The Evolution of a Doctrine

The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America, by Jay Sexton. Hill and Wang, 2011. $27.00, 304 pp.
For a work of academic history, Jay Sexton’s The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth- Century America is a brisk and rewarding read. In a little under three hundred pages, the author, a lecturer at Oxford, traces the evolution of America’s most famous foreign policy from its articulation in 1823 to the 1904 expansion of the Roosevelt Corollary. Though perhaps disappointing to those who expect broad claims, Sexton offers impressive amounts of historical evidence to reinforce his narrow and intriguing points.
In total scope, the work should sound familiar to any AP U.S. History student. Sexton argues, as many have before, that the rejection of European influence in the New World sprung from an American government unsure of its place in the global order. By the early twentieth century, of course, the theory became a justification for intervention in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine nonetheless advances two less familiar ideas: that domestic politics rather than international conditions motivated American policymakers and that the doctrine’s implications remained a major point of American debate. These ideas, though not radical departures from traditional opinion, add enough nuance to make the book significantly more than just a review of familiar historical events.
Domestic Ideologies, International Doctrine
Throughout The Monroe Doctrine, Sexton emphasizes linkages between domestic politics and American foreign policy. Early on, as with most 19th century American political struggles, slavery often lay at the center of these disputes. Through careful historical reasoning, the book shows that voting Americans and the politicians they elected, both pro- and anti-slavery, constantly feared a New World intervention by Old World powers. As Sexton is careful to remind, however, these threats often proved imagined, or at least exaggerated for domestic political advantage.
In one particularly salient example, The Monroe Doctrine cites contemporary arguments that Britain planned intervention in Texas to abolish slavery, and that France desired to do so in Mexico to establish it. These speculations, claims Sexton, shaped the U.S.’s subsequent interactions with its southern neighbors more often than a more blasé historian might care to admit. No sole work of diplomatic history, Sexton’s chronicle speaks most to the men who conceived and applied the Doctrine. Neither of the British nor French scenarios bears a great deal of plausibility in retrospect. Still, Sexton maintains, Americans’ fears of similar interventions encouraged politicians and statesmen to assert the Monroe Doctrine in new ways, even as they used it to link themselves with a revered intellectual heritage.
A Complex Evolution
Another of Sexton’s focuses centers on the often vehement disagreements among Americans about the true meaning of the Monroe Doctrine. Sexton writes that the original articulation in 1823 and the 1904 emergence of the Roosevelt Corollary constitute “bookends for the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine.” Between these marks, however, the author identifies five broadly defined periods within which separate conception of the Monroe Doctrine prevailed. These periods range from President Monroe’s “Era of Good Feelings” to the first of President Roosevelt’s interventions in Latin America, yet each provides a radically differing interpretation of Monroe’s meaning. Pro-slavery politicians used the statement both for and against territorial expansion, while Democrats in the 1840s applied it to support unfettered American empire. President Cleveland used the rhetoric of Monroe to argue against intervention, while the first President Roosevelt often used the words to support it. Different as the politics of these arguments were, a common thread runs through each of the periods outlined: no one ever agreed on what exactly the Monroe Doctrine meant.
This almost constant disagreement, convincingly established by the frequent quotation of memoirs and letters and a deluge of citations, remains the most intriguing part of Sexton’s argument. In part, The Monroe Doctrine’s narrative speaks to the typically American tradition of historical reinterpretation and reappropriation. Indeed, the work deserves a debt of gratitude for its emphasis on deliberate acts of creation and interpretation, standing against notions of a never-changing document. By contrast, the conclusion Sexton seems to draw, that American foreign policy remains driven largely by domestic concerns, is intuitive enough that its frequent restatement can get stale. For the most part, though, Sexton spends his time crafting an interesting history and explaining the significance of that history in unique ways.
The Post-Doctrinal World
The emergence from The Monroe Doctrine into a year where the book’s namesake lacks its previous cachet can be jolting. Sexton depicts an America in which statesmen made constant reference to the Monroe Doctrine as they navigated foreign threats, both real and imagined. The reader resides, on the other hand, in a world in which the United States intervenes most in places far removed from what Teddy Roosevelt would have considered his country’s “back yard.” President Monroe feared the apparent threat to American territorial integrity posed by the military power of vast Old World empires, and even Roosevelt worried about the threat to American hemispheric interests by less ominous, but still threatening, European nation-states. Today, President Obama presides over a globe-spanning nation, less doctrinal and more willing to engage with the world. As for the Monroe Doctrine itself, the most significant modern use came almost half a century ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Few American politicians or voters have the emotional connection to the Monroe Doctrine once so prevalent.
One might well answer that an America that can perceive national security threats in Afghan caves understandably sees the geographic limits of the Monroe Doctrine as antiquated. Sexton never makes so broad a claim, but he does hint at the emergence of an entirely new, internationalized Monroe Doctrine throughout the Wilson presidency. Wilson proposed that “the nations should…adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world.” Although the Wilson administration would often violate this principle by imposing its military will on Latin American governments, the proposal marked the beginning of a worldview which equated threats to American values abroad as threats to national security domestically. In examining the evolution of a doctrine whose emotional impact has been lost among modern Americans, then, Sexton does not just write an intriguing history of one of a country’s most symbolically important policies. He provides context for the transformation of the United States from a minor regional player into a global superpower through the lens of contrast of the country’s two dramatically different doctrinal self-perceptions.
Matthew Bewley ‘14 is a Staff Writer.