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

can afford to be defeated.
The Fifth Freedom
We were not defeated, and rarely are; for the people of Nicaragua,
the verdict of history was different. 36
Summarizing his three-volume work, Dexter Perkins writes that “In
the development of the Monroe Doctrine, one of the most extraordinary
and interesting objects of study must be the evolution of a doctrine
which was intended for the protection of Latin-American states by the
United States into one that justified and even sanctified American
interference in and control of the affairs of the independent republics of
this continent.” 37 The assessment of the early intention may be
questioned, and one might be slightly taken aback by Perkins’s lack of
comment over what this “interference” has meant to Latin America,
evident enough when he wrote in 1937. But the basic thrust of his
summary is much to the point.
Over the years, there have been various “corollaries” to the Monroe
Doctrine, most notably, the “Roosevelt Corollary” announced by
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, after he had succeeded in
stealing the Panama Canal route from Colombia and with an eye on the
Dominican Republic:
Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general
loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as
elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation,
and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United
States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States,
however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or
impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
This pronouncement was described by the Argentine newspaper La
Prensa as “the most serious and menacing declaration against South
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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