The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine
1945 - 1993
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
President Monroe's 1823 message to Congress, declaring that the U.S. would brook no foreign intervention in our hemisphere, became a Cold War tool to justify Latin American dictatorships, CIA-funded death squads and repressions to ward off an alleged communist threat, contends Smith, a history professor at Yale. In a cogent study, he explains how the U.S. molded the U.N. Charter to bar the U.N. from political involvement in the West. Eisenhower used the Monroe Doctrine as a cover to overthrow Guatemala's liberal reformist president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, replacing him with a dictator. Critics blasted Kennedy for failing the Doctrine by allowing Cuba to become a ``Soviet protectorate.'' Ostensibly to prevent another Cuba, the efforts of LBJ and Nixon to bolster repressive regimes in Brazil and Chile were ``infused with Monroeism,'' and Reagan invoked it in his proxy war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas. Smith argues that the Doctrine has become irrelevant with the end of the Cold War.
