Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
3. Latin America: “An Incident, Not An End”
elser is, of course, not the first Latin American to discover that
“the United States [seems] destined to plague and torment the
continent in the name of freedom” (Simón Bolívar, 1829). 32 Nor
was Kennan the first to enunciate the doctrine that the US has special
rights in Latin America. Thomas Jefferson declared that “America has a
hemisphere to itself,” and John Quincy Adams, while formulating the
thinking that led to the Monroe Doctrine, stated to the cabinet that the
world must be “familiarized with the idea of considering our proper
dominion to be the continent of North America.” It is, he said, “as much
a law of nature that this should become our pretension as that the
Mississippi should flow to the sea,” while in his diary he recorded his
statement to British minister Canning: “Keep what is yours, but leave
the rest of this continent to us.” 33 S
Connell-Smith comments that while it
is not entirely clear what Jefferson, a well-known expansionist, meant by
the term “America,” “the appropriation by United States citizens of the
adjective ‘American’, not surprisingly resented by Latin Americans, has
encouraged a proprietary attitude towards the hemisphere already
present in 1823.”
This propietary interest was expressed in the Monroe Doctrine,
announced by the President in 1823. This doctrine has no more
standing in international affairs than the Brezhnev Doctrine a century
and a half later, expressing the right of the USSR to protect the
“socialist” world from influences regarded as subversive. In the major
scholarly study of the Monroe Doctrine and its subsequent history,
Dexter Perkins comments that “The Doctrine is a policy of the United
States, not a fixed principle of international law,” a conclusion that is
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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