The 3 R’s of America’s Home Hemisphere: Republics; Revolutionaries; & the ’Rithmatic of Politics

It’s a special privilege to deliver a lecture named in honor of Ernest May.

And the topic is especially fitting because 50 years ago Professor May published a slim volume titled The Making of the Monroe Doctrine.

May’s book offers a useful starting point for this ASG session: His thesis was that the Monroe Doctrine is best explained by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ presidential ambitions and domestic politics —rather than debates about national interest or the product of international politics.

Historians have recognized the Monroe Doctrine as the “first public stand by the United States on an [international] controversy that did not immediately touch its own citizens and territory.”

But the Doctrine declared what European powers should not do, not what the United States would do. That was the question Adams and his Secretary of State, Henry Clay, faced two years later.

Clay wanted the United States to attend a Congress of new republics in Panama to promote a “good neighborhood” policy and “new American principles” that contrasted with Europe's Holy Alliance, the system so admired years later by a rising Henry Kissinger. Clay pursued an ambitious agenda, including: commerce; navigation; maritime law and property rights at sea; neutral rights; liberal emigration and naturalization; internal improvements, including a trans-isthmian canal; and even free toleration of religion.

But domestic politics intervened again: The Jacksonians in Congress held up the confirmation and funds for emissaries. Eventually one died of a tropical fever along the way and the other only got as far as Mexico City by the time the Panama Congress adjourned.

That diplomatic debacle previews a frustrating cycle of US partnership with Latin America—and then detachment and disappointment—that continues through today.

Nevertheless, Clay had planted the seed of what became known as the Western Hemisphere Idea—the belief that the peoples of the Americas had a special relationship with one another, which sets them apart from the rest of the world and especially Europe. The idea faded as the
United States became a global power, but echoed over the years into a new form about a distinctive regional perspective amidst global flux—with variations as recently as the 1990s and perhaps even today.

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This lecture offers history from a policymakers’ perspective. I will identify various US approaches to our home hemisphere, and especially North America and the Caribbean littoral. At times, older ideas were recalled to duty and updated—such as Elihu Root and FDR did with Clay’s Good Neighborhood. I’ll close with a brief observation on how President Trump’s National Security Strategy and policies relate to the earlier American experience.

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William Seward, Secretary of State to Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, deserves recognition as a proto-geopolitical thinker. Having maneuvered diplomatically to secure the blockade of the Confederacy and thwart British and French intervention in the Civil War, Seward was especially attentive to the nation’s oceanic frontiers. His travel on a Navy ship in the Caribbean in 1866 was the first official trip by a Secretary of State outside the United States.

Seward might be best known for his purchase of Alaska—although his less recognized acquisition of Midway Island also turned out to be a very useful possession some 80 years later. Yet those moves were part of a much larger strategy. Seward also tried to buy Iceland, Greenland, the Danish Virgin Islands, Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic ), and the Hawaiian Islands. He even sought to add British Columbia before the creation of the Canadian Confederation in 1867.

Seward perceived “the control of the continent is to be…the controlling interest in the world.” Viewing the world as a globe, not just through flat maps, Seward perceived Alaska and the Aleutians as “extending a friendly hand to Asia.”

But Seward distinguished his approach from European imperialists who were grasping territories. He saw commerce as the new “god of boundaries.” He negotiated a treaty with Colombia to survey a ship canal in Panama, but a change in Colombia stymied the effort.

Seward—like Lincoln, Daniel Webster, and other inheritors from the founding generation—spoke of the idea of the Union in almost mystical terms. Of course Lincoln best articulated how the Union fused the principles of the Declaration with the governing compact of the Constitution—the world’s “last, best hope.” But Seward also believed that the republican Union offered an alternative to the European order of empires and rival states contesting for supremacy.

The triumph of the Union in the Civil War seemed to offer a powerful endorsement of the idea. Seward pondered whether federations or confederations could forge a system of states including overlapping communities that respected liberty and many nationalities.

Seward envisaged a North American Union created through free choice, not coercion or conquest. He stressed the power of attraction—what Joe Nye would have called soft power. One scholar termed it Seward’s “law of imperial gravity.”

Seward had voted against the Mexican War of 1846-48 in which Mexico lost half its territory, and he thwarted Generals Grant and Sheridan from intervening in Mexico after the U.S. Civil War to depose the Habsburg Emperor, who was failing anyway. In 1867, after Benito Juarez assumed the Mexican presidency and the creation of the Canadian confederation, a democratic North America appeared possible.

In the 1880s, Secretary of State James Blaine tried again to promote special ties with Latin America, advancing what became known as the Pan American idea. Europeans had carved up Africa, were threatening to do the same with China, and were expanding influence in Latin America, including through France’s drive to dig the “Big Trench” in Panama.

Blaine sought to mediate American conflicts, which were rife in South America at the time, while other Americans, inspired by the successful integration of the German Zollverein, called for an American customs union. In his second term, Blaine organized the first Inter-American Conference of 17 countries in Washington, and the new group eventually became the Pan American Union.

In 1895-96, the Cleveland administration compelled powerful Britain to accept a boundary arbitration with Venezuela over British Guiana.

Then the outcome of the Spanish-American War of 1898 required Washington to figure out what to do with Cuba and Puerto Rico. The Congress had pledged to secure Cuba’s independence, but after reflecting on the island’s strategic location, the treaty included the Platt Amendment, which granted the United States a right to intervene to preserve Cuba’s independence. Elihu Root, the lawyer-Secretary of War who prepared the treaty, later explained that “You cannot understand the Platt Amendment unless you know something about the character of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second.”

But the follow up would fall to Theodore Roosevelt. In a warning to all supporters of trade, President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist after promoting reciprocal trade at the Pan American Exposition In Buffalo.

TR explicitly connected America’s home continent to a geopolitical concept and his Mahanian naval strategy. Roosevelt believed that US dominion over North America and the Caribbean created a home port for the country’s global sea power and capacity to facilitate a balance of power among European and Asian empires.

The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was prompted by worries that European powers would use sovereign debt defaults —as in Santo Domingo—to invade and seize customs houses and perhaps territory. TR asserted “police powers” to thwart “brutal wrongdoers” or breakdowns in government that threatened “the ties of civilized society.”

To the north, Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to an arbitration of the Alaskan-Canadian boundary along the coastal strip to help London save face, but as our colleague Graham likes to recall, TR also made clear that he expected the United States to prevail—which it did. Yet Elihu Root, now Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, had a soft spot for Canada and included the Canadian coat of arms in the new building of the Pan American Union in Washington in anticipation that Ottawa would join. Root’s successful tour of South America in 1906 was the first by a Secretary of State; the impressive Root would certainly have been a member of the ASG, if it had existed,

Roosevelt’s machinations in Panama enabled Americans to finally fulfill the dream of the trans-isthmian canal, a wonder of engineering and triumph over disease, which TR considered his supreme accomplishment. When the President asked his Attorney General, Philander Knox, to construe a legal justification, Knox allegedly replied, “Oh, Mr. President, not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality!"

Roosevelt’s Big Stick diplomacy in home waters was, however, part of his pursuit of a global balance of power. He adroitly mediated the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Moroccan Crisis of 1906, one of those disputes on Europe’s fringe that eventually triggered a world war. As Philip Zelikow wrote in The Road Less Traveled , Woodrow Wilson was not so skillful a decade later.

Woodrow Wilson’s travails in the home neighborhood stand for another recurring experience: one of frustrated interventions because Latin neighbors kept defaulting on debts, seizing the property of US citizens, and overthrowing governments—the most important of which was the Mexican Revolution.

President Taft had encouraged a “dollar diplomacy” of supporting US businesses abroad, especially in Latin America and the Far East. But political turmoil in Nicaragua, Haiti, Santo Domingo (again), and Mexico led to arms embargoes and occupations to restore order, protect property, and, in the case of Mexico, establish the principle of only recognizing governments based on public consent.

Wilson wanted to avoid military action, but was dragged into two Mexican ventures. Pancho Villa’s raids into Texas and New Mexico sought to undermine Mexico’s new president by provoking a U.S. intervention—which became the Pershing expedition of 15,000 troops. Wilson’s campaign slogan for reelection in 1916—“He kept us out of war”—referred as much to Mexico as Europe. Wilson wrote that he had learned a lesson about trying to redirect a “profound revolution.” Not all his successors did.

In 1917, Washington faced a blunt reminder of the importance of security relations with Mexico when Imperial Germany proposed that Mexico could recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona if it joined with Berlin and urged Tokyo to switch sides. State Secretary Zimmermann didn’t mention California; perhaps he wanted to keep Hollywood for Berlin.

In the 1930s, FDR revived the Good Neighbor policy of Clay and Root and renounced armed intervention. As storm clouds gathered over Europe and Asia, Secretary of State Cordell Hull built closer ties across Latin America through three Pan American conferences. Washington withdrew troops and reached less obtrusive arrangements with Cuba, Haiti, and Panama. Of 31 new liberalizing trade agreements that Hull negotiated under the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, 20 were with hemispheric partners. Washington also sought to lock up access to the critical natural resources of the mid-20th Century. FDR supported President Vargas’ near-dictatorial powers in Brazil to keep the Germans out.

Pan Americanism, however, was also employed in the 1930s by isolationists as an alternative to intervention in European and Asian wars. But geopolitical disciples of Mackinder and Spykman prodded Americans to look at maps differently; rather than dividing the world into two hemispheres, the global strategists eyed the World Island of Eurasia, which dominated the two satellite islands of North and South America. A retreat to hemispheric defense would not suffice.

Indeed, Europe was less distant than the terms Old and New World suggested. One writer in Foreign Affairs puckishly observed that “no capital in Europe, including Moscow, is as far from Madison [Wisconsin, a hotbed of Pan American isolationism] as is Buenos Aires….”

A new relationship with Mexico, initiated under President Coolidge by the deft, Spanish-speaking Ambassador Dwight Morrow, a former Morgan banker, turned out to be especially critical. The Mexican Revolution had evolved into a one-party soft-authoritarian system, with similarities to the corporatist models of Europe. As described in a recent history by Pamela Starr, Washington arrived at an informal policy that accepted Mexico’s “autonomy within limits.” As long as Mexico did not threaten US security, the United States would not interfere in Mexico’s domestic and foreign policies.

From Washington’s perspective, Mexico’s stability was more important than its stunted democracy, nationalism, and closed economy. This arrangement lasted for about 50 years.

During World War II, the United States negotiated a Bracero program with Mexico to supply guest workers, especially for agriculture and the railroads, drawing some 4.6 million Mexicans to the United States between 1942-64. The tight limits of the Immigration Act of 1924 did not apply to the Western Hemisphere, but ironically the liberalizing 1965 Act did—with the unintended consequence that Mexicans who formerly shuttled across the border had to decide whether to stay in the United States.

The Cold War created a new context in which global politics—and fears of communism and revolution— reshaped priorities. In 1947, the United States agreed to the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, including the phrase that an attack on any state is an attack on all; Senator Vandenberg drew upon this precedent for regional security when drafting the language for the North Atlantic Alliance of 1949.

The dramatic nuclear showdown of the era, the Cuban Missile Crisis, occurred in home waters, although Philip and Graham have revealed that the event was closely linked to the freedom of Berlin.

Washington returned to military interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada, as well as special operations throughout Central America.

But the contest ranged more widely. As Arne Westad observed, the US and USSR were in conflict over the very concept of economic modernity—which played out in economic competition, especially over theories of development.

The Eisenhower administration created the InterAmerican Development Bank and President Kennedy launched his Alliance for Progress, US AID, and the Peace Corps. The New Frontiersmen experimented with Walt Rostow’s ideas about stages of growth, which they also applied in Vietnam. LBJ, who had a soft spot for poor farmers, tried preferential trade.

The Cold War dramas in the Americas led to fierce domestic political fights—a reminder of Henry Clay’s experience that foreign policy battles close to home raised the partisan stakes.

Jimmy Carter returned control of the canal to Panama, but misjudged the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. The wars in Central America in the ‘80s almost destroyed the Reagan presidency. Secretary of State Baker scored the first diplomatic win for President Bush 41 by working with Central Americans, the Congress, Jimmy Carter, and even the Soviets to restore democracy to Nicaragua and negotiate peace in El Salvador. But the wound of Cuba kept bleeding boatlifts, embargoes, fears of intelligence operations, and Cuban trouble-making elsewhere.

Nevertheless, conflicts and interventions were not the sum of US policy. Ronald Reagan introduced—or perhaps reintroduced—a vision that, like many of his ideas, shaped policy through the early 2000s.

In 1979, Reagan’s speech launching his candidacy for President included an unusual foreign policy priority: “The key to our own future security may lie in both Mexico and Canada becoming much stronger than they are today, “ declared Reagan. “It is time we stopped treating our nearest neighbors as foreigners.”

One of Reagan’s favorite themes was an accord between North and South America based on democracy and economic freedom.

As was often the case with Reagan, someone had to take operational charge to translate vision into reality.

In 1985, Secretary of the Treasury Baker announced a four-part debt plan to assist Latin American economies, which were in deep trouble. If the Latins renounced debt defaults and undertook reforms, US banks would roll over their loans and Washington would add capital to the World Bank so that the Bank and IMF could offer greater assistance. By 1988, US banks had rebuilt their capital and could offer partial debt forgiveness, too. The reforms and trade provided a stronger foundation for macroeconomic stability and growth in Latin America.

Also in 1985, Prime Minister Mulroney of Canada gambled on deeper economic ties with the United States through a free trade agreement. The two countries had already failed twice— in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. This complex negotiation almost failed again until Mulroney persuaded Reagan to dispatch Baker to take over and close the deal in 1987.

Not long after, President Salinas of Mexico ran the even greater risk of proposing an FTA to President Bush 41. The old PRI political and economic model was breaking down. Salinas recognized the need to open up Mexico, but discovered on a trip to Davos early in 1990 that all eyes had turned to Central and Eastern Europe. No one seemed to care about Mexico.

Most histories of President Bush 41 focus on his stewardship of a peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe and organizing the UN-authorized coalition to liberate Kuwait. But Bush also saw NAFTA and a successful Uruguay Round in GATT as cornerstones of the US strategy for a post-Cold War world.

NAFTA was much more than a trade agreement. It was a step toward historical reconciliation and a recognition that Mexico faced an immense political-economic transformation. Under the old PRI system, all the institutions of society operated within a hierarchy led by the party, with the one-term president at the apex. As the system began to fragment, where might the weak institutions and civil society look for models? Oligarchs, criminal networks, and populists of the left and right might grasp for spoils.

NAFTA offered the alternative of US and Canadian models, rule of law, and civil society.

Moreover, the Bush administration believed that NAFTA could facilitate continental cooperation on many issues—ranging from foreign policy and the environment to transnational topics such as immigration and narcotics.

For all three amigos, NAFTA could create a stronger continental base from which they could advance their global interests. Seward had turned out to be right.

Bush completed the negotiation within two years, and President Clinton passed it with the help of Republican votes. Clinton demonstrated the practical effect of deeper partnership by backing Mexico in the Peso crisis of 1995.

Clinton welcomed the democratic movements in Latin America and inaugurated a Summit of the Americas, in the spirit of Clay and Blaine. But Clinton’s call for a Free Trade Area of the Americas didn’t move far off the drawing board. Bush 43 took a step-by-step approach, adding FTAs with Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, and the five countries of Central America and the Dominican Republic. At some point, the FTAs might have been fused regionally—akin to the Trans Pacific Partnership—and joined by other Latins.

The free flows of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s were not, however, just economic or democratic: Immigration and drugs began to dominate the politics of the neighborhood.

Mexican migration supported the growing U.S. economy, especially in services and agriculture. The Immigration Act of 1986 tried but failed to stem the tide. By the turn of the 21st century, Mexico was adding a million people a year to the United States—with the total rising from about 760,000 in 1970 to about 9 million in 2000. Bush 43 and Obama tried comprehensive immigration reform, but Congress balked.

The decline of push-pull factors eventually reduced the Mexican flow to net zero by 2010, but then a massive influx began from Central America and beyond.

The narcotics story is similar. As the Reagan administration staunched the flow of drugs through the Caribbean, the Colombian cocaine trade shifted to Mexico. Transnational criminal enterprises pushed aside the local bosses.

Bush 41 invaded Panama in December, 1989, to depose a narco-trafficker dictator who crushed an election. Clinton worked with the Republican Congress on Plan Colombia to break the hold of the cartels, but Mexican traffickers stepped into their place and grew in sophistication. Mexico’s democratic decentralization led to less effective law enforcement and more local corruption. Bush 43 sought to use the Colombian example with a Merida initiative for Mexico.

Mexico’s economic institutions had become world class, but its legal, judicial, and policing capacities had not. President Calderón tried to build a new federal police force, working with CIA Director Petraeus, but Lopez Obrador, Calderón’s successor, dismantled it. Mexico has relied increasingly on its military.

The Trump candidacy seized on the sense of loss of control at the border, a reminder that domestic politics dominates policies in the home neighborhood more than any other region.

Trump’s Wall symbolized public frustration with illegal immigration. In his second term, Trump and Secretary Hegseth have directed the US military to use anti-terrorist strategies against the drug trade.

Trump’s zero-sum approach to trade and investment inevitably targeted Mexico and Canada, the country’s largest trading partners. Nevertheless, NAFTA had become so embedded after 20 years that Trump couldn’t kill it is his first term and opted instead for modifications through the USMCA. The current review of USMCA offers another test.

President Trump’s second term National Security Strategy prioritized the neighborhood, although deals and battles elsewhere continue to grab his attention.

A charitable assessment of the NSS might trace it to past US priorities of emphasizing security in the neighborhood. Trump’s American Shield Summit highlights the shift from promoting democracy and trade to fighting criminal networks. Recent elections throughout Latin America reveal a shared interest.

The Venezuelan and Cuban cases will loom large in Trump’s legacy. So far, his focus has been on keeping global adversaries out and dominating energy resources, not intervening to reform internal politics. But time will tell.

Trump’s hemispheric policies might also trace a distant lineage to FDR’s aim of securing critical natural resources.

But unlike Seward, TR, or the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, it’s hard to see how Trump plans to connect his approach to the neighborhood to America’s global role—whether as a mediator of a balance of power, promoter of freedom, or attractive magnet of commerce.

The North American idea is on life support, as Mexico has turned its back on the reformist era in favor of a “Fourth Transformation, ” and Prime Minister Carney seeks to lessen Canada’s dependency on the United States.

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While most ASG members have built careers working on European, Asian, and Mideast policies—along with a few Africanists—my quick romp through history suggests that US global concerns have continually reverberated in our home region—and that the U.S. role in the world depends on the security, prosperity, and sense of promise of our continental base.

The history also suggests that new U.S. leaders have a way of recalling earlier ideas, reshaped for changed circumstances—yet always keeping a keen eye on US political anxieties and aspirations.

Perhaps over the next two days the ASG will come up with suggestions to help them.