Here’s Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter in 2014 explaining that the “US Needs to Recognize Russia’s Monroe Doctrine.”You should go and read it in its entirety.
One last example of many. In 1939, when the Soviets invaded Finland, they did it in furtherance of what Soviet diplomat Ivan Maisky called a “Soviet Monroe Doctrine.” Of course, because history is a puckish fellow, when the Soviets tried to turn Cuba into a colonial garrison of the Soviet Empire, Nikita Khrushchev insisted the Monroe Doctrine had “outlived its time” and had “died, so to speak, a natural death.”
Now, the nominal heir to Khrushchev and the world’s foremost champion of nostalgia for the Soviet empire is a defender of a Monroe Doctrine for me, but not for thee.
Before we continue, I should add another irony. Russia is significantly to blame for the creation of the Monroe Doctrine in the first place. Russia wasn’t alone, but under Czar Alexander I, Russia joined the Holy Alliance, which was determined to restore monarchism, the divine right of kings, and the colonial holdings of various empires, specifically the Bourbon rule of Spain and its former colonies in South America.
America had no problem with the Holy Alliance so long as it stuck to the grubby Old World. But we’d be damned if we’d let them recolonize South America and threaten the United States. Great Britain was nominally on our side because it wanted to protect trade with the New World. But we refused to work in tandem for them because we were—understandably pissed about the War of 1812.
Now, I’m not going to defend everything we did under the banner of the Monroe Doctrine. I can defend some things, but I’m not going to speak up for, say, all that crazy William Walker stuff. But telling the revanchist, reactionary rulers of Old Europe that they should keep their stinking mitts of South America strikes me as entirely just and defensible, particularly in 1823.
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