The Lethality of the Global Monroe Doctrine

This month, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organized the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.

U.S. President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies.

At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning a visit to Saudi Arabia – a self-described theocracy. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s exclusionary stance, and so Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras refused to come to the event. As it turned out, the summit was a fiasco.

Down the road, over a hundred organizations hosted a People’s Summit for Democracy, where thousands of people from across the hemisphere gathered to celebrate the actual democratic spirit which emerges from the struggles of peasants and workers, students and feminists, and all the people who are excluded from the gaze of the powerful.

At this gathering, the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela joined in online to celebrate this festival of democracy and to condemn the weaponization of democratic ideals by the United States and its allies.

Next year, 2023, will be the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. asserted its hegemony over the American hemisphere. The malign spirit of the Monroe Doctrine not only continues but has now been extended by the U.S. government into a kind of Global Monroe Doctrine.

In order to assert this preposterous claim on the entire planet, the United States has pursued a policy to “weaken” what it sees as “near peer rivals,” namely China and Russia.

In July, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research — along with Monthly Review and No Cold War — will produce a booklet on the reckless military escalation by the U.S. government against those whom it sees as its adversaries — mainly China and Russia. It will include essays by John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, Deborah Veneziale, a journalist based in Italy, and John Ross, a member of the No Cold War collective. In the vein of that booklet, No Cold War has also produced Briefing No. 3, “Is the United States Preparing for War with Russia and China?” on Washington’s sabre-rattling and alarming march toward nuclear primacy.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/20/the-lethality-of-the-global-monroe-doctrine/