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.
Historical Context and Lincoln's Warning
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.
Contemporary Challenges and U.S. Actions
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.”
Rise of Pro-American, Pro-Israel Governments
The vintage Peronist and Castroite Latin American left, blaming everything on the Gringos, wallowing in the good will of China, and posturing with anti-Israeli sloganeering, has failed and been rejected by the steadily better functioning democratic systems of Latin America. Pro-American, pro-Israel governments have been elected in the last few years in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Paraguay, Honduras, and now Colombia. The Argentinian leader, Javier Milei, has drastically shrunk government and cut inflation. He consults his dogs, whom he clones (to seek immortality for them), and campaigns with a chain saw. The Salvadoran leader, Nayib Bukele, of Palestinian Christian ascendance, has instituted a draconian Territorial Control Plan that has reduced violent crime by over 50 per cent, and while it impinged on civil liberties, it enabled his reelection by an apparently genuine 85 per cent of the voters, and may have shown Latin America the way to crush these deadly gangster organizations, in Mexico and Colombia in particular.
