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VOA VIEW -- Is the opinion of "Voice of Americans", which is a private entity not affiliated in any way with the United States government or any of its agencies. The opinions expressed here, in whatever medium or format, are not necessarily the opinions of the ownership or advertisers of this web site - 0415.

      President Donald Trump likes putting his name on things, so maybe it was inevitable he’d get his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.  Needed

     Truth be told, what the president’s just-released National Security Strategy sets out as a new proposition is a re-statement of the Lodge Corollary, named after Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1912. That proviso prohibited any foreign power or interest — not just European governments — from gaining “practical power of control” in the Western Hemisphere. Naming rights aside, the treatment of our hemisphere is a strong element of the strategy.  The so-called Trump corollary aims to assert US preeminence in the hemisphere, and to keep non-hemispheric actors from positioning forces or controlling strategically vital assets here.

     It is, in the words of the strategy, “a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”  We should, by all means, breathe new life into a Monroe Doctrine that in recent decades has become a museum curiosity.  The precipitating crisis that ultimately gave us the doctrine was Russia’s 1821 declaration that would prohibit foreign shipping within 115 miles of its holdings on the Pacific coast.  Secretary of State John Quincy Adams rebuffed the edict in terms anticipating the doctrine.  The bigger issue at the time was that the Spanish empire was disintegrating.

     The end of its grip in the Western Hemisphere created the predicate for the rise of Latin American republics and the possibility of interventions by ambitious, illiberal continental European states. What to do?  The British, who didn’t want to get locked out of Latin American markets by other European countries and viewed the United States as a potential partner, suggested a joint declaration that continental powers should steer clear. We played the Brits along — and then President James Monroe issued on his own what would become his eponymous doctrine in an annual message to Congress in 1823.

     He asserted that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”  New European footholds in the Western Hemisphere were thought to represent not just security, but territorial, demographic and ideological threats to the United States. Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian statesman, took great umbrage. He called it an “act of revolt,” and pronounced it “fully as audacious” and “no less dangerous” than the American Revolution.