Time to Renew the Monroe Doctrine

"The fight against China doesn’t begin in Asia. It ends in Asia, but it starts in the Americas."

By Chuck Warren

In 1823, President James Monroe announced a new policy: Only countries in the Americas were allowed to have a military presence in the Americas. In other words, no European (and later Asian) country would be allowed to have a military presence in our backyard. The Monroe Doctrine was born.

The Monroe Doctrine has been U.S. policy for two centuries and has stood the test of time. It is possibly the most successful foreign policy in U.S. history, but it is also the victim of its success. Increasingly, Americans are taking the Americas for granted.

Let’s test something: What are the worst things about our neighbors? To our south, it is that they are not governing themselves well enough that migrants keep coming to live here. It’s much worse to our north: They are Canadians.

But as much as you might not like Justin Trudeau, he still edges out Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as a neighbor. (Just barely, though!)

This success has allowed us not to think about our own neighborhood. And because of this, we’re getting a new neighbor: Xi Jinping!

This year, Chinese military personnel, for the first time, joined a Peruvian parade. China wants a naval base—or more than one if they could—in the Americas. And a missile base. And more. And they are making inroads.

A blessing we have against our enemies is that we have our military at the doorsteps, but they don’t have their militaries near us. This means that, if we ever go to war, we can hurt them at home immediately, but without using nukes they can’t reach us.

Speaking of nukes, even that’s a game changer. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets had missiles at home to hit us with. But it was a big deal because it’d take half an hour for a Soviet missile to reach us after being launched from Soviet territory, but it’d take only a few minutes for it to reach us from Cuba. Also, NORAD, which is our warning system to detect Soviet (and now Chinese) missiles, is located in Alaska and Canada. If a missile is launched from our south, we wouldn’t know.

All these mean that the Cuban Missile Crisis was such a big deal because we wouldn’t know in time if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack against us to hide, and millions more could die because of it.

There was a mini-crisis like in Cuba in the 1980s. The Soviets were planning on putting missiles in El Salvador. Ronald Reagan, through the State Department, kindly informed the Soviets that if they put missiles there we would hit them. The Soviets caved and the crisis passed.

If China realizes its ambitions in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, America will be very poor because the Chinese will deny us access to markets. But if it achieves its objectives in the Americas, Americans will be at a serious security risk.

The rest of the world matters a lot, but our own neighborhood matters the most.

When George Shultz became Reagan’s secretary of state, he made a point of this. The first thing he did as secretary was a tour of the Americas to signal to our neighbors that they were his top priority. It worked. By the time Reagan left, the Communist influence only existed in Cuba, and the rest of the continent was democratizing rapidly.

The military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina had ended.

Chile had scheduled its first election and Pinochet had announced that he was retiring.

Mexico had held its first competitive election.

El Salvador and Nicaragua were holding elections.

And so on!

This GOP tradition continued. George H.W. Bush built on Reagan’s success. He made sure that Pinochet didn’t cancel the election in Chile, that Nicaragua and El Salvador didn’t walk back into dictatorships, and he even invaded Panama to remove the dictator who was running a drug trafficking cartel and installed a democracy in his place.

George W. Bush continued this tradition. He helped Colombia’s fragile government to make advances in the conflict with FARC guerrillas, including with U.S. military assistance. By the time he left office, Colombia had transformed into a stable country. He also signed CAFTA-DR, a free trade agreement that has helped prosper the United States and our southern neighbors.

We are losing what we accomplished now, and it began with the Obama administration, whose secretary of state, John Kerry, foolishly celebrated that the Monroe Doctrine “is dead.” You couldn’t make it up!

Nicaragua and Venezuela are now communist dictatorships.

Mexico is close to becoming a left-wing dictatorship, too, while cartels are making life impossible there. (During the Obama administration, Hezbollah, a proxy of Iran, was running drug cartels in Mexico. Obama suppressed the story so as not to offend Iran!)

Colombia is losing ground to FARC again. El Salvador has been losing stability, and people are giving up on democracy there because they think it’s too chaotic.

Brazil is flirting with China and Russia and turning against us.

Haiti is not a functioning state anymore.

Bolivia and Peru are both fragile democracies that are quickly descending into authoritarianism.

The only country that is making gains is Argentina, and not for anything we have done. (More on Argentina and Javier Milei soon!)

This is not an accident. Some of it is because we are no longer investing in the success of our neighbors, and some of it is because our enemies are investing in their failures.

China has been outbidding us on development aid and loans everywhere. Foreign aid gets a bad rap, but it is only 1% of what we spend annually. But if we did it right, instead of cutting it altogether, then we wouldn’t have to spend more on our military to also defend us in our own neighborhood.

Also, if we did it right, we wouldn’t have to deal with millions of people coming here illegally. But this means not just helping them prosper, but also helping them govern themselves.

It also means that we will have leverage over them to tell them not to allow the Chinese military on their soil.

But in addition to money, we need to pay attention to them. This brings me to our next secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

Rubio is Hispanic. He has been on the Western Hemisphere subcommittee in his entire Senate career and a champion of paying more attention to our own continent. He speaks fluent Spanish. But also, he is already knowledgeable about what is going on there. He’s a slam dunk pick!

The fight against China doesn’t begin in Asia. It ends in Asia, but it starts in the Americas.

We should seriously implement the Monroe Doctrine and not allow any foreign military in the Western Hemisphere. We should also compete with the Chinese for influence. It takes very little to outbid them, but in return we won’t have to worry that their navy and missiles are sitting just a few hundred miles away from us. And we should invest in their success so their countries are stable and prosperous enough that their peoples stay, instead of leaving north to come here.

As much as Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and other friends of ours matter, nothing matters more than getting our own neighborhood in order.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.