You guys know if there is a teachable moment the Old Professor will jump on it with both feet.

I recently wrote a post about the possibility of a mash-up between Venezuela and Guyana in South America over a oil rich region….in case the post was missed….

I said then that the US, if it gets involved, would probably invoke a 200 year old edit issued by Pres. Monroe…..

The Monroe Doctrine, first outlined in a speech to Congress in 1823, had President James Monroe warning European powers to not attempt further colonization, military intervention or other interference in the Western Hemisphere, stating that the United States would view any such interference as a potentially hostile act. Over the centuries, the Monroe Doctrine policy has become a cornerstone of U.S. diplomatic and military policies.

By the early 1820s, many Latin American countries had won their independence from Spain or Portugal, with the U.S. government recognizing the new republics of Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico in 1822.

Though Monroe had initially supported the idea of a joint U.S.-British resolution against future colonization in Latin America, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams argued that joining forces with the British could limit future U.S. opportunities for expansion, and that Britain might well have imperialist ambitions of its own.

Adams convinced Monroe to make a unilateral statement of U.S. policy that would set an independent course for the young nation and claim a new role as protector of the Western Hemisphere.

https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/monroe-doctrine

What you probably learned in high school, that is if you stayed awake long enough to learn, is probably not the ‘rest of the story….

If you’re American, the high school textbook that you once read probably presented James Monroe’s 1823 message as a foreign policy equivalent of the U.S. Constitution. It allegedly outlined basic rules, headlined by a prohibition on further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, that structured U.S. foreign policy thereafter. But this clean and tidy view of the doctrine always has been more myth than reality.

For starters, the nonsequential foreign policy paragraphs of James Monroe’s 1823 annual message were not intended to be a timeless set of policy prescriptions. Rather, Monroe and his team muddled through a complex situation, dodging critical questions and controversies as they responded to events beyond their control. When Monroe audaciously proclaimed an end to European intervention in the Western Hemisphere at a critical moment in the Spanish-American revolutions, he failed to mention how it would be enforced (fortuitously, by the time Monroe delivered his message, the British had already cut a secret deal with France that resolved the diplomatic crisis). The ambiguous text of the 1823 message to Congress also sidestepped the critical matter of future U.S. imperial expansion.

Monroe fudged the key issues. He kicked the can of an alliance offer from Britain down the road, while offering only lip-service support to the revolutions in Latin America and Greece. Most of all, his message stopped short of committing the United States to any action. The evidence is clear: The 1823 message was never intended to become a binding foreign policy “doctrine.” Monroe’s message was a nothingburger.

But the subsequent “Monroe Doctrine,” a phrase that first appeared in the decades before the Civil War, had very little to do with the original text. Rather, it was an adaptable symbol of U.S. foreign policy that ricocheted back and forth across the American political spectrum, sometimes even bouncing across borders when appropriated by foreign officials. The best definition of the Monroe Doctrine might be as follows: a contested political symbol into which varying actors have loaded their agendas.

The Many Faces of the Monroe Doctrine

There was so much more to this statement than we know…..

Today marks the 200^th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, celebrated in history books for extending U.S. influence throughout the hemisphere. But few Americans are aware of its lesser-known predecessor – “The Jefferson-Monroe Penal Doctrine” – which first proposed using slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime to establish a national penal colony.  At a time of continued reckoning over slavery in the United States, it is also a fitting moment to consider the roots of prison expansion in empire.  

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Gabriel Prosser and hundreds of enslaved people in Virginia planned a revolt. Enslavers and local militia discovered and thwarted the rebellion amid a suffocating climate of white hysteria over the revolution taking place on the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, where enslaved people were engaged in a struggle against slavery that would establish the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. 

https://www.salon.com/2023/12/02/the-lesser-known-history-of-the-monroe-doctrine/

I just wanted my reader to be aware of all aspects of the Monroe Doctrine in case the idiots in DC use it to instigate yet another war.

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