Tom Wolfe wrote a wonderful Op/Ed in the Sunday issue of The New York Times titled, "The Doctrine That Never Died." Wolfe just argues that President Bush's Inagural address was the 21st century's continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. He sited Teddy Roosevelt's December 4, 1904 speech where TR stated:
"Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. ...The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. ... The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced."
He also noted Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts promoting another plank in Monroe Doctrine in 1912, where he pushed through the passage of the Lodge Corollary. Which basically stated that no foreign government could have "practical power of control" over our nation. Which the government suspected Japan was doing.
A third plank was the promotion of George Kennan's policy of Containment, which was culled from his famous article Mr. X article in in Foreign Affairs. Basically we would stop Communist actions in our hemisphere. Such a policy would exist until Reagan's rollback policy that push the Soviet monolith into an ash heap.
The final plank in the Monroe Doctrine, so far, is what President Bush is persuing. The Hemisphere of James Monroe has expanded to the entire world. Wolfe notes that the President is following through with the objective with this passage:
"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," President Bush said. He added, "From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth."
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