United States of Hypocrisy: The Monroe Doctrine And Russia-Ukraine Crisis

No doctrinal statement in American diplomatic history is more fundamental than the Monroe Doctrine.

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There is no doctrinal statement in American diplomatic history that is more fundamental than the Monroe Doctrine. It was designed to draw a strategic line between the New World and the Old, and to alert the European powers that their political influence and presence was no longer welcome in the Western Hemisphere.

No doctrinal statement has been enforced as often as the Monroe Doctrine, which has been used to justify U.S. intervention throughout Central America and the Caribbean. The Monroe Doctrine was cited in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a perfect failure, as well as the Cuban missile crisis, a diplomatic triumph.

President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary to justify the “exercise of an international police power” in any nation in the Western Hemisphere whose policies or actions could provoke foreign intervention. In other words, the United States would not need to wait for a foreign intervention, it could enforce a change in governments that adopted “unacceptable” policies.

President Woodrow Wilson used the Roosevelt Corollary in 1913 to justify the intervention in Mexico to move its politics in a more favorable direction for U.S. interests. The United States overtly and covertly attacked Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sponsored covert action in Chile in 1971 against a democratically elected government in order to reverse its political and economic policies.

There is a reason why the nations of Latin America refer to the United States as a “great hegemon.”

In refusing to acknowledge Russia’s concerns about U.S. and Western intervention on its borders, the Biden administration is engaging in hypocrisy. The philosopher Hannah Arendt called hypocrisy the “vice of vices.”

Lying to others is part of the political game, but the United States is lying to itself in denying that it committed to limit NATO’s role in East Europe.

Putin is asking for written guarantees regarding NATO membership because we betrayed the verbal guarantees that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker gave to their counterparts, Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, respectively.

We need to recognize our role in the Ukraine crisis; Russian President Vladimir Putin is not the sole cause of a crisis that could have horrific consequences.

This is an important part of the current crisis over Ukraine, particularly in view of Putin’s demands regarding Russian national security, which are consistent with Russian and Soviet thinking over the past 300 years. Read more.

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