Monroe Doctrine

We trace the Monroe Doctrine from a daring 1823 warning to a living rulebook that still shapes how America defines security, principle, and power. From John Quincy Adams to modern strategy, we test where defense ends and intervention begins.

• origins of the Monroe Doctrine and its core warning
• British alignment and Adams’s diplomatic gamble
• post‑1812 great power context and American confidence
• expansionist logic framed as defensive security
• the Roosevelt corollary and intervention as police power
• extension to Europe, NATO, and global alliances
• modern restatement in national security strategy
• Venezuela, Greenland, and hemispheric control debates
• Washington’s standard: interest balanced with justice
• civic responsibility to evaluate leaders and policy

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: 1823 And Today
• 3:08 What The Monroe Doctrine Said
• 5:08 Great Power Context After 1812
• 8:00 John Quincy Adams And Britain’s Offer
• 11:16 From Declaration To Doctrine
• 13:09 Expansion And Defensive Logic
• 16:10 The Roosevelt Corollary Emerges
• 19:10 From Europe To Global Alliances
• 21:50 Cold War Legacies And Reach

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

Welcome back to Civics of the Year. Today we're going to talk about a document from 1823. And you might have heard it recently in the news. It is the Monroe Doctrine. And Dr. Kreese, I'm excited to talk about this because again, who thought that a primary source from 1823 would all of a sudden be in the news? So can you tell us what is the Monroe Doctrine and why was it a significant event in American political history when it was announced in 1823 by President Monroe?

SPEAKER_00: 1:18

Yes, thank you, Liz. This is a recurring theme in American history that our earlier history matters. In a way you could say it's having it right in the text of the Declaration of Independence. So it this kind of historical reference and argument has been a part of our character for 250 years. But we sometimes forget how important history is. And so that's why in the Civics in a year podcast, we're doing this series of episodes on important historical moments and documents. Yes, as you mentioned, and we'll talk about this further, the Monroe Doctrine has been in the news in 2025 and 2026. So it is crucial right now, if you're a serious citizen preparing for the possibility of voting someday, you are able to vote now, you want to be a citizen. It's important to know this document and this statement. It in 1823 sees a President of the United States declaring to the world that the United States of America is the dominant power in a quarter of the globe, the Western Hemisphere, the Americas. So, Liz, you could help me out by reading the crucial passage where m President Monroe first makes this announcement, and then he follows it up further in the the This is this is, I should explain, this is the what we would call the State of the Union address. This is the in the 19th century, it's called the annual address, so a president's annual address to Congress in 1823, and he uses that to make this declaration, not just to the Congress and the American people, but to the world. Okay. So if it wasn't clear what that meant, he has a little bit later some paragraphs, some language, and I'll ask you to read that about what this means. This is putting the rest of the great powers in the world on notice that A, the United States is a great power, Great Britain, France, the Russian Empire, anybody else. We are your peer, we are a great power. And second, we are telling you stay out of this neighborhood, i.e., this quarter of the globe, this hemisphere. There's to be no future colonization by any European powers, number one. And then, as I'll mention later, there's more. There's more of a limit. So we are the sheriff over this quarter of the globe. Now, how is this happening in 1823? Well, first of all, it's after the War of 1812. But by 1815, the United States has proven we can beat the British Empire a second time. I think having gotten ourselves kind of stupidly into that war, but we come out of it. Our national capital is burned, yes, but we come out of it. And we are great power, a peer of Britain, that has really wanted to show itself that it could handle these nasty Americans if needed, because Britain's existence has been threatened by Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars. So here it is, 1823, and America is saying we are a great power. And by 1823, you know, several years after the end of the War of 1812, we're trying to patch it up with Britain. John Quincy Adams is the Secretary of State for President Monroe. John Quincy Adams has a long history in the American Foreign Service. He was appointed into the American Foreign Service by a guy named Washington as the first president of the United States. So Quincy Adams has been thinking about he's a young boy abroad with his father, John Adams, who's an diplomat ambassador for the United States. So Quincy Adams is a very adept diplomat. He's trying to patch it up with Britain. And in the context of his regular conversations with Britain, including with the foreign minister in the early 1820s, the British minister makes an offer. We would call it a kind of a deal, condominium, bargain between Britain and the United States. You know, maybe it would be good for the Anglo-American relationship, for the Brit the British and the Americans to say the two of us should be dominant in the Americas, in North America and South America. We should be dominant. And the British Foreign Minister sort of signals that Britain, if America wanted to do this, Britain would support. In effect, we started a naval academy, not by name, but the U.S. Naval Service is running a naval academy to educate officers just like there's an Army military academy in West Point, New York. But we don't have a Navy that could enforce some doctrine that declares we're good this quarter of the globe is ours. We can't have a big Navy in the Atlantic Ocean, we can't have it in the Pacific Ocean. So this is a very attractive suggestion to John Quincy Adams, his American Secretary of State, coming from the British Foreign Minister. You know, we we in Britain might support you, i.e., the Royal Navy might help police this idea that the other great powers in the world, meaning the European powers, which China's not really a player here. It's Russia, it's Britain, it it's France, basically. And so John Quincy Adams turns around to President Monroe and says, you know, we ought to just announce this. That is a deal we're making with the British. And if we announce it, the British will the British Navy will support us in this if we declare this quarter of the globe is ours. So it's a r it's it's breathtaking. The United States is saying we are a world power and telling the other great powers in the world, keep out of this part of the world, in effect.

SPEAKER_01: 8:04

So I mentioned it before, but the Monroe Doctrine has been in the news a lot lately, with President Trump strongly invoking this in his second term. But before we talk about the recent prominence of it, how has it been an important element of American foreign policy thinking and debate across the two centuries?

SPEAKER_00: 8:23

Yes, I think you could look at American expansion across the North American continent after 1823 as partly informed by the Monroe Doctrine that we need a kind of offensive-defensive position in the world to protect liberty and the expansion of liberty. Because, you know, after the French Revolution, it was a mess in France. You know, it's not clear that liberty is gonna just because the American Revolution has succeeded, doesn't mean any of these revolutions against monarchies or autocracies to establish republics doesn't mean they're gonna work. It's a dangerous world. And and so this idea develops that if we keep expanding, and this is part of the argument for for President Polk in in the Mexican War to push back against the remnants of the Spanish Empire and and Spanish Catholic presence in in any part of North America, this is defensive. You know, this is to protect our liberty in the United States of America. And so it's this mixture of being aggressive and forward-leaning with saying it's for defensive purposes. And this takes us all the way to the Pacific Ocean by the middle of the 19th century. And then what President Theodore Roosevelt declares at the end of the 19th century and going into the beginning of the 20th century, the the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, as it's called, that we will not only be saying European powers stay out or other great powers in the world stay out of this hemisphere, we, the United States, are now saying, under the Roosevelt corollary, we have a kind of intervention power within this hemisphere. If we find a government that is failing or not under taking its international obligations, which might draw in foreign powers from elsewhere on the world, we, the United States, will intervene. That's a kind of police power, it's called. Eventually, President Wilson and a majority of the Congress was persuaded we need to be involved on the European continent in a horrific war with all this new horrific killing technology because it's in our own defensive interest. If the wrong powers win that war, it's going to hurt liberty here. So, in a way, that's an extension of the Monroe Doctrine to Western Europe. And there's a reaction to that. President Wilson overreaches, can't get the elements of the Versailles Treaty established, crucially the League of Nations. To extend the Monroe Doctrine to Western Europe is one thing, to say the United States is going to join this new global body and in some ways be subject to this new global body about the maintaining peace and the rule of law, that's too much. And there's a reaction even to our having been involved in that Great War and to extending the Monroe Doctrine to Western Europe. So there's a bit of a kind of snapback. But with the Second World War, and then if you think about the outcome of the Second World War and President Truman establishing NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a full formal statement, in effect, of the Monroe Doctrine to all of Western Europe. Explicitly, formally, in a treaty, one nation gets invaded, all parties have been invaded, in effect, are attacked. So this idea, and then now why should we care about Taiwan? Why should we care about rebuilding Japan and making it a liberal democracy? Why should we care about South Korea? Why should we care about the Philippines, right? So this series of wars that America gets involved with later in the 19th century, into the 20th century, it's an extension of the Monroe Doctrine principle. To protect liberty at home, given changes in technology, for goodness sakes, we're talking about intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and jet aircraft, and now we're talking about hypersonic and blah, blah, blah, right? We need to extend this concept by saying we're not an empire, we're not the Roman Empire, but we know liberty republics are threatened, and we're going to keep extending our defensive perimeter, extended deterrence out there, so that in effect we're an Atlantic-Pacific power, we're a global power, putting other people on notice, forming alliances all over the world, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. So the Monroe Doctrine spirit didn't, you know, it has it's had its ups and downs in the past two centuries, but it's never gone away. And so, in a sense, if you've been paying attention, uh it's not all that shocking that President Donald Trump, in his second term, would put a real step on the Monroe Doctrine and kind of reclaim it as his own. And so we can talk more about that.

SPEAKER_01: 13:48

So, how has the second Trump administration invoked the Monroe Doctrine? And what does that say about American foreign policy debates and strategies today over 30 years after the victory in the Cold War in 1991? Which how is that 30 years ago? Isn't that only 10 years ago? Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00: 14:09

Time flies when you're having fun. Congress passed a law requiring presidents, at least once in each administration, to publish a statement of strategic doctrine about American foreign policy and America's national security, America's presence in the world. So it's a requirement that presidents produce a national security strategy. So President Trump, like all presidents since then, has complied with this. In late 2025, he issued the Trump administration national security strategy. It came out in December of 2025. And in that, it's a very clear, strong restatement, in a way, as the first strategic principle of the second Trump administration to reassert the Monroe Doctrine and to reinsert the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that we talked about, President Theodore Roosevelt, that it's not only to keep foreign powers out of this hemisphere, especially great powers that might be opposed to the United States, it's restating our right, power, claim to be involved in the internal affairs of states in this hemisphere, obviously we mean South America, we don't really much mean Canada, because it it something going wrong in those states might affect the security of the United States of America. And President Trump has not only applied this to south of our border, most you know, within weeks, within a month after this publishing of the National Security Strategy to effectively invade Venezuela, capture the President, and extract him in this extraordinary military operation, but also all of the language about Greenland to our north, that the United States' security, the security of the entire Western hemisphere, is threatened by Europe's negligence, the Western European powers, their negligence toward Greenland. The Chinese are involved there, the Russians are involved there. Any prior relationship the United States has with Greenland and the European states about Greenland, it's not good enough. Our access to military bases there, et cetera, it's not good enough. We should take it over, right? So this is the Monroe Doctrine principle that to protect liberty and Republican government here, the United States as a great power will need to be aggressive at times. It's this aggressive defensive blend that the Americans have been claiming since 1823. We're not an empire. We're not doing this because we want to. We're being aggressive, leaning out to the world, asserting our power, even again to that TR corollary, which President Donald Trump and others have referred to as the Donro doctrine. We are going to intervene in the domestic affairs of states, not because we want to, we're not an empire, because we have to to defend our security in this era of, you know, again, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, complicated international commercial economic relations, et cetera. So can I just say this again, why we're doing these historical episodes in the Civics in Year podcast? Here is a moment which proved yet again being a citizen of the United States is hard work. Way too many of us are way too lazy about this. It not only takes a serious commitment to civic education when you're a young person in school, however you're getting your schooling, and if you're fortunate enough to go to two-year college, four-year college to get to continue with and deep into civic education with you there, but for the rest of your life to be thinking about American history, American civic principles, the American founding, our 250 years of debate about it, because here we are in 2026, and we're in a debate. What does the Monroe Doctrine really mean? What does the Teddy Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine mean? What is President Trump doing with it? Was it ever justified in the first place in 1823? Was it was TR's corollary justified? Is what President Trump doing justified? And in a way, to set up a future episode we're going to do, in a way, the it points out to us that the Monroe Doctrine is part of a debate happening in the in the 50 years after the founding, the the the decades after George Washington's farewell address. What really is America's role in the world? What are the fundamental principles of American foreign policy? George Washington had said in his farewell address that this is often forgotten, that America is a great nation. A great nation, a great power in the world. And yet he said we have to be exceptional because our founding principles are exceptional. We can't be lawless, imperial, just tossing around our might and power as our might and power grows. And it's an incredible foresight on his part in 1796 to say we're on the ver he basically said we will someday soon be a great power if we stick to this constitutional order. Well, he was exactly right. And we do become a great power. But he's also saying our principles mean we can't just think of our own interest. We must be guided by justice. And that has been the basic template, whether we know it or not, of American foreign policy debates for the 240 years since 230 years since Washington's farewell address of 1796. How do we balance our interests as a separate nation state or republic with justice? Because the Declaration of Independence says we are guided by equal natural rights for all human beings. We can't be an empire saying, hey, you, you little country, we're greater than you, we're going to squash you like a bug unless you accept our imperial dominance over you. We can't do that and stick to our principles. So the Monroe Doctrine and these later echoes of the Monroe Doctrine point us back to that founding debate. We're a republic, we have the potential to be a great republic, but we don't want to be the Roman Empire, do we? The Roman Republic that becomes the empire, falls into an empire, loses its republic, its commitment to liberty. So this is what being a citizen in the 21st century and 2026 means. Get serious, people. You have some thinking to do. Who are you going to vote for? In elections for the president, elections for the U.S. Senate, elections for the House, even your own governor and your own state legislature. Who who's got the right ideas about this? It's it's serious business and it takes some work.

SPEAKER_01: 21:27

And in our next episode, we're actually gonna go back a little bit in history to talk about another address because we we cannot possibly cover every primary source because this would end up being 25,000 episodes if we did that. But a lot of the primary sources that we're looking at have a role today. So, Dr. Creese, thank you so much for kind of going through this Monroe Doctoring with us. And listeners, our next episode, we're gonna go back to John Quincy Adams, but again, these are foundations and context for things like the Monroe Doctoring. So, Dr. Creeze, thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 22:06

Thank you, Liz.