| During the twentieth century, an unusual trend emerged in Monroe Doctrine historiography: respectable historians repeatedly declared the doctrine dead at least five times, basing their conclusions on distinct yet different events. First, the interventionist trend in the early 1900s rendered the doctrine obsolete. Second, American participation in World War I violated the abstention tenet of the doctrine as the United States became involved in European affairs. Third, the Pan-American movement during the interwar years overwhelmed the doctrine's unilateral character, making it inapplicable. Next, the existence of a communist state within the western hemisphere after the Cuban Missile Crisis proved that the Monroe Doctrine was dead. Lastly, without the Cold War's communist threat, the Monroe Doctrine was no longer necessary and had passed into historical irrelevance. These repeated assertions of the doctrine's demise have created an illogical pattern. Each declaration of the doctrine's death implied that previous claims of the doctrine's passing were mistaken.; To resolve the confusion historians have created, this study examined official, political, and popular discourse within five specific periods of the doctrine's evolution: the 1923 Monroe Doctrine Centennial, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. relationship with Panama from 1977 to 1999, and the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s. Each of these stages illustrated one of two enduring doctrine characteristics that explain its persistence.; Is the Monroe Doctrine dead? It is premature to declare the doctrine dead because Americans still incorporate it in their foreign policy debates and because it is careless to presume that conditions warranting its use will not recrudesce, as they have repeatedly since the doctrine inception. This argument is significant because it resolves the uncertainty caused by frequent claims of the doctrine's demise and reveals the two characteristics that explain the doctrine's endurance; its ambiguity, which clarifies why Americans have used it as a relevant standard for very different events; and its powerful influence on the collective American mind, which accounts for why Americans have been reluctant to relinquish the doctrine. |
