United States versus Gaddafi

Abstract

The United States has long been accustomed to intervening in the Third World for strategic or economic reasons. The celebrated Monroe Doctrine was one of the clearest signs that the US considered itself entitled in the nineteenth century to intervene in the world wherever its emerging hegemony would allow. The Monroe Doctrine was not the first overt expression of this presumed right, nor was it the last; but it signalled a resolution that weaker nations ignored at their peril. On 2 December 1823 President James Monroe declared to the US Congress that the United States was to run the western hemisphere, that interlopers from Europe had no right to ‘extend their system’ to the New World. From the 1850s onward it was assumed that the Monroe Doctrine entitled the United States to invade any country of Latin America whenever it wished and for whatever reason. This principle had a convenient simplicity and focus: it was to be refined and enlarged for application many times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Why don’t we give him AIDS.

George Shultz, US Secretary of State, 1986