a Cold War justification for CIA
covert operations in Nicaragua. And now we arrive
at the 2026 Donro doctrine. complete with Caribbean
naval deployments and presidential captures.
It's quite the journey. It is. And this is exactly
why understanding this history is the ultimate
shortcut to deciphering today's geopolitical
headlines. When you read about a diplomatic spat
over Chinese infrastructure in South America
or naval deployments in the Caribbean, you aren't
just looking at isolated incidents. You are watching
a 200 -year -old operating system executing its
latest code in real time. It proves how a single
idea can be infinitely stretched to shape the
modern world. But there is one final fascinating
reality from the source material to consider
before we wrap up. We've talked exclusively about
the Monroe Doctrine as an American concept, but
what if it isn't anymore? Wait, what do you mean?
Deep in the history of the Pacific, there is
a concept known as the Australasian Monroe Doctrine.
Really? Yes. In the early 1900s, Australian leaders
used this exact phrasing to oppose threatening
powers from entering the Pacific Islands. And
commentators in the 2020s have aggressively revived
the term to combat China's growing influence
in the region. Australia is essentially claiming
its own hemisphere. Oh, wow. It forces us to
ask if every rising regional power decides to
claim their own hemisphere and apply their own
version of Monroe Doctrine, where do the lines
finally get drawn?