Remarks at Veterans For Peace event in Iowa City, Iowa, November 11, 2023
On December 2nd the Monroe Doctrine will turn 200. That is, it will be 200 years from the day President James Monroe made a speech from which years later politicians and pundits excerpted some paragraphs and labeled them the Monroe Doctrine. If the purpose was to allow a privileged clique the power to lawlessly create policy and elevate it above all actual laws, it worked. Over the years, more presidents were given doctrines, and now we can't get through a single presidency without a doctrine being announced. Some presidents are given, by newspaper columnists, doctrines that they themselves never said at all.
The Monroe Doctrine, or the part that endured and was built and expanded upon, basically says that the United States will wage war against any outside power that tries anything anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. From Day 1 the ambition extended beyond that hemisphere, even though it would be many years before the United States focused on much outside of North America. By Theodore Roosevelt's day the doctrine was made explicitly global. Now, of course, the U.S. military has bases ringing the globe. U.S. weapons are sold or given to dictatorships and so-called democracies in every corner of the Earth. Wars thousands of miles away are proclaimed defensive.
The Monroe Doctrine was not simply an announcement that the United States would attack people. It was much subtler and more dangerous than that. It was a means of allowing people to engage in imperialism while thinking of it as humanitarianism. This began with the Doctrine of Discovery, also put into U.S. law in 1823. Native Americans were not real people with real nations just as we're told today that the Palestinian people do not really exist and this is why people will tell you with a straight face that Afghanistan or Vietnam was the longest U.S. war. If people don't exist, you can hardly be killing them or stealing their land.
Next, people did exist but they were not fully formed people, they were not smart enough to know that they wanted to be part of the United States, so you simply had to show them for their own good. This, too, is still with us. At the height of the destruction of Iraq, polls found the U.S. public resentful that Iraqis were not appreciative or grateful.
Third, people were simply imagined as actually wanting to be part of the United States. And, fourth, apart from the trivial matter of the people living on the land, the point is that the U.S. was taking North America to save it from the Russians and French and Spanish. If you're fighting to save people from imperialism then what you're doing cannot be imperialism. For many of the past 200 years, including this year, you could also substitute the word "Russia" for imperialism. If you're fighting to save people from Russia then what you're doing cannot possibly be imperialism.
Ironically, Russia's notion that it, too, can have a Monroe Doctrine in Eastern Europe has run up against the U.S. insistence that this planet is only big enough for one Monroe Doctrine, and that has thrust us all to the edge of nuclear apocalypse.
Part of what's needed to undo the Monroe Doctrine, the other war doctrines built on it, and the wars that never end can be found in what the people of Latin America are doing.
To some significant extent, the U.S. government doesn't need what FDR called "our sonofabitch" (as in, "he may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch") running each Latin American country anymore. The United States has bases, weapons customers, U.S.-trained troops, U.S.-educated elites, corporate trade agreements that overrule constitutions, and the financial powers of debt, aid, and sanctions. In 2022, the Wall Street Journal insisted that the Earth's climate (how's that for a new excuse?) would require that corporations, and not the nations of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, control lithium. How did our lithium get under their ground?
Meanwhile the people of Latin America keep resisting coups and election interference and sanctions, to empower independent-minded government. The year 2022 saw the list of "pink tide" governments enlarged to include Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Honduras. For Honduras, 2021 saw the election as president of the former first lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya who had been ousted by the 2009 coup against her husband and now first gentleman Manuel Zelaya. For Colombia, 2022 saw its first election of a left-leaning president ever. Colombian President Gustavo Petro now speaks up for independence from U.S. control and for an end to militarism, but for cooperation and collaboration as equals, including on generating power for the U.S. from the sunshine in Colombia.
In 2021, on the 238th anniversary of Simón Bolvar's birth, Mexican President Andre's Manuel López Obrador proposed to recreate Bolvar's "project of unity among the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean." He said: "We must put aside the dilemma of joining the United States or opposing it defensively. It is time to express and explore another option: to dialogue with the U.S. rulers and convince and persuade them that a new relationship between the countries of the Americas is possible." He also said: "Why not study the demand for labor and, in an orderly manner, open the migratory flow? And within the framework of this new joint development plan, investment policy, labor, environmental protection and other issues of mutual interest to our nations must be considered. It is obvious that this must imply cooperation for the development and well-being of all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. The politics of the last two centuries, characterized by invasions to install or remove rulers at the whim of the superpower, is already unacceptable; Let's say goodbye to impositions, interference, sanctions, exclusions, and blockades. Instead, let us apply the principles of non-intervention, self-determination of peoples and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Let's start a relationship in our continent under the premise of George Washington, according to which, 'nations should not take advantage of the misfortune of other peoples.'" AMLO also rejected a proposal from then-U.S. President Trump for a joint war against drug dealers, proposing in the process the abolition of war.
In 2022, at the Summit of the Americas hosted by the United States, only 23 of 35 nations sent representatives. The United States had excluded three nations, while several others boycotted, including Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Antigua and Barbuda. Also in 2022, Nicaragua completed the process of withdrawing from the OAS.
The changing of the times can also be seen in the trajectory from Lima to Puebla. In 2017, Canada, as Monroe-Doctrine-Junior-Partner (never mind if Monroe supported taking over Canada) took the lead in organizing the Lima Group, an organization of American nations intent on overthrowing the government of Venezuela. Members included Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela (the pretend Venezuela governed in his own mind by Juan Guaidó). But nations have been dropping out to the point that it's not clear anything is left. Meanwhile, in 2019, the Puebla Group of Members of Parliament from Latin American nations was formed. In 2022, it issued a statement:
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