Why the Monroe Doctrine, meant for Europe, still echoes in Venezuela — and once in India

In that message, the President declared that the Western Hemisphere was no longer open to European colonisation or intervention, actions the United States would deem a threat to its security. The doctrine has since assumed a central place in the American foreign policy psyche. Its meaning, purpose, and application, however, have been reshaped repeatedly by successive political regimes.

Alex Bryne, lecturer in History at De Montfort University, says his initial response to the Trump administration’s recent invocation of the doctrine was one of confusion. “As a scholar of the Monroe Doctrine, the President’s invocation of the doctrine does not seem to be particularly relevant to the US invasion of Venezuela. There is no external, non-American threat that the United States is seeking to combat in Venezuela. It was a Venezuelan leader who was deemed to be a threat, so the US disregarded Venezuela’s sovereignty on the basis of national interest alone…” he tells indianexpress.com in an email interview.

The confusion is shared by academics and experts across the globe. What is the Monroe Doctrine? What was the geopolitical context at the time of its drafting, how has its meaning evolved, and what are its absurdities?

Backdrop to the Monroe Doctrine

European colonial expansion began in the fifteenth century, and by the seventeenth century, European powers maintained vast empires beyond the continent. In the American hemisphere, Spain, Britain, Portugal, and France held extensive possessions. After the American Revolution — a political conflict between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain — friction developed between North America and Europe over territorial claims, political systems, and trade.

According to Sexton, although Britain lost its most important North American colonies in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution, its imperial rise lay ahead. “The British Empire was larger and more powerful in 1820 than it had been in 1776. During the intervening decades, it tightened its grip on India; its resources and people poured into its settler colonies in Canada and Australasia; it acquired strategic way stations such as the African cape and Singapore; it increased its commercial and naval presence in distant markets in East Asia and in Latin America…and its political system weathered the ideological storm unleashed by the American and French revolutions,” he writes.

French intervention in Mexico, 1861–1867 (Wikipedia)

This expanding British empire cast a shadow over the young United States, which found itself entangled in British influence long after achieving political independence.

“There was an American conviction that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans conveniently divided the world into Old and New, Eastern and Western Hemispheres with distinct political systems: the Old World characterised by autocratic monarchies and the New by republican states, linked to freedom and liberty,” notes Denneth M Modeste, academic and public official, in The Monroe Doctrine in a Contemporary Perspective (2020).

Against this backdrop emerged the American view that the Western Hemisphere was no longer a region where Europeans should find a favourable reception. As Modeste writes, “If a policy statement was required to promulgate this idea, it took the form of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed by United States President James Monroe on December 2, 1823.”

Tenets of the doctrine

James Monroe’s annual message to the United States Congress outlined two core principles that together became known as the Monroe Doctrine. The first, the non-colonisation clause, sought to prevent European powers from pursuing future colonial expansion in the Americas. The second was the principle of non-interference, which warned European powers against imposing their political systems on the Americas or threatening the integrity of newly independent states. In return, the president pledged that the United States would refrain from involvement in European affairs.

In his book The Monroe Doctrine and United States National Security in the Early Twentieth Century (2020), Bryne argues that the doctrine’s meaning became increasingly contested as US power expanded following the Spanish-American War of 1898. As America assumed a more assertive international role, policymakers debated how the doctrine should be understood and applied. “Through public addresses, congressional debates, academic publications and conference papers,” Bryne observes, Americans “fractured” the doctrine’s meaning.

James Monroe (Wikipedia)

Bryne identifies two competing interpretations of the doctrine. One framed the Monroe Doctrine as a justification for maintaining regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The other emphasised inter-American unity and political, economic, cultural, and military cooperation. Sexton adds, “The key to understanding the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine is the simultaneity and interdependence of anticolonialism and imperialism.”

An example of this changing meaning, Modeste notes, occurred during the Second World War when one of the doctrine’s foundational principles — the US commitment to not interfere in European affairs — was effectively abandoned as the country retreated from isolation and later entered the war against the Axis powers.

The many absurdities of the Monroe Doctrine

The doctrine has been invoked repeatedly over time. As decades passed, it acquired a semi-sacred status in American political culture, and by the turn of the twentieth century, it was widely regarded as a foundational historic document deserving reverence. “A mythology had solidified around it, one that claimed that the United States had been able to protect its national interests on the world stage because its leaders had adhered to the doctrine’s tenets since its enunciation,” writes Bryne in his book. Venezuela offers an early example of this mythology at work.

According to Bryne, the Venezuelan boundary dispute of 1895-1896 was central to reinforcing this narrative. When a border conflict erupted between Venezuela and British Guiana, President Grover Cleveland and his Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine to challenge British influence in the Western Hemisphere, successfully pushing for arbitration. Standing up to the British Empire convinced Olney that adherence to the doctrine had given the United States a “practically sovereign” position across the Western Hemisphere.

The recent invocation of the doctrine, however, marks a shift. What Bryne terms the “Trump Corollary” suggests that the US intervention in Latin America no longer requires the presence of an external threat. “We have arrived at a time when the Monroe Doctrine really does equate to US imperialism without any pretence,” he says. “The Monroe Doctrine has long equated to US imperialism within Latin America, so its invocation will presumably raise tensions between many Latin American nations and the United States.”

One of the doctrine’s central problems, scholars argue, lies in its inherent ambiguity. “The original doctrine was vague and did not demand action on the part of the United States. It did not state that the United States should oppose European colonialism in Latin America – it merely stated that the United States would view colonialisation as a threat to its interests…,” writes Bryne, noting that a wide range of ideas — from anti-colonialism to imperial ambition have since been attached to it.

Political cartoon depicting Theodore Roosevelt using the Monroe Doctrine to keep European powers out (Wikipedia)

This vagueness has allowed the doctrine to be repeatedly reinterpreted, most significantly by President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1904, Roosevelt established a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that stated that the United States could intervene in the internal affairs of any Latin American country if that country was responsible for any wrongdoing. In essence, the United States began policing the Americas so that European nations would not interfere in the affairs of Latin American countries.

Sexton says, “And so Trump’s invocation really resembles that one, the Roosevelt Corollary, much more than it does the original.”

When there was a call for a Monroe Doctrine for India

The Doctrine’s global appeal once extended beyond the Americas. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, seeking international support against British rule, argued for a similar principle of self-determination. In The Wilsonian Moment (2007), historian Erez Manela cites an appeal by Tilak for a “Monroe Doctrine for India,” arguing that colonial powers should withdraw to allow self-rule — an interpretation that overlooked the history of US intervention in Latin America but spoke more to the nationalist hopes of the era.

For Sexton, the doctrine’s revival today signals a return to an older world order. “Fundamentally, the doctrine is about dividing the globe into spheres of influence…this is a blast from the past.” He argues that such thinking ultimately benefits US rivals. “What basis does the United States have to oppose the intervention by Russia on Ukraine or China on Hong Kong if it itself is doing exactly that same thing in Latin America? (sic)”

Looking ahead, Sexton warns of wider consequences: regional instability, renewed great-power rivalry, and domestic backlash in the United States. “So you might want to think about destabilisation, not of just international affairs, but the further destabilisation of US internal politics.”

As Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once observed: “No single utterance of an American president, no statement of policy and strategic political philosophy, has had more influence on the history of the world and the history of a region than President James Monroe’s fundamental and seminal statement of 1823…”