The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot. Secretary of Defense Pete Higgseth issued an order to quote, kill everybody on the vessel. By a real Panama Canal is ours. Trump should mine his own business, and all countries have the ability to use the canal. Monroe Doctrine, we sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don't forget about it anymore. You're listening to Civics 101, I'm Nick Capity-J. I'm Hannah McCarthy. And today we are talking about a 200-year-old written statement by a president that didn't really mean much until it did the Monroe Doctrine. What it was, what it became, how it was used over the centuries, and why everybody is talking about it right now. Stick around. AWS AI is how industry leaders are transforming how we learn, live, and solve tomorrow's challenges. Take Phillips. Using AI to turn millions of medical scans into answers faster. Hear that? That's the sound of car manufacturers using AI to shift production up a gear. And how gaming worlds level up as you play. Across industries worldwide, AWS AI is how innovation happens every day. 500 orders a month was manageable. Fast-thousand is madness. Embrace intelligent, orderful filming with ShipStation. The only platform combined in order management, where else workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Go to shipstation.com and use code Start to try ShipStation free for 60 days. Alright Nick, we're talking about the Monroe Doctrine. Let's start with what it is. James Monroe, our fifth president, was this something that he wrote? Was it an executive order? Alright, we got to set the scene first, Hannah. Alright. It's the 1820s. We got the war of 1812 in a review. We've got a national purpose. I'm okay, you're okay. It is the moment in history known as the era of good feelings. In other words, the period when the Federalist Party collapses, the Democratic Republicans run the show, and seemingly nobody is disagreeing about anything. Anything at all. And ask your question, Hannah, what is it? This is something written, sort of, by James Monroe, but it is not an executive order. Alright, so 1823. This is the seven-stay of the unidrests from President James Monroe. Dan Casino, it has been too long. Every moment a treasure with Dan Casino. Is Dan still professor of government and politics at Fairly Dickinson University? You know it. Yeah, you know it was fun. I, one of my colleagues, a history professor, got text from his son and said, wait, do you know Dan Casino? We heard his stuff. James Monroe gives his state of the union address in 1823. Remember, state of the union is not him giving a talk to Congress. It's actually just writes a letter. They didn't give talks to Congress over the 20th century. Here's where I'm going to note, though, Hannah. It was Monroe's state of the union, but these words were not written by him. They were written by Monroe's then secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. So embedded in this very long state of the union address, he has this little statement where he says that foreign country, European countries, should not get involved in South America or in the Western Hemisphere. One more time to make sure I've got it. Europe should not metal with countries in the Western Hemisphere. Right. And what's the follow up to that should? What do you mean? Well, if Monroe says don't do this, it seems like there should be some sort of, and if you do, like a consequence, right? Right. It's the sort of thing that should be followed up with, or else, you know? But it's not. It's just a period because America doesn't really have much of an army or a navy at this point. So we are just making as a statement of policy, there should be no more colonies in South America. All right, but why? What is the problem with European government getting involved in South America? Well, we've got to think in the geopolitical context of the 1820s here. Remember, so America has this revolution. You have the French revolution, looks like republics are taking over Europe. By the time you get to 1815, 1816, there's been a retrenchment of monarchies. A retrenchment of monarchies? Like the Empire Dress and Beethoven Piano Sonatas, monarchies are so back. This is right after the defeat of Napoleon, right? And you get Poland, Russia, and Austria form this alliance, this is pro-monarchic alliance, putting a monarchy back in France. So we are having a resettlement of monarchies. You know, the republican fervor has finally passed, and the monarchies feel like they're safe going forward. And monarchies are taking back over. There's a fear that those monarchies are going to try and reconquer the South American countries that had already had revolutions against the monarchy and established republics. The idea we're putting forward here is that these new republics that have been formed in South America should not be reconquered. You shouldn't try and make them back into monarchies. Because the old world, okay, you guys have monarchies, we accept that, find whatever. But the new world should be republics. And again, there is no or else in there. And what we now call them in road doctrine sort of floats into the mist. So, no one pays any attention. Nobody cares. Because America does have much of a robbery. It doesn't have much of a robbery. We just got our butts kicked in the War of 1812. Like, this is not really much a statement. We know like Simone Boulevard hears about this and goes, oh, that's nice, I guess. I mean, like, no one is really taking this seriously. I, in fact, the only one who takes this seriously, it is the British. Because this is really good for the British. Why is this good for the British? It's good because of one word, mercantilism. The best things in life are free. But you can give them to the bad and be the I want the money. You don't talk about mercantilism enough, but mercantilism. All right, mercantilism is the economic theory that in theory, Adam Smith put an end to, but in practice, he did not. That the way you get the strongest and best country, the strongest and best economy, is by accumulating as much gold as you possibly can. If you get the most gold, you win. What do you win? We don't ask questions like that, but you win if you get the most gold. So your trade policy under mercantilism is to get as much gold as possible. How do you get gold? You sell stuff to other countries because they're going to pay you in gold. So whenever I sell something to another country, some of the gold, their gold gets transferred over me and I get their gold. At the same time, while I'm selling stuff, I am not buying anything. Because when I buy something, gold comes out of my coffers and goes to my potential enemies. So my job is to sell as much as possible and not buy anything, which kind of falls apart when you start to make this economic theory that's applying to an entire continent. Because everyone's trying to sell stuff and nobody wants to buy anything. So indirectly, this is, of course, what actually leads to colonialism, the idea that I need to find other stuff that they don't have in their country that I can sell them so they have to buy it for me. Ideally, an addictive substance like caffeine or tobacco or something, opium, whatever. And if that doesn't work, then my colonies work as a captive audience. They have to buy my stuff. Right? And I get the gold from them. So this is a huge deal geopolitically in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now, what did Dan mean when he said Adam Smith supposedly put an end to mercantilism, but actually didn't? Yeah, so Adam Smith was a renowned economic philosopher who published a treatise in 1776, explaining why some nations are rich and some nations are poor. And that mercantilism is not the way to go to ensure success. The short name of this treatise is the wealth of nations. In theory, the wealth of nations put an end to this. It was a very definitive proof that this didn't actually work in the true wealth of nations as in the bounty and the production of your people. But nobody really bought that for at least another 40 or 50 years. So the British love this idea because all these newly freed Republicans out of America, well, they're not part of the mercantilist system that the Spanish or whoever previously owned them are part of. So previously, if Brazil is owned by Portugal, Brazil ain't trading with anybody. Right? The British can't trade with Brazil. Right? Because they're part of the mercantilist system with Portugal. Mexico is with Spain. You can't trade with them because they're tied up with Spain. So big, powerful European countries like Portugal and Spain, if they take over a country in South America, that makes it a lot harder for Britain to trade with that country to get stuff from South America that you can't get anywhere else. Like bananas. Oh, man, Hannah, we are going to get to bananas. Really? Oh, yeah. But yes, it is easier for Britain to trade with a small independent republic that needs the money and doesn't have a big, wanging army behind it. And remember, at this time, Britain has the biggest navy in the world. So the British become the biggest defender of the Monroe Doctrine. Basically saying to other countries in Europe, no, no, no. You can't go back in and reconquer this place and reconquer your former colonies out of America because the Monroe Doctrine, right? That's the whole thing over here. So the British become the defender of this throughout the 19th century. And the Americans do basically nothing with it. Okay, so when does America finally start to care about the Monroe Doctrine? First, a few little dribs and drabs, President James K. Polk hints at it a little bit to justify a manifest destiny and the Mexican-American war. But the rise of the Monroe Doctrine into something that actually affects American policy going forward is in the 1850s. And before we get to that, we've got to take a quick break. Many years ago, never mind how many, but I wasn't high school. My very wise friend informed me that I should stop acquiring so much flimsy, fall apart in the wash, fast fashion. This was, by the way, before the term fast fashion had properly entered the lexicon, so he probably just said junk. And that I should instead invest in high quality clothes that I could wear year after year. Now, there are two reasons that I did not do this at the time. One, I believe I was like 16 years old, two, when I heard invest and high quality in the same sentence. I really heard two expensive for the likes of you. Now, here I am some years later, and there's finally a path to exactly the kind of quality over quantity my buddy Pete was talking about. And that is Quince. Quince makes wardrobe staples that last. We are talking 100% European linen, 100% silk, organic cotton, Mongolian cashmere, high quality fabrics, well made clothes, the stuff that you can reach for year after year. As I speak, I am wearing my Quince organic cotton boyfriend sweater, something that I reach for week after week. And it has been years. High school Hannah could not even imagine something holding up for this long. Let alone keeping its shape, warmth, softness, and color like this puppy has. And because Quince works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, I did not end up paying fancy retail or brand markup prices for this. So Pete was right. I don't need a ton of clothes. I just needed the clothes that I love that last year after year. And you can have the very same right now. Go to quince.com slash civics for free shipping in 365 day returns. That is a full year to wear it and love it. And you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to quince.com slash civics for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash civics. So food delivery services have been around for a while. And I've tried a lot of them and I loved some and I hated others. I will say that green chef is the trusted authority on clean eating. They deliver only real farm sourced ingredients. So for my choice, I chose the Mediterranean option because I want to live another thousand years. And the standout to me was the fish. Oh, I've had so much trouble fishing my life. Specifically in this box, the salmon with red peppers and olives. Because I don't live by a fishmonger. There isn't one in my town. And salmon, salmon my whole life, it's been a gamble. This salmon from green chef, these were vacuum sealed. They were gorgeous cuts of fish. The kind I literally could not get at my local grocery store. And also I haven't made a fish and olive dish and maybe ever. So I learned something and that means it was a good day. So if you're interested in having someone else handle your meal planning and your grocery shopping in an organic affordable varied way, give green chef a try. Just head to greenchef.com slash 50 civics. That's 5-0 C-I-V-I-C-S. And use code 50 civics to get 50% off your first month. And then 20% off for two months with free shipping. Again, that is code 50 civics at greenchef.com slash 50 civics. Tuesday night on a sofa, watching Telly with mum again. 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Just a reminder to our listeners, we have hundreds and hundreds of episodes at our website, Civics101podcast.org. Just check it out if you need a refresher on just about anything. Okay, Nick, you were going to tell me about the point at which the Monroe Doctrine actually started to matter. When does that happen? Alright, but first, Hannah, a quick word on the name, the Monroe Doctrine. Here again, is the inimitable Dan Casino. It doesn't even get called the Monroe Doctrine until sometime in the 1850s. No one's thinking about it, no one calls it a Doctrine. This is just something Monroe said until the 1850s where it becomes start to get more important. Now, why is it getting more important? It gets more important because America gets a bigger army and navy. So we can actually start to do stuff. And so the first time we actually see the Monroe Doctrine actually coming into effect in any sort of recognizable form is the Spanish American War. Where we're going into Cuba and saying, no, no, no, we have this long standing doctrine that we've never enforced before. Saying that you Spain cannot have Cuba. No one can do this. Now, during the period between the 1820s and the 1890s, lots of European powers came in and muddled around South America. I mean, the French conquered Mexico and installed an emperor in Mexico. So Spain and France were actually acting against the Monroe Doctrine? They were. We said, don't do this. And they just didn't listen. Okay, and why didn't we do anything about it? We didn't do anything about it because it was 1862 and we were a little busy doing other things at the time. But there was not a whole heck of a lot America could do about it because we didn't have an army or navy. Right? We had no way of enforcing these rules we didn't theory put into place. And again, no one even thought of them really as being rules. Okay, so Spanish American War. We're going in conquering all of these territories to free them from the yoke of European oppression. And it's Teddy Roosevelt, who's of course very deeply involved in the Spanish American War, who puts his corollary, we call it the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This moment, Hannah, this is a huge yes and to the Monroe Doctrine. This is how Teddy Roosevelt justified the war where the US took over Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines. And it also began our protectorate relationship with Cuba. And what is the corollary exactly? The Roosevelt Corollary is again all about economics. His argument is that we as America, we are responsible for the economic and social well-being of the Americas, writ large. And what that means in practice is that if a country in South America is going to default, right, if their trade policy is out of whack and they're going to default, we Americans are going to step in and get things back on track so the Europeans don't have to. The way we're going to keep Europe out of South America is by going into South America ourselves and regulating the economies, regulating the government of South America, to make sure that the European powers don't actually have to do that. So now it's not just, hey, Europe, stay out of South America. It's, we here in the US are responsible for maintaining the economic stability of South America. Yeah. And look, there is a real fear that if Venezuela defaults on his loans, that the British are coming to invade, because that's what you did at that time. And so we're saying, look, we're going to make sure Venezuela, whoever doesn't default on his loans, there are coming doesn't get out of track, they don't nationalize stuff. We're going to make sure that that never happens in order to not give the Europeans the excuse to come in. And here Hannah is where we get to the bananas. And you get America becoming very, very active in South America and Central America. And this is because of the expansion of American companies into Central America and South America, mostly fruit companies, you know, you're getting fruit, you're getting sugar and all these things. And so America expands its military presence in South America and Central America to protect American business interests. This actually leads America to a series of wars between about 1920 and 1934, colloquially known as the Banana Wars. And the Banana Wars are the, the truest expression of the monodocron, where we just send in the Marines to protect American business interests. So we had just finished the Panama Canal. Trade from South America was now significantly easier. And the US owned a lot of fruit companies down there, namely, Dole and Chiquita, then named the standard fruit company and the United Fruit Company. We're going to invade. We're going to attack if you're under attack. Again, we have to make sure that their economies are being run properly because if their economies are not being run properly, that would give, in theory, given excuse to Europeans to come in and do something about it. But we're not really worried about that. But we are saying our business interests are supposed to be dominant here in South America and in Central America. So therefore we are obliged to do whatever the heck we need to do in order to protect those business interests. Those, the Banana Wars are very, very bloody. I mean, we are talking, you know, thousands of American Marines are killed in these Banana Wars. But that's nothing compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of Central and South American people who are killed in these Banana Wars. Essentially to protect American business interests and to keep the flow of tropical fruits into America and tropical fruit sugar in America going strong. So this is US owned companies using the American military as protection. Exactly. Before this, a company would and did higher private security firms like the Pinkertens to be the muscle. I don't like the Pinkertens. But now you've got the US armed forces. Look, these are colonial economies. These are colonial plantation economies. In a plantation economy, the only people who have money are the people who own land. Right? And everyone else has no money, has no nothing because all the wealth comes from land from owning where the crops are growing. And so it turns out if you have a bunch of Americans who come in and own all of the land in a country, the locals get a little squirrely about this. They're unhappy and sometimes you get revolts. And what are these poor American business owners supposed to do if you want to keep the flow of pineapples of bananas going to New York? Well, you call them Marines. The Banana Wars ended, didn't they? They did. Why? For companies, this is the big one being the Great Depression and the Build up to World War II. Like we need those Marines for other things. Weirdly, public support for supporting businesses and supporting business oligarchs drops during the Great Depression. They're like, I don't know. Public opinion is not there. And Frank Lerosevelts, not really as big on this as like Calvin Coolidge would have been. Because you know, Kwakul, he'll call it the Pinkertens on anybody in a moment's notice. So, Frank Lerosevelts, not as big on this, knows we're building up to war in Europe. So, you know, these things wind up, you know, they die down. So, Frank Lerosevelts basically pulls the troops out and lets the business owners, you know, benefit themselves. Which again, is not really too much a problem. Private security forces, things like that. I don't like the Pinkertens. So, we essentially don't need to send the military all over the place. But, after World War II is over, when all the soldiers and the Marines and the ships and the tanks were no longer needed in Europe, when the U.S. has embroiled in a Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine has another renaissance. And this time, it's not just protecting economies of other nations, it's about ideas. I like an iceberg, much communist activity is out of sight in the underground. But here and there, signs appear. You know, we are in the Cold War era and during the Cold War era, there is a long-standing tradition of America intervening in South American countries and South American governments. And this can be seen as an offshoot of the Roosevelt Corollary, the idea that our job is to maintain stability. And just by the 1950s through 1970s, we have redefined stability to mean not socialist. So, because socialism is basically communism, and you know how the domino theory works if one country goes communist, then it all go communist. During the Cold War, we have to protect South America from socialist governments. And so, we often don't do this with the military anymore. We're going to do this with the CIA because, or with other secret means because we don't want to get the blame for it, because people will be very upset at us if they know what we were doing. Okay, as we're starting to get nearer to the modern era, Nick, I have to ask something I should have asked at the beginning. Is this allowed? Can we invade a foreign country because we don't like their ideals? I know we have done it many a time under various justifications and names, but is this in line with international law? No, absolutely not. International law going back to the Treaty of Westphalia is supposed to say that you can't intervene in other countries without a council's belly. But we, we're at this point, we're a very powerful country and that means international law doesn't really apply to us. And I'm going to come back to that point because it's a big one. But the US continued to involve itself with affairs in the Americas, most notably in Panama in the 1980s. And the arrest of Manuel Narega in 1989 on drug trafficking charges, which looks very much like recent events. But in that case, we send the greens, we invade and occupy Panama for a month over, looking for the guy. So there's lots of times where we're sending, still seeing the greens, but not nearly as much as we were earlier. Because we don't really need to as much as we did before, because we're making sure the governments then South America are relatively friendly to us. But of course, that doesn't mean it's not happening at all, especially in 2026. Multiple explosions and low-flying aircraft were seen in Caracas in the early hours of Saturday morning. Maduro's government immediately accused the US of an imperialist attack on civilian and military installations. We did an episode a few weeks back on what happened in Venezuela on January 3rd, 2026. We've got a link to that in the show notes if anyone wants the big picture on the history leading up to the capture of Nicolas Maduro. But I will just share right here, Donald Trump cited the Monroe Doctrine specifically, in justifying the invasion of Venezuela. The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot. President Trump was very clear about the Monroe Doctrine. As President Trump often does, he talked about it as if no one had ever heard of it before. He said this is the Monroe Doctrine. It's very big right now. People forgot about it, and I can't forget about it ever again. So yeah, he absolutely cited it as part of the justification for this. Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western atmosphere will never be questioned again. The Doctrine was explicitly called out in Trump's national security strategy, released in 2025, which announced a quote-unquote Trump corollary, which was to quote, re-assert and enforce them in the Roe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere. End quote. The Trump corollary has been referred to by the Trump administration as the Don Roe Doctrine. The Don Roe Doctrine, I don't know, is Monroe Doctrine. And it was not just used to justify the Venezuelan invasion, but the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, the proposed acquisition of the Panama Canal, the blowing up of boats in the Caribbean, and also, which we're going to have to get to in a future episode, as things unfold, I don't even know how to refer to it, the explicit intended taking of Greenland. And by the way, I'm a fan of Denmark, too. I have to tell you, and they've been very nice to me. I'm a big fan, but the fact that they had a boat land there 500 years ago, this doesn't mean that they own the land. Purely, and lots of boats go there also. Can we get back to what Dan said about international law? That the Monroe Doctrine is not applicable under international law because, under international law, we do not invade unless someone threatens or provokes us, or unless that country asks us to. How do we square that? What happens when we ignore international law? This is, reflects a very 18th century understanding, a pre-modern understanding of international law. This is the Greeks during the Peloponnesian War, those who can do and those who can't suffer. We have power, so we can do whatever we want. And this is not the way the modern rule oriented post-1945 world system is supposed to work. You have to remember, so in 1945, right in America, we have the dominant power on earth, everyone else in blown to smithereens, partially by us. And what we do, we've got this hegemonic moment where we're the only ones with the nuclear bomb, the atom bomb. We have everything, and we could use that to become the global hegemon. But instead, what we do is we say, all right, we are going to establish all these international organizations, like the UN, and all these other things that are going to regulate trade and regulate international relations. And then we're going to give ourselves a privilege position with those organizations, but everyone gets a voice. And that way, everyone will buy in to America being the leader of the world, and we'll be able to maintain this kind of global dominance for much, much longer. If we just try and do base everything, we've got the atom bomb and you don't, well, in 10 years, everyone else can have an atom bomb, so it's not going to work. But we can build these organizations, the general agreements on tariff and trade, the world trade organization, the UN. We can build these organizations, and that will extend that hegemony for much, much longer, because we'll get everyone to buy into it. And so when we go ahead and abandon really the rules we set up to deal with exactly this kind of thing, we abandon those rules, we are giving permission to other people to abandon those rules as well. And that's really troubling, because one thing that's made the world safer in the last 80 years has been this rules-oriented norms-based international organization system. And when we get rid of that, that causes problems, and it doesn't cause problems as far as other people cause problems for us. That is them in row doctrine today on Civics 101. This episode is made by me and a capidice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Marina Hanky is our producer and Rebecca LaVoy are executive producer. Music in this episode from the usual suspects, epidemic sound, blue dot sessions, and the tremendous Chris Zobriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio. Not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast The Shadow Sessions hosted by me, Hibba Belfaqay. A psychologist and trauma expert, we should light on the hidden corners of the human experience. Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, the Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow the Shadow Sessions wherever you're listening now. Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-World War II, East and West Germany. So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of the future of our former democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast from more equitable democracy and large media, hosted by me, Colin Cole and Heather Villanova. It's time to rethink democracy. 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