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

The Fifth Freedom
surely correct. Latin Americans “have seen [the Monroe Doctrine] as an
expression of United States hegemony employed to justify that country’s
own intervention,” not as protection against Europe, and since the days
of Simón Bolívar have sought “to summon Europe to their aid against
the Colossus of the North,” with good reason. 34
The operative meaning of the Doctrine was lucidly explained by
Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing, in what Wilson
described as an “unanswerable” argument but one that it would be
“impolitic” to state openly:
In its advocacy of the Monroe Doctrine the United States considers
its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an
incident, not an end. While this may seem based on selfishness
alone, the author of the Doctrine had no higher or more generous
motive in its declaration.
A few years earlier President William Howard Taft had sagely
explained that “the day is not far distant” when “the whole hemisphere
will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is
ours morally.” The attitude towards Latin Americans remains as
expressed by Wilson’s Secretary of the Interior to Lansing: “They are
naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown
ups,” requiring “a stiff hand, an authoritative hand.” 35
The essence of the Doctrine, and the “protection” it conveyed for
Latin America, was expressed succinctly by Secretary of State Richard
Olney in 1895, when Great Britain was still the Evil Empire:
Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,
and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its
interposition. Why? It is not because of the pure friendship or good
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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