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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hey Nia, how are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. I'm especially good because we have Chris Saladino back with us. How are you doing today?
C. Saladino: I'm here and that's good. I'm good. Thank you for having me back.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, we're continuing our series on international relations and comparative politics. Previous episodes, we've looked at British common law, the British political and government system. We had Chris previously on a podcast episode where we looked at foreign policy and IR terms and how they get used and perhaps how they get misused.
N. Rodgers: I'm pretty sure he gave me permission to be a dictator. I'm pretty sure he gave me permission as long as I don't couch it in any terms other than I'm also a jerk.
C. Saladino: I said, it's good work if you can get it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Today we're going to travel back in time and we've asked Chris to come on and talk about one of the dominant US foreign policy doctrines that oftentimes get taught. Students learn for all of maybe five minutes for an exam and then they just let it escape their brains. Listeners, we have Chris on here to unpack, if you will, the infamous Monroe Doctrine. Yes. Nia, you wanted to say something?
N. Rodgers: I actually did. I did. I have a question. Well, I want to start off for the question, actually. Chris, is that okay if I just jump in?
C. Saladino: Sure. Beat me up. Do it.
N. Rodgers: Monroe obviously after President Monroe.
C. Saladino: Yeah, you're in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the City of Richmond.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I will expose now my complete ignorance beyond what I learned in whatever tenth grade or whatever it was when we touched on the Monroe Doctrine briefly, which is basically stay in your own hemisphere and control your own hemisphere. Is that more or less the Monroe Doctrine? Or I'm misremembering. Are we done?
C. Saladino: In one sentence?
J. Aughenbaugh: While the podcast episode is completed.
N. Rodgers: The shortest podcast episode we've ever done, Now we can talk about [inaudible] because [inaudible] .
C. Saladino: It's controversial in some ways and it's wildly simple in other ways, but it tends to be more about the application of this thing that is not a piece of law. It's not a diplomatic agreement with other countries. Nobody else said okay to it. It's not a treaty, and also how the United States has applied it. At the moment, and as it's generally taught in that tiny piece that you might see in world history two in Virginia high schools or maybe the eight seconds of foreign policy and public policy class is basically the United States saying, as it's coming into its own as a nation, this hemisphere shall no longer be subject to foreign intervention and foreign colonialism really pushing it at the Europeans and implying that the United States would enforce that. A, stay in your lane, and B, if you don't they'll be costs associated. Pretty brash stuff for a country whose material power in 1823 was middle of the pack at best, and making a strong statement to the most materially considered nation states. That's my language for powerful states. That is the colonial powers themselves. The United States had only just recently been a colony.
N. Rodgers: As you can say we were only 40, 50 years on.
C. Saladino: Well, we were that, and we were also right after.
J. Aughenbaugh: War of 1812.
C. Saladino: We were less than 10 years after the war of 1812 where we finally extricated ourselves from the idea of British rule, not withstanding the whole revolution and we did win but then what were we going to look like in the Constitutional Convention and the organization of what American democracy would eventually look like was just a work in progress. Those people we called founding fathers, they still had jobs back then. They weren't monuments, they were founding the country. That had to come and yet those very individuals were expressing these ideas really from the beginning. In terms of, well, and this is not in anybody's document. It's in memoirs, it's in speeches, it's in quotes, but most of those people that we think of as founding the nation had great concern about, well, when the war is over, how do we keep them from coming back? How do we exert our authority over this piece of territory? Remember, the territory that we had our authority over in the very first place was the coast of the central part of North America. That was it. The rest of North America was still occupied by those same people. The British weren't gone from North America by any stretch of the imagination. They just had to give up these colonies, and so stay in your lane. Don't come here, but how would this be enforced? The answer is not. Not enforceable.. An edict with no strong authority, an edict with no idea of what we would do should the British try for round three of reclamation as opposed to, in 1844 you see or 1845 James K. Polk negotiates the Oregon Territory and the United States is now, for the third time, aggressively taking the territory of North America, but through diplomatic means and the Monroe Doctrine applies to every piece of that territory we take. Now, the hemisphere starts to move to the left coast. The hemisphere starts to make strong implications about newly established sovereign countries in the Caribbean, in Central America, and in South America, and yet the whole time the implication is nobody gets to go to any of those places or the United States will say something about it and just no capacity to make it happen.
N. Rodgers: Is this the threat of don't make me pull this car over? I mean is it like the implied threat is what holds because what's really going to happen when your parents pull the car over, they're just going to yell at you [inaudible].
C. Saladino: First, there's no implied threat. It's an implication of an implication because these are nation states with ocean going blue water navies. That's the way any of those, France, England.
J. Aughenbaugh: Portugal.
C. Saladino: The Netherlands, etc, Portugal all manage their colonial empires with blue water navies. The United States has a military navy that fought along our coastlines against those, I'm making hand gestures, those navies that came from far away. But think about the age of explorers in the 1600 and 1700, 1500, 1400s. None of those people were coming from North America and yet these were sailing ship nations at a time when the sailing ship made you dominant. We're saying you can't come to Hispaniola, you can't come to the Virgin Islands, you can't come to the Grenadines, you can't come to Central America or South America with your navies and try to take territory because we'll stop you with an idea that sounds good, doesn't it?
N. Rodgers: Don't come over here or else.
J. Aughenbaugh: It begs the question, Chris, how much of a deterrent, at least initially, was the doctrine? Because with what you're describing if I'm a king or queen over in Europe, I got to be sitting here thinking, well, prove it.
N. Rodgers: Shoot. If it was me and you in a boat, we would be saying that. Aughie and Nia sailing up to Hispaniola going well. We'll just take it and see what happens. What are they going to do?
C. Saladino: Too I think different things there. First of all, it's the dawning of the age of, not Aquarius, but the age of the end of colonialism. That European states are going to experience distance based imperial overstretch on a more frequent basis, which will culminate ultimately by the 20th century where you got to let him go.
N. Rodgers: Sorry, I have a question, and he said yeah, because I raised my hand even though you can't hear.
C. Saladino: It was [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: It was awesome. Is that why empires end? Because they get so big that you can't reach the edges in the ends of them?
C. Saladino: Such a long series of answers to that but it is a reason. It overstretch is one thing, but also where your empire is and what it's doing has a lot to, there's a little bit of real estate logic there. Location and also how intensely does your mother country need what the empire provides? If it's life's blood you stay a lot longer, or if you identify, the success of the regime. The French don't get out of Algeria until over 100 years after they should have gotten out of Algeria because they can't extricate themselves. The French aren't going to get out of Southeast Asia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Asia.
C. Saladino: Until [inaudible] in 1954 and when they get out in 1954, they literally just go.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're gone.
C. Saladino: All the expert is we're out of here, screw it. But those are examples of overstretch to some great extent, it's very difficult to maintain. The United States has learned this in modern years. It's very difficult to maintain a fighting force 5, 6, 8, 9, 12,000 miles away. Also, to maintain a modern sense, public support of that fighting force over there, beyond I support the people that are over there. But increasingly that mission, if it's to maintain somebody else and to dominate somebody else, eventually at home, you either need to control the media, control your journalism, or you need to just say, we just talked with the guy who's in Kyiv. You have to say to your citizens lies about what's happening to keep people interested, and the expenses are high. The social costs are not good. The threats to the regime's stability in terms of social unrest, I mean, there's all these different things that can do that. But to come, to put it in perspective, to come to North South Central America, to come to this hemisphere. Now, with a bit of an edict that says, and if you do, we're going to chase you out. It either has to be very light intervention. It's got to be no we're not really doing this. We'll talk about a couple of instances of that I suppose, or it's got to be aggressive. It's got to be, you want a war? Here's a war. British occupation of the Falklands Islands is a violation of Monroe doctrine. Very much so.
N. Rodgers: Right.
C. Saladino: The United States says, hey, you guys can't do that. But it's also 9,000 miles away from Washington, DC. It's not quite that far but it's pretty darn close. It's almost to Antarctica. The overstretch simply means you got too many extensions of your force, you can't back it up. The blow back starts to become, it doesn't have to be far away. The Austral Hungarian Empire in 1914 had imperial overstretch. They had all these countries that are now Albania and whatever. They just weren't that interested in governance. They just wanted those people to be very much like it was the 1700s, 1600s, 1500s pay their feudal dues and still obey the king. Those people are like, look, we're not Austrian and we're not Hungarian, we're not Catholic, we're nothing like you. We want our own countries. That World War I then blew up that empire, because there was no impetus to ever return those people to that type of colonialism. In a sense, the United States is the model for that in the hemisphere. If you think about it, the United States becomes this independent nation state. Following that, really looking at the ideas of American democracy, even though it doesn't all become democratic. You see Mexico and you see the Pan Colombian, or the individual nation states of Central America, the big countries of South America start to follow suit. Start to reject Spanish colonialism. Start to reject Portuguese colonialism. Start to reject British colonialism. Those states either fight small wars or bail, just do actually bail, or it becomes the product of a bigger war somewhere else, where you go, I'm going to give up Cuba or Puerto Rico. This happens all the way for the next hundred years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Something you just said, Chris, got me thinking. How did the other nation states in the Western hemisphere perceive the Monroe doctrine? I mean, did they welcome it? Did they say, hey, wait a minute here. Are we replacing one colonial regime or regimes with,
N. Rodgers: It's another. What makes the Americans any better than the French or British, or the Portuguese who are running our power.
C. Saladino: In terms of the western powers, that thought originally doesn't happen. Originally they don't go, what makes the Americans think that are entitled to this? Because most of them look at what the Americans say at this time. These are ideas that come from George Washington, who is influenced by Lafayette, it comes from some of the American generals in a very predictive of George Patton way saying, who are we going to fight next? It comes from very much so Alexander Hamilton, it comes James Madison, it comes from the Federalist Papers, it comes from Jefferson's idea of diplomacy. I mean, there's a lot of ideas that come. In fact, Monroe basically gets credit for it because he said it and he was the president. He didn't even really write most of them. But that being said, at the time, it's the most empty shell of a threat. If it's a threat at all, it's not a legitimate policy. It's not agreed on by Congress. It's not a signed treaty. It's not something that's passed through courts. It just is a statement that says, stay in your lane. Those European powers don't respond to it aggressively. They don't like it and they say they don't like it. The French particularly say, this is not your call to make. The French still have reasonable territorial possessions. The French have a strong tie in Canada. The French have islands nations in the Pacific. They still own those territories. The Brits still have island nations in the Pacific at the time, and it bothers them the least. In fact, they try to make it sound like what the Americans are saying is that, no one gets to come here because us, and our friends, the British will kick you out. Which is pretty interesting since we've just fought our second war in two generations against the actual British. The love affair is not quite as established as may be it's implied. But you have to ask the question, would the Monroe doctrine not have happened? Suddenly, there would have been more and more colonial expeditions to the Americans. A lot of people suggest, probably not, that the land that could have been colonized was, and this is a situation of international relations and imperialism. Imperialism tends to be blamed for the cause of a lot of wars. One of the primary reasons is, is that people want to spread. They want their manifest destiny, which people say this is a piece of our manifest destiny. But they run into a place where somebody else has already spread their manifest destiny and then that's the fight. Where do you go? Germany becomes this big, powerful German country. Germany has only existed since 1871. It's relevant to this discussion, but in 1871, they're the biggest baddest power in Europe. They go, one thing, we don't have are colonies. Let's go get some and everywhere they go, there's some Dutch and Portuguese and Spanish, and British. They're like, what the hell? Where do we get our stuff? World War I almost begins at Agadir, in Morocco, when the Germans show up with gunboats and go like, we claim this for the German Crown. They're like both the British and the French are here. You got the wrong place. If you don't leave, there's going to be a war. It's tense. It's like a little mini Cuban Missile crisis, 1907.
J. Aughenbaugh: You what?
N. Rodgers: You know what?
C. Saladino: We must have missed the flag.
J. Aughenbaugh: We didn't get the memo.
C. Saladino: Right. To answer the question. The impression, initially is not welcomed, but it's not menacing because there's not a task force that is now out on the water actively looking to intercept foreign ships. Keep in mind, this is 200 years ago, so technologically, a policy like that would take years to implement. It's not really until we get into the 1840s, 1850s, that the United States has now claimed a lot more territory again, between the acquisition of the territories of Louisiana Purchase and then the Oregon Territory. That makes the United States a much bigger, albeit not stronger yet. But certainly what Dale Copeland might call potential power with resources and land and people, and the ability to stave off threats on its own.
N. Rodgers: What about Mexico and Brazil? The countries that we're under the Monroe doctrine in the sense of the Americans had declared it. I guess we're all going along with it because nobody's going to fight with him. But did they feel like, hey, this is great? We don't have to fight off the colonial powers. The Americans will fight them off for us.
C. Saladino: They did their thing. It has never been what the United States in a modern sense. Imagine where the countries of the hemisphere looked at the United States and said, all right, these guys have our back. Unless it was needed so 1950s and '60s, even '70s, If you've got a very right wing, very anti Marxist nation state that's experienced counter revolutionary and revolutionary stuff, that has leftist, has Marxist, has self identifying whatever socialist, then suddenly they want the Monroe Doctrine to make a lot of sense and where you're going to come and help us. The United States says we're going to claim the Monroe Doctrine, because we've got to keep communism away. It's a cold War, it's an all or nothing. It's a zero sum game between the forces of non communism. Don't call them democracy, but it's the arsenal of democracy. But the forces of anti communism and the forces of communism. Well now, the Monroe doctrine is convenient. Nation states go, hey, we need more military aid. We need your ships patrolling off, we need the help. Now, if those same individuals end up being narco terrorists and we start to intervene and go, you guys are narco terrorists, we're going to send American troops down there. They go, no. This is a violation of more sovereignty.
N. Rodgers: I would like my cake and then I shall eat it.
C. Saladino: Or politics as usual. But over 200 years that has waxed and waned as nation states became sovereign. Keep in mind that the countries of Latin America, Brazil has been Brazil for a long time. Argentina has been Argentina for a long time. Uruguay has been Uruguay for a long time. These aren't like when we look at African countries or when we look at even some of the Caribbean countries, we look at Jamaica, we look at the Bahamas even. 1962, the British gave up all those countries. The people in Bermuda were like, do we have to be a country? Are we getting given up to? No, we don't have any money, but you're like, oh, Jamaica has been a country for forever. Jamaica has been a country for 62 years. That's not forever. South American country as been the 19th century. Those countries are sovereign nation states. The idea here is that you can't see incursions into the sovereign nation states and then the potential colonial territories from external forces and the external forces are implied very directly to still be European. Later on, we start to worry about other powers, most notably now China. We try to apply the idea of the Monroe Doctrine. It's interpreted plenty of cases where there were issues and instances where it was invoked.
J. Aughenbaugh: How much or to what extent was the Monroe Doctrine representative of US foreign policy emphasizing isolationism throughout the 19th century? Chris.
C. Saladino: It originates in isolationism as far as I can tell. I learned that a long time ago, but I've read a little bit more about it over time. When I taught foreign policy, I jumped into a little bit. The trick is that isolationism in the United States has never been a new thing, but it has been an evolving thing,. We're isolationist for different reasons and under different circumstances. We're isolationist because we're a new power. We don't want to get picked off. We're isolationist because we're a middle power and we don't want to get sucked into great superpower conflicts, but we want to maintain. Then we're isolationist in the sense that we don't want people to mess with us. We can, none of these have worked out particularly well, by the way, but nevertheless, it's a pretty strong statement of if war doesn't come to us, we're okay. The United States in 1823, can't imagine that it's going to be sending its troops to fight wars in Europe multiple times in the next 100 and some. It can't imagine It's going to send troops to Southeast Asia. It's going to send troops to Central Asia. It's going to send troops in the Middle East for years, and every party, every leader, every founding father would patently reject that. It's not an unusual idea because you had to kick those marooning British out of your territory.
J. Aughenbaugh: When you think about it, listeners, George Washington gives a farewell address when he's leaving the Office of President. He warns both political parties about dangerous entanglements and even as recently as President Eisenhower.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say, and then 150 years later, Eisenhower, beware of that military industrial complex. The idea that you're going to get tangled up in other people's wars and spend a lot of money and treasure a lot of money and a lot of treasure. It's the human lives. That's what strikes me that Chris, when he said, the idea of Americans going to fight a war in France, between France and Germany. I can understand where the founders would be like. Are you insane? What are you talking about?
J. Aughenbaugh: Right.
N. Rodgers: We just got ourselves to be Americans, we don't need to be trying to go off.
C. Saladino: Or the British prime minister would beg the US president to go ahead and save them the first roughly two, two and a half years of World War II.
N. Rodgers: But that isolation still holds because we don't get into the wars for quite a while, any of the wars. We drag our feet a little bit trying to. I'm going to ask a question, Chris, and if you don't want to answer it, it's fine. But is the Monroe Doctrine what leads us to do dumb stuff in other countries in our hemisphere like overthrow their governments or encourage an overthrow?
C. Saladino: It depends on when, so anything that's not in the Cold War that's justified by the Monroe Doctrine has nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. It's just window dressing. It's the global struggle between good and evil, between communism and democracy, between capitalism and socialism; it's that. But before that, it depends on what the dumb thing is and how dumb is it. Ultimately, the Monroe Doctrine literally doesn't have a tooth in its head if you read it because it's basically a speech. It's a description of what James Monroe says our foreign policy will be going forward. It really doesn't get powerfully articulated until 20 something years after Monroe's out of office. It would be like saying, all of a sudden tomorrow we decide to start doing stuff in Southeast Asia and we base it on the strong belief in Nixon Doctrine. Well, Nixon Doctrine was a thing, Truman Doctrine was a thing, Eisenhower Doctrine was a thing, Kennedy Doctrine; these are real things. Almost every president who had a foreign policy series of issues, Obama Doctrine is a thing, Bush Doctrine is definitely a thing, and Reagan doctrine, most certainly.
J. Aughenbaugh: But even with the Reagan Doctrine, Chris, you and I have discussed off recording how much of the Reagan Doctrine has its roots in the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
C. Saladino: Of course.
J. Aughenbaugh: These are not discrete and isolated, if you will, foreign policies. They oftentimes are reaction to things that went on in a previous presidential administration.
N. Rodgers: Do they bleed into each other; little bits get kept and then other bits get changed.
C. Saladino: They have to because you don't cut off the faucet of foreign policy, put in a new sink and then turn the faucet back on, you've got people in the field. You've got relationships that are ongoing. You've got crises that you've got to manage. You've got work that's being done that you don't want to stop doing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or think about this, Nia. Imagine what the world's reaction would be to the United States, to where with every successive presidential administration you get a brand new US foreign policy. It helps explain why so many of the European nations right now are just out of their minds after they listen to former President Trump say, well, if I become President again.
N. Rodgers: I think it was a NATO thing. I don't think that's how he said it. I think what he did actually say was, "I will not protect people who are not paying their dues.
C. Saladino: Not paying their fair share.
N. Rodgers: Appears as some sort of roster. As if there's some sort of roster of what that means when in fact, I don't believe NATO actually has a bill that they sent to each country.
C. Saladino: That's like the Mafia coming to your store and saying if you don't want to get robbed, we believe you've got to pay this much.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, but the point that I was making by using that as an example is see the reaction of many European nations, because it would be such an abrupt break in US foreign policy, likewise with these doctrines. It's not like the Truman Doctrine, which President Truman uttered after World War II was all that brand new. Actually, it was an extension of what the US role was in ending World War II. He just went ahead and announced it and in many ways, it was a continuation of what Roosevelt attempted to do with his foreign policy.
C. Saladino: That's a good point, because what you see there is what changed for Truman was not I'm changing foreign policy because I'm a new president, but rather, a new context emerged. Two world wars, and we call it World War II, but it's two world wars that ended a few months apart. An entirely new technological age of warfare emerged and a new threat just came right in. Yeah, were some policies changed dramatically? Of course, you have different adversaries and you have different methodologies and you have different technologies and you have a different set of alliances and so a new policy emerges when contacts change. That's normal for policy. But the other stuff, and you did have a fairly significant reshuffling of what we call the Department of War. We created the Department of Defense. That's innovation and it's innovation that's good, bad, or indifferent, but it is innovation. But to take Truman's policies, which really have to now begin to deal with the now globalized threat of communism or to create a globalized threat of communism and say here's the thing. For Winston Churchill says, there's an Iron Curtain. We all know that, what it is. We contain it. George Kennan writes a bunch of stuff and we just assume that he knows everything and that's okay. But he miraculously wins reelection in '48, his doctrine, if you want to call it that, or his foreign policy continues to evolve with new threats. The Korean War happens, the rise of thermonuclear weapons happens and then what do you get? You get Eisenhower who rejects certain ideas of Truman Doctrine and basically carries a lot of it through for the next eight years. Kennedy who says we need a different kind of world, it's a new world. Kennedy's doing a lot of the same stuff. LBJ, who says, I don't know shit about foreign policy and I don't want to do anything with it, it's not my thing. I believe in the great society, I look like the most racist man ever to walk the earth. Yet I'm truly the OG, social justice warrior, all at the same time and what's his foreign policy? It's Kennedy foreign policy. Nixon's anti communism should have been so much elaborately more than Kennedy's and Johnson's.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it wasn't yet.
C. Saladino: Nixon has detente.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
C. Saladino: Nixon opens up to China. Nixon, while at the same time doing a lot of nasty stuff that everybody else did as well. Then to Aughie's point about Reagan, people who laud Ronald Reagan are not going to be dissuaded from this. But the truth of the matter is, is that Reagan's idea about anti communism was sincere. But his methodology was, oh, I know people who will do this. He's the communicator. But at the same time people were like, well, the reason we had to get rid of Carter was because Carter was cutting the military. Untrue. The largest increase in military spending in recorded US history at the time is Carter Doctrine. It's anti communist and it's anti Soviet, and it's the war in Afghanistan. It's why we boycott the Olympics. Carter is a raging anti communist and yet in the election you would have thought that he was a full blooded Marxist.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say Pinko commie.
C. Saladino: That would have been the words of the time. The only thing that Carter was more interested in was, how are we going to pay for it? Now imagine the Republicans and Democrats just flipping their wigs right now but Carter was like, look, I read all 17,000 pages of the budget and I've made some adjustments on how we're going to pay for it. David Stockman gave the budget to Reagan and Reagan held it like this and read it feels really good, David thanks and gave it back to him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris, in a previous podcast episode, we talked about different presidential leadership styles and how they approached the job, and we talked about how Carter was so involved in the creation of the budgets, his four years in office. It's one of the critiques of Carter as a president, what worked for him as a governor. Mind you listeners, you got to remember Jimmy Carter was the governor of Georgia. In Georgia at that time, like many southern states, was a pay as you go state, so you never made extensive commitments, whether it be capital projects, US foreign policy, expansion of welfare programs, you never made any of those commitments until you figured out how you were going to pay for it. That's one of the more remarkable things and Carter knew all that stuff, but the way his administration and going forward gets portrayed is that he was weak on US defense. He didn't really do very much in regards to tackling stagflation, but in many ways, he was the product of a really bad time in US politics and US government. Situations that nobody could have, you had economists, folks who basically said stagflation should never occur. You can't have inflation and stagnant economic productivity at the same time, that just doesn't make sense, and Carter was just like, here it is.
C. Saladino: To be fair, Jimmy Carter people who love Donald Trump should love Jimmy Carter because he didn't miss words he said we're in a bad way. It might not get better before it gets worse, we're going to work our way out of it, but there's going to be pain he used the words pain and suffering.
N. Rodgers: That's right.
C. Saladino: People went, what do you mean?
N. Rodgers: He's like put on a sweater and turn down thermostatic we got to save money and people freaked out what do you mean we have to save no I'm not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris, remember how he went ahead and publicly announced that the United States was going to boycott the Olympics. He just went right immediately for the kill shot, which is to all of our athletes who have been training for years, I'm sorry, but you're not going to the Olympics and you're just like, wow, there was no softening.
C. Saladino: They were in Moscow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Many of them had already gone overseas.
N. Rodgers: To bring us back to the Monroe so what you're basically saying is each president has a doctrine, but it's reactive to their millia. Whatever's going on in the world and sometime is borrowing of the previous and sometimes it's something that's slightly different.
C. Saladino: Unnamed presidents have tried to reinvent the wheel or pretend that they know how to invent a wheel at all.
N. Rodgers: Is it partly because you can't turn this ship that quickly but we're big nation with big policy.
C. Saladino: Inertia is a bitch, no doubt.
J. Aughenbaugh: But even the nomenclature is somewhat inaccurate because we stick the label doctrine onto a president's US foreign policy, but they may not have even intended for it to be a "Doctrine." They're trying to figure out how to go ahead and avoid the Third World War or a nuclear.
N. Rodgers: They're solving a problem not creating a doctrine.
C. Saladino: We tend to take the highlights of their foreign policy after the fact, and we call that doctrine. We know the major tenants of Carter Dr, we know the major tenets of Bush. Dr. Bill Newman writes enormous books about this hundreds of pages about each doctrine, and that's a distillation of all the documents. But at the end of the day, while Bill's work is incredibly important for lay people, for Americans to understand that the president comes in with his vision of foreign policy with his executive leadership team who are his foreign policy advisers with the people he puts into the cabinet positions in those departments, with some turnover of the career bureaucrats who say, I don't want to work for Reagan, I don't want to work for Bush, I want to work for Obama. But basically what Nia pointed out is the ship is still going in a direction, there's no brakes. Now you can say as of today, I'm pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, you can do that. That would be Trump doctrine if we haven't gotten there yet. We're going to pull out of agreements I think are bad, that's basically Trump doctrine with signatures. But what that doesn't do is change much course in terms of the day to day operations of foreign policy and where you are. When Donald Trump says about Joe Biden's attempt to pull our troops out of Afghanistan, a deal that Trump negotiated, not blaming them, inextricable situation and intractable situation, to use two similar words.
J. Aughenbaugh: You still have to monitor what's going on in Afghanistan.
C. Saladino: If you're pulling out, you're pulling out, it took years to pull out of Afghanistan it wasn't that day.
J. Aughenbaugh: You can't go ahead and say, well, okay, we no longer have an agreement with the Iranians and pretend like the Iranian nation state is not an important actor in the Middle East. We can't just go ahead and say, well, let's just hope that that regime fails.
C. Saladino: You are attacked to your alliance partners in all those actions.
N. Rodgers: Because we can say we don't want anything to do with Iran, but Israel can't say that and we are partnered with Israel, so in as much we can be pulled out with Iran, but not completely.
C. Saladino: We pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal we did, okay, fine we froze all that stuff on the one hand, on the other hand, our European partners, that wasn't a bilateral agreement, that's a multi state agreement. All of our European allies said, this is a terrible idea and our president punished them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes there are a number of countries in Western Europe who are still engaged in deal making with the Iranians.
C. Saladino: The United States in the latter part of the Clinton administration signed onto a couple of major agreements. Number one was the International Criminal Court which said crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide will be prosecuted in a centralized court that we won't have ad hoc, tribunals set up around the world. There'll be a single court and these will be the criteria and the Clinton administration signed off on it, knowing fully well that the Senate would never ratify it. Still signed off on it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I remember that.
C. Saladino: Within that same year, the Clinton administration signed off on the Kyoto Protocol which was going to be the most significant environmental treaty in the world and something that probably the world really needed. The world was like, okay, fine. Clinton knowing full well the Senate was not going to sign off on this treaty. Then Clinton went out of office and when Bush came in, just ignored Kyoto and unsigned the International Criminal Court. Our allies. George W. Bush had a great working relationship. It's true.
N. Rodgers: No. I was just imagining him pulling out a big eraser [inaudible] . We're not part of this anymore.
C. Saladino: The terminal, we unsigned it. We abrogated. We're going out of the treaty and George W. Bush has an amazing relationship with the British, and they say to President Bush, they follow us into Iraq, they heavily participate in Afghanistan. Understand a bitter end. When a lot of other European states were fleeing on and we was like, it's not looking good, we're out, and yet on a daily basis, those prime ministers, Tony Blair particularly said to President Bush, look, we're good friends, we have a lot of agreement.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're in special relationship.
C. Saladino: You need to get back in the ICC. Bush said, no, we're not going to do that. In a sense that's Bush doctrine. Intervene in one way but not so much in another.
N. Rodgers: That brings me to, I think, what my final question is, which is, so is doctrine a thing that you can only see after a President has left off. In the middle of it, they can speech but they could change speech from one to another. Unique perspective is that what you need.
C. Saladino: It can be interpreted because let's use the Monroe doctrine itself. At certain points, American foreign policy has said, hey, Monroe doctrine, you don't get to do this. Monroe doctrine, we can go here and we've used it as a justification. But other presidents have said, let's not use it. Or other presidents have said that's not important enough, or other presidents have said this would hurt my candidacy next year when I run for reelection. For whatever political reason. Because it's not a law, this is the beauty of doctrine. When we teach Monroe doctrine, students believe that there's a document that was signed, Congress approved it and it became our foreign policy until the next doctrine came along. Doctrine is just a way of describing what the sea change in foreign policy looks like. This was a pretty significant sea change for a country that hadn't flexed its muscles overseas really at all. Now, in spite of not having flexed its muscles overseas, was going to say to the biggest powers but if you come over here, we might physically ask you to leave. It's not a method of convenience. It is a method of classification. It is a good way to look at Bush doctrine and compare it to Carter doctrine or Reagan doctrine and compare it to Obama. It makes sense in a comparative way. We know as political scientists, that comparative politics, the comparative method says that perfect comparisons don't exist. There are differences. But we go all the way back. I think we brought up Max Weber last time. It's important I bring up Max Weber in almost every talk I ever give. Let's go back to old dead German, Max Weber, who said look, ideal typologies are good for analytical purposes and this are not exactly the same but if we say generally this is what a democracy looks like and generally this is what an authoritarian government looks like, and this is what an autocracy looks like, you may bleed over the side a little bit but everybody knows what you're talking about. That's a good thing. If we say generally the tone of Nixon doctrine was to talk loudly and fight hard over here but negotiating the shadows here then that's it. Was that every single one of the things? No, but that's how we got to China. That's how we got detente, that's how we negotiated the end of the Vietnam War or the Vietnamization of the war. It's okay to generalize about these doctrinal associations. The only one that has effectively been something that we can still reference today is the Monroe doctrine. It's the only one that people really, I think, know very little about its origination because we don't hear much about Lincoln doctrine but there wasn't one. In fact, not a lot of Monroe doctrine application between 1860 and 1865 the Lincoln years because of that Civil War thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: That Civil War thing.
C. Saladino: It occupied our time.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say took everything. It took up all the oxygen in the room.
C. Saladino: But to make it modern doesn't still get looked at. Monroe doctrine is essentially in a lot of the justifications around the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962 and the Bay of Pigs, and any Soviet intervention or the idea that Cuba may become so communist that it spokes out communism. Why? Well, we can't let them be in our space. In a way reducing the Monroe doctrine to we can't let them be in our space is an okay generalization.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Good job. Chris has just brought us back around to your first question or first comment here. Once again, Chris, Nia and I thank you for the discussion about the Monroe doctrine and for joining us over these three podcast episodes.
N. Rodgers: I look forward to discussing the Rogers doctrine at some point.
C. Saladino: Well, you have to establish that dictatorship.
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
C. Saladino: Make some policies and then we'll give you a doctrine and it'll have a logo.
N. Rodgers: I'll have a logo and oh, and Chris could be in charge of deciding my doctrine. That'd be lovely. You'll be part of my regime.
C. Saladino: I will give you six different doctrines and I'll put one on each side of a die and just roll it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Chris, you may not know this about Nia but in a number of our podcast episodes, Nia said she's going to go ahead and be this and be that and then she follows up by saying, and by the way, Aughie is going to do X, so you will be in an implementation role.
N. Rodgers: I need Henchman.
C. Saladino: Story of my life.
N. Rodgers: You're not effective as a leader unless you have Henchman I believe.
C. Saladino: I don't think that I'm allowed to put that on my CV.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm pretty sure we're not allowed to.
N. Rodgers: I could bank business cards for y'all that say Dr. Chris Saladino Henchman and then you could hand them to people at conferences and then walk away and leave them totally confused.
C. Saladino: I think now my retirement is a little more in the near future so I'll call back. Honey, what are we going to do? I've got this gig as a henchman.
N. Rodgers: It's all going to be great.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks Chris.
N. Rodgers: Thank you both.
C. Saladino: Well, thanks guys.
J. Aughenbaugh: All right. Take care.
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