[News] A New Mood in the World Will Put an End to the Global Monroe Doctrine
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Thu Nov 23 12:26:34 EST 2023
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*A New Mood in the World Will Put an End to the Global Monroe Doctrine:
The Forty-Seventh Newsletter (2023)*
Tagreed Darghouth (Lebanon), from the series /The Tree Within, a
Palestinian Olive Tree/, 2018.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=b08fbd24d5&e=d206d0a40d>.
Every day since 7 October has felt like an International Day of
Solidarity with the Palestinian People, with hundreds of thousands
gather
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=00dfdf0f71&e=d206d0a40d>ing in
Istanbul, a million
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Jakarta, and then yet another million across Africa
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Latin America
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to demand an end to the brutal attack being carried out by Israel (with
the collusion of the United States). It is impossible to keep up with
the scale and frequency of the protests, which are in turn pushing
political parties and governments to clarify their stances on Israel’s
attack on Palestine. These mass demonstrations have generated three
kinds of outcomes:
1. They have drawn a new generation not only into pro-Palestine
activity, but into anti-war – if not anti-imperialist – consciousness.
2. They have drawn in a new section of activists, particularly trade
unionists, who have been inspired to stop the shipment of goods to
and from Israel (including in places such as Europe
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and India
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where the governments have supported Israel’s attacks).
3. They have generated a political process to challenge the hypocrisy
of the Western-led ‘rules-based international order
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to demand that the International Criminal Court indict Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli government
officials.
No war in recent years – not even the ‘shock and awe
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campaign used by the United States against Iraq in 2003 – has been as
ruthless in its use of force. Most horrifying is the reality that
civilians, penned in by the Israeli occupation, have no escape from the
heavy bombardment. Nearly half
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(at least 5,800
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of the more than 14,000 civilians that have been murdered are children
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No amount of Israeli propaganda has been able to convince billions of
people around the world that this violence is a righteous rejoinder for
the 7 October attack. Visuals from Gaza show the disproportionate and
asymmetrical nature of Israel’s violence over the past seventy-five years.
Vincent De Pio (Philippines), /Back to the Future/, 2012.
A new mood has taken root amongst billions of people in the Global South
and been mirrored by millions in the Global North who no longer take the
attitudes of US leaders and their Western allies at face value. A new
study
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by the European Council of Foreign Relations shows that ‘much of the
rest of the world wants the war in Ukraine to stop as soon as possible,
even if it means Kyiv losing territory. And very few people – even in
Europe – would take Washington’s side if a war erupted between the US
and China over Taiwan’. The council suggests that this is due to the
‘loss of faith in the West to order the world’. More precisely, most of
the world is no longer willing to be bullied by the West (as South
Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor put it
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Over the last 200 years, the US government’s Monroe Doctrine has been
instrumental in justifying this type of bullying. To better understand
the significance of this key policy in upholding US dominance over the
world order, the rest of this newsletter features briefing no. 11 from
No Cold War
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=93b53de992&e=d206d0a40d>,
/It Is Time to Bury the Monroe Doctrine/.
**
In 1823, James Monroe, then president of the United States, told the US
Congress that his government would stand against European interference
in the Americas. What Monroe meant was that Washington would, from then
on, treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its ‘backyard’, grounded by
a policy known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Over the past 200 years, the US has operated in the Americas along this
grain, exemplified by the more than 100 military interventions
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against countries in the region. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991, the US and its Global North allies have attempted to expand this
policy into a Global Monroe Doctrine
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c0eaad5e75&e=d206d0a40d>,
most destructively in Western Asia.
Stivenson Magloire (Haiti), /Divided Spirit/, 1989.
*The Violence of the Monroe Doctrine*
Two decades before Monroe’s proclamation, the world’s first
anti-colonial revolution took place in Haiti. The 1804 Haitian
Revolution posed a serious threat to the plantation economies of the
Americas, which relied upon enslaved labour from Africa, and so the US
led a process to suffocate it and prevent it from spreading. Through US
military interventions across Latin America and the Caribbean, the
Monroe Doctrine prevented the rise of national self-determination and
defended plantation slavery and the power of the oligarchies.
Nonetheless, the spirit and promise of the Haitian Revolution could not
be extinguished, and in 1959 it was reignited by the Cuban Revolution,
which in turn inspired revolutionary struggles across the world and,
most importantly, in the so-called backyard of the United States. Once
again, the US initiated a cycle of violence to destroy Cuba’s
revolutionary example, prevent it from inspiring others, and overthrow
any government in the region that tried to exercise its sovereignty.
Together, US and Latin American oligarchies launched several campaigns,
such as Operation Condor
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=46fa0d28ba&e=d206d0a40d>,
to violently suppress the left through assassinations, incarcerations,
torture, and regime change. These efforts culminated in a series of
coups against left-wing forces in the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile
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(1973), Uruguay (1973), Argentina (1976), and El Salvador (1980). The
military governments that were subsequently installed quashed the
sovereignty agenda and imposed a neoliberal project in its place. Latin
America and the Caribbean became fertile ground for economic policies
that benefitted US-led transnational monopolies. Washington co-opted
large sections of the region’s bourgeoisie, selling them the illusion
that national development would come alongside the growth of US power.
Oswaldo Vigas (Venezuela), /Duende Rojo /(‘Red Elf’), 1979.
*Progressive Waves*
Despite this repression, waves of popular movements continued to shape
the region’s political culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, these
movements toppled the military dictatorships put in place by Operation
Condor and then inaugurated a cycle
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of progressive governments inspired by the Cuban and Nicaraguan
revolutions and propelled forward by the electoral victory of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The US response to this progressive upsurge
was yet again driven by the Monroe Doctrine as it sought to secure the
interests of private property above the needs of the masses. This
counterrevolution has employed three main instruments:
1. *Coups.* Since 2000, the US has attempted
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to conduct ‘traditional’ military coups d’état on at least
twenty-seven occasions, with some of these attempts succeeding, such
as in Honduras
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(2009), while many others were defeated, as in Venezuela
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(2002).
2. *Hybrid Wars. *In addition to the military coup, the US has also
developed a series of tactics
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to overwhelm countries that are attempting to build sovereignty,
such as information warfare, lawfare
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diplomatic warfare, and electoral interference
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This hybrid war
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strategy includes manufacturing impeachment scandals (for example,
against Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo in 2012) and ‘anti-corruption’
measures (such as against Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner in 2021). In
Brazil, the US worked with the Brazilian right wing to manipulate an
anti-corruption platform to impeach then President Dilma Rousseff in
2016 and imprison former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in
2018, leading to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.
3. *Economic Sanctions.* The use of illegal, unilateral coercive
measures – including economic sanctions and blockades – are a key
instrument of the Monroe Doctrine. The US has employed such
instruments for decades (since 1960 in the case of Cuba) and
expanded their use in the twenty-first century against countries
such as Venezuela
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=68cafee271&e=d206d0a40d>.
The Latin American Strategic Geopolitics Centre (CELAG) showed
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=e351c630c8&e=d206d0a40d>
that US sanctions against Venezuela led to the loss of more than
three million jobs from 2013 to 2017 while the Centre for Economic
and Policy Research found
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that sanctions have reduced the public’s caloric intake and
increased disease and mortality, killing 40,000 people in a single
year while endangering the lives of 300,000 others.
Maya Weishof (Brazil), /Between Talks and Myths/, 2022.
*End the Monroe Doctrine*
US attempts to undermine progressive politics in Latin America,
underpinned by the Monroe Doctrine, have not been entirely successful.
The return of left-wing governments to power in Bolivia, Brazil, and
Honduras after US-backed right-wing regimes illustrates this failure.
Another sign is the resilience of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions.
To date, while efforts to expand the Monroe Doctrine around the world
have caused immense destruction, they have failed to install stable
client regimes, as we saw with the defeat of US projects in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Nonetheless, Washington remains undeterred and has shifted its
focus to the Asia-Pacific to confront China
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=06f9aeb864&e=d206d0a40d>.
Two hundred years ago, the forces of Simón Bolívar trounced the Spanish
Empire in the 1821 Battle of Carabobo and opened a period of
independence for Latin America. Two years later, in 1823, the US
government announced its Monroe Doctrine. The dialectic between Carabobo
and Monroe continues to shape our world, the memory of Bolívar instilled
in the hope of and struggle for a more just society.
Sheena Rose (Barbados), /Agony/, 2022.
Today, the ugliness of the war on Gaza suffocates our consciousness. Em
Berry
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=f20053d71d&e=d206d0a40d>,
a poet from Aotearoa, New Zealand, wrote a beautiful poem on the name
Gaza and the atrocities being inflicted upon its people by apartheid Israel:
This morning I learned
The English word gauze
(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word غزة or Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries
I wondered then
how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them
and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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