Monroe Doctrine
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The Monroe Doctrine is the subject of a history John Kiriakou tells at length, and of a warning he attaches to its revival.

The history he tells

President Monroe declared in his 1823 State of the Union that the United States would oppose any European involvement in the Western Hemisphere, "a slap at the British, plain and simple." Nobody even realised he had said it until seven years later, when a member of the House of Representatives noticed. (In a later telling Kiriakou dates the declaration to 1814 rather than 1823; both dates appear in his accounts.)

Britain treated it as nothing. In 1852 it seized the islands the Argentines called Las Malvinas, renamed them the Falklands, and took them; the Argentines objected that the Americans had this thing called the Monroe Doctrine, to no effect. When Britain later invaded Venezuela and took all its gold, around 1868, by Kiriakou's reckoning, the Venezuelans came to Washington with the same appeal. The United States, too weak after the Civil War to fight, sued Britain instead at the international court in Geneva, and then "high-fived" over a ruling that let Venezuela keep ten percent of its own gold. "That was a victory."

Only in 1905, as the country grew bolder and stronger, did Teddy Roosevelt make the doctrine real, telling the British "you, out of Venezuela," and they finally left. Kiriakou sets the whole episode in its period context: a genuinely multipolar world of the Tsarist, British and French empires, with the United States only beginning to stretch its legs.

The revival, and what it concedes

Kiriakou reads the seizure of Maduro as "in a very odd way, a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine", noting alongside it that a Chinese-built refinery in the Turks and Caicos and an Indian-built refinery were both undercutting the American goal of channelling Venezuelan oil refining to Texas.

His objection is that the doctrine is obsolete on its own terms. Its original purpose was to protect the hemisphere from foreign powers, which in Monroe's day meant the British Navy; today, he says, "we don't really need a Monroe Doctrine, and it's not up to us whether the Argentines want to have good relations with China."

The consequence he draws is a trade nobody negotiated. If the United States asserts a sphere of influence covering the Western Hemisphere, then by the same logic the Chinese have one that includes Taiwan and the Russians have one that includes Ukraine, "because that's kind of what it seems." The Maduro operation, in his phrasing, "may have inadvertently given the green light to something that both the Russians and the Chinese have long sought," conceding a unipolar world in favour of a multipolar one.

He offers the silence of the other two powers as evidence for the reading. Kiriakou says he was shocked at the complete lack of Chinese or Russian response to the Maduro operation, unless their analysis is precisely that the Americans are resurrecting the Monroe Doctrine, in which case Taiwan is China's sphere and Ukraine is Russia's, and the Americans will back off in both.

Where the argument lands is not a complaint. Kiriakou adds that "personally, I think a multipolar world is safer", defining it as one with three or more superpowers rather than one.

The balance of force behind it

The reason the doctrine can be reasserted at all, in his account, is that the United States remains the only true superpower: China has far more people and many nuclear missiles but one aircraft carrier, against an American twelve, soon to be fourteen, plus many more long-range bombers and fighters, while Russia is bogged down in Ukraine even though it is winning there.

That advantage does not, in his view, translate into willingness to use it. "This simple act of just sending a team in to grab Maduro has turned international diplomacy on its head." Asked what would happen if China moved on Taiwan tomorrow, his answer is "honest to God, I think nothing would happen", the United States would rush to protect Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand as major non-NATO allies and close friends, but as for sending American soldiers to Taiwan to fight Chinese soldiers, "I can't imagine it."

See also

- Maduro Capture
- United Fruit and the Arbenz coup
- Greenland
