By Conrad Black
The current U.S. administration seeks to reimpose the Monroe Doctrine upon this hemisphere. This was an initiative by President James Monroe in 1823, which accepted the presence of European powers in the Americas, but purported to forbid any new intrusions in the Americas from overseas or to extend existing ones. The United States at the time had no authority to enforce such a ukase, but it was aware that the British did not wish any successful attempt by Spain to resurrect its empire in the Americas, which by 1823 had been reduced to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Thus the Monroe doctrine for its first 40 years was in fact based on the British control of the seas.
President Lincoln warned Emperor Napoleon III against his hare-brained attempt to establish a Bonaparte-Habsburg monarchy in Mexico while the United States was distracted by its Civil War. When that war ended, the United States had the greatest army and the greatest generals in the world, a fact which accelerated the assembly of the string of colonies along America’s northern border into the ultimately very successful Confederation of Canada. It also enabled the United States to assist the rebels in Mexico, led by that country’s greatest hero, Benito Juarez, (who deserved more flattering recognition than to have Italian dictator Benito Mussolini named after him), to overcome the foreign sponsored monarchy in Mexico, though the “emperor,” Maximilian, the well-intentioned brother of Franz Joseph, who ruled in Vienna until 1916, did not deserve to be executed by firing squad.
None of this applies to Canada, and obviously, the United States has no right to tell the sovereign states of Latin America who they can have relations with outside the hemisphere. But the tremendous traffic of lethal drugs and illicit migrants into the U.S. largely master-minded by China and with extensive cooperation from Mexico and several other countries, gave the Trump administration a reasonable pretext to act. The Mexican government has mended its ways; the Venezuelan president now resides in prison in New York, and the new president of Colombia is an uproarious protégé of President Trump, Abelardo de la Espriella, a former Miami lawyer, who has declared that his opponents need a “backbone transplant,” that he will “emasculate the left,” and drive them “15 metres under the ground with my boot on their neck.”
After the end of the Cold War, the United States didn’t much care what happened in Latin America as long as it was not itself threatened. Almost the entirety of Latin America was in the hands of left-wing governments for some time, though little occurred that provoked the Americans. This changed with the particular case of the virtual takeover of the northern provinces of Mexico by extremely sinister gangs who were instrumental in trafficking millions of illegal immigrants into the United States, including approximately 500,000, mostly criminals, that were deported last year, according to Homeland Security. But the ambitious program of penetration of Latin America by China has aroused the Trump administration at the same time that the widespread failure of the leftist governments that welcomed China into this hemisphere provoked a turn of direction in government to the right in Latin America.
First published in the National Post
