"In a cogent study, [Smith] explains how the U.S. molded the U.N. Charter to bar the U.N. from political involvement in the West." - Publishers Weekly When President Monroe issued his 1823 doctrine on U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere, it quickly became as sacred to Americans as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But in the years after World War II - notably in Guatemala in 1954, in Brazil in 1963, in Chile in 1973, and in El Salvador in the 1980s - our government's policy of supporting repressive regimes in Central and South America hastened the death of the very doctrine that had been invoked to protect us in the Cold War, by associating its application with torture squads, murder, and the denial of the very democratic ideals the Monroe Doctrine was intended to protect. Gaddis Smith's measured but devastating account, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, is essential reading for all those who care how the United States behaves in the world arena.

When President Monroe issued his 1823 doctrine on U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere, it quickly became as sacred to Americans as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But in the years after World War II - notably in Guatemala in 1954, in Brazil in 1963, in Chile in 1973, and in El Salvador in the 1980s - our government's policy of supporting repressive regimes in Central and South America hastened the death of the very doctrine that had been invoked to protect us in the Cold War, by associating its application with torture squads, murder, and the denial of the very democratic ideals the Monroe Doctrine was intended to protect. Gaddis Smith's measured but devastating account is essential reading for all those who care how the United States behaves in the world arena. "This epilogue to well-known history of Monroe Doctrine is a provocative interpretation of how US presidents resolved policy contradiction of accepting Soviet presence in the Caribbean while reaffirming tenets of Monroe Doctrine"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

President Monroe's 1823 declaration on U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere quickly became a keystone document. But in the years after World War II, our government's policy of supporting repressive regimes in Central and South America hastened the death of this doctrine. Here, Professor Smith offers a measured but devastating account--essential for all who care about U.S. foreign policy.

A Concise History of the (In)Famous Doctrine that Gave Rise to the American Empire President James Monroe's 1823 message to Congress declaring opposition to European colonization in the Western Hemisphere became the cornerstone of nineteenth-century American statecraft. Monroe's message proclaimed anticolonial principles, yet it rapidly became the myth and means for subsequent generations of politicians to pursue expansionist foreign policies. Time and again, debates on the key issues of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foreign relations—expansion in the 1840s, Civil War diplomacy, the imperialism of 1898, entrance into World War I, and the establishment of the League of Nations—were framed in relation to the Monroe Doctrine. Covering more than a century of history, this engaging book explores the varying conceptions of the doctrine as its meaning evolved in relation to the needs of an expanding American empire. In Jay Sexton's adroit hands, the Monroe Doctrine provides a new lens from which to view the paradox at the center of American diplomatic history: the nation's interdependent traditions of anticolonialism and imperialism.

This book demonstrates that during the early twentieth century, the Monroe Doctrine served the role of a national security framework that justified new directions in United States foreign relations when the nation emerged as one of the world’s leading imperial powers. As the United States’ overseas empire expanded in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the nation’s decision-makers engaged in a protracted debate over the meaning and application of the doctrine, aligning it to two antithetical core values simultaneously: regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere on the one hand, and Pan-Americanism on the other. The doctrine’s fractured meaning reflected the divisions that existed among domestic perceptions of the nation’s new role on the world stage and directed the nation’s approach to key historical events such as the acquisition of the Philippines, the Mexican Revolution, the construction of the Panama Canal, the First World War, and the debate over the League of Nations.

In 1823, President James Monroe announced that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any future European colonization and that the United States would protect the Americas as a space destined for democracy. Over the next century, these ideas—which came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine—provided the framework through which Americans understood and articulated their military and diplomatic role in the world. Hemispheric Imaginings demonstrates that North Americans conceived and developed the Monroe Doctrine in relation to transatlantic literary narratives. Gretchen Murphy argues that fiction and journalism were crucial to popularizing and making sense of the Doctrine’s contradictions, including the fact that it both drove and concealed U.S. imperialism. Presenting fiction and popular journalism as key arenas in which such inconsistencies were challenged or obscured, Murphy highlights the major role writers played in shaping conceptions of the U.S. empire. Murphy juxtaposes close readings of novels with analyses of nonfiction texts. From uncovering the literary inspirations for the Monroe Doctrine itself to tracing visions of hemispheric unity and transatlantic separation in novels by Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Lew Wallace, and Richard Harding Davis, she reveals the Doctrine’s forgotten cultural history. In making a vital contribution to the effort to move American Studies beyond its limited focus on the United States, Murphy questions recent proposals to reframe the discipline in hemispheric terms. She warns that to do so risks replicating the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary claim to isolate the Americas from the rest of the world.