Nowadays few Americans could identify what the Monroe Doctrine signifies. Named for the fifth US president, the point of the 1823 policy had been succinctly stated fifteen years earlier by the third, Thomas Jefferson: “The object… must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere.”
Sean Mirski terms the Doctrine “revolutionary” in his impressively erudite We May Dominate the World, an astonishingly comprehensive and stylishly written account of US foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere during the years 1860 to 1945. Calling the period a “missing chapter” in American history, he rightly asserts that “the story of the United States’s rise to regional hegemony has not received anywhere near the attention it deserves.”
France’s 1861-67 invasion of Mexico — a piece of history even well-read American historians may not immediately recall — understandably led to “a new, nationwide commitment to the Monroe Doctrine” once the US reunified in the wake of the Civil War. “For the sake of its own security, the United States needed to help stabilize and strengthen its neighbors” in order “to prevent unstable parts of the Western Hemisphere from falling into the hands of its great-power rivals.”
Throughout the late nineteenth century pressures mounted as Great Britain, France and Germany all aggressively expanded their colonial empires, and Mirski recounts how, by early in the twentieth century, colonial powers controlled more than 80 percent of the world’s landmass. Up until the late 1890s the United States was content to employ attentive deterrence, but a confrontation between Great Britain and Venezuela, plus increasing Japanese pressure on the independent kingdom of Hawaii, led to a decisive shift in US behavior and the adoption of a “far more assertive” Monroe Doctrine. “Over time, the defensive strategy of European exclusion turned into the reality of aggressive American expansion” as the United States went on what Mirski claims was “a regional rampage of staggering scope and scale,” intervening in one manner or another from Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in the Caribbean to Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico in Central America as well as in Hawaii.
That is one of few occasions when Mirski’s energetic style gets the better of his considered judgment, for as he later forthrightly acknowledges, almost always the US “had no good options. If one of its neighbors imploded, the United States could not safely ignore the resulting power vacuum for fear that one of its great-power rivals might step in.” Such was the case both in Hawaii in 1897-98 and in Panama — then a province of Colombia — in 1903, the two interventions that would loom largest in subsequent American history.