The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest American Destiny: The Myth About Reason (1)

Published at: 05/06/2026 06:53 PM

Some of the mythological and ideological tools used by the United States to justify its territorial expansion and its lack of political influence on the continent since the 19th century are what we know as the Monroe Doctrine. and the manifest destiny.

The Monroe Doctrine serves as a continental hegemony that Americans summarize in the phrase “America for Americans”, was proclaimed by American President James Monroe in 1823 before Congress, for the purpose of To prevent European powers from colonizing or intervening in the affairs of the new independent States of North America, and their mission was to establish a line of separation between the Old World (Europe) and the New World (America) .

The Mexican researcher, Raúl Figueroa Esquer, from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, explained in an essay, called “The Polk Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1845) II”, that “in the beginning, Monroe created this doctrine as a formal warning to the powers Europeans not to recolonize the continent; and later, in 1845, to assume the Polk Doctrine or the Polk Corollary, as an extension of the Monroe doctrine that was formulated by American President James K. Polk , and established that the United States always will oppose European interference in America, even if a country on the American continent voluntarily ceded its territory. These premises were used as a justification for the war with Mexico and to advance the territorial expansion to the west and the annexation of Texas.”

Polk expanded on the 1823 doctrine, pointing out that the voluntary cession of American territory to a European power represented a threat to US national security.

To give strength to the created myth of “America for Americans”, understanding how America and the entire continent, the United States continued its interventionist policies; this was also explained by the American Smithsonian Institute, through research on the Monroe doctrine, explained that “a Although it was born as a defensive stance against Europe, it became a tool for the United States to intervene militarily and economically in Latin America, as reflected in the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904; a foreign policy that expanded D. Monroe Doctrine and established that his country had the right to intervene militarily and economically in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean to maintain order and avoid the intervention of European powers”.

The documents that reside in the National Archives and Records Administration, located in Washington, describe that “as the 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, had a unique position for to turn your country into a world power. In 1904, the year in which his government began the construction of the Panama Canal, the president reacted to the threat of European intervention in the Dominican Republic by issuing Roosevelt's Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which claimed the continent and It is rich not as a sphere of influence of the United States, without specifying strategies. Roosevelt's Corollary affirmed the American right to active intervention and, in the first decades of the 20th century, justified the use of U.S. military force in Cuba, the Dominican Republic , Haiti, Nicaragua. , Panama and other countries in order to guarantee the ideological and economic alignment of these countries with the United States”.

If the Monroe Doctrine enshrined American political and military guardianship over Latin America through the premise “America for Americans”, which evolved from a defensive stance against European colonialism to a justification for recurrent interventions and invasions in the region, the Corollary Roosevelt enshrined the United States as an “international police” in the Caribbean.

The political and geopolitical impact of this doctrine has been reflected on the continent as a limited sovereignty, seeking to replace the old European colonial dependence with American hegemony; which gave way to the rise of Latin American anti-imperialism face of asymmetry of power.

As assumed by the U.S. government since its constitution, the Monroe Doctrine establishes by “divine right” international isolation to the countries of the continent, and so it exercises that right by applying actions to block independent alliances between nations of the South and Europe.

At the same time, the United States also applies the so-called Doctrine of Destiny and I manifest myself as a philosophy and political ideology according to which it is destined by a divine design to expand its borders to the west, conquering territories from coast to coast to spread its culture, its model of freedom and its form of government. It is then that the mythological and the ideological are united, as explained by the Gazette of Anthropology , referring to the use of myth for manipulation and detailed that “in a mythological tool it uses narratives, symbols and the supernatural to explain the origin of the world and transmit values. In contrast, an ideological tool is a set of political, economic, or social ideas designed to justify power and guide the actions of a society.”

Both doctrines changed the role of the United States: it went from being a former colony seeking protection to becoming an imperialist power that threatens the entire Western Hemisphere. The My Manifesto Destino was a phrase coined by journalist John O'Sullivan in 1845 that they assume as the certainty that their country is destined by God to expand from coast to coast.

Under these premises , Americans consider themselves a chosen people with superior values and their mission is to dominate the American continent by spreading their conception of freedom and democracy; both the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and the As a matter of fact , in 1845, they rapidly transformed from diplomatic positions to the imperial justification for intervening and carrying out U.S. military invasions in Latin America. While the first closed the way to outside competitors, the second granted Washington a “divine right” to expand its control. Both ideas mutated over time to try to transform Latin America into what they have historically called Washington's “backyard”.

For Latin Americans, these doctrines hinder the development of international relations of sovereign respect, perpetuating an asymmetry of power. In the contemporary political debate, the revival of the American monroist discourse on the continent is critically viewed by Latin America as a modern update to maintain its interventionist policy.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team