John Kerry is turning out to be an even more dangerous Secretary of State than Hillary Clinton. He just took it upon himself to unilaterally proclaim that the Monroe Doctrine is dead, saying, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
The Monroe Doctrine has been a fixed star in American foreign policy since December 2, 1823. Its essential words are: “The political system of the allied powers is essentially different from that of America. We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
The operative words are: “this hemisphere,” “dangerous to our peace and safety,” and “system.” The Monroe Doctrine is not limited to military aggression; it prohibits extending the “system” of foreign powers to the Western Hemisphere, recognizing the fundamental difference between our constitutional republic and Old World empires and dictatorships.
The Marquis de Lafayette called the Monroe Doctrine “the best little bit of paper that God ever permitted any man to give the world.” The Monroe Doctrine has been successful over the centuries in keeping Old World dictatorships out of our hemisphere.
In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was specifically directed at Imperial Russia when Czar Alexander was trying to colonize our Pacific coast. President James Monroe made his courageous declaration at a time when America had no standing army and our navy had only five sailing ships.
But we had a proud sense of national identity and national security. Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, stated, “There can, perhaps, be no better time for saying, frankly and explicitly, to the Russian government that the future peace of the world cannot be promoted by Russian settlements on any part of the American continent.”
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the problem was Russia again. The American people fully backed President John F. Kennedy in forcing Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
In October 1983, the Soviet Union tried to turn the island of Grenada into a Soviet base. The American people fully backed Ronald Reagan’s use of U.S. troops to counter this threat in the Western Hemisphere, and we can look back on Reagan’s rescue of Grenada as the turning point in official American policy toward Soviet Communism.
The U.S. State Department later published a selection from the 35,000 pounds of captured documents proving how the Soviet Union had planned to use Grenada as a base of operations and supplies. Grenada was being prepared as an air base for Soviet military jets, a port for Soviet vessels, and a base for exporting revolution.
One document quoted a Soviet military chief as gloating, “Nineteen years ago we had only Cuba. Now we have Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada – we are making progress.” But Communist progress was halted when Reagan ended the Cold War, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “without firing a shot.”
Like Kerry’s repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine, he is selling out U.S. interests in other negotiations, many of which are conducted in secret such as the current ones with Iran and Afghanistan. The Associated Press reported that “The U.S. declined to release specific details about the negotiations” with Afghanistan, and John Kerry confirmed this week that “We have agreed on the language that would be submitted to a loya jirga.”
Kerry didn’t define “we,” but we know it does not include the American people, who certainly have not agreed on any terms of a treaty with Afghanistan. Much as the American people don’t want to put our fate in the now-dictatorial hands of Harry Reid’s Senate, we surely don’t want to be subject to the 3,000 Afghans called the loya jirga.
According to what has leaked out about this treaty and exposed by Diana West, U.S. forces will be forbidden to conduct combat operations in Afghanistan, or even counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida-brand terrorists, without Afghan approval. This agreement commits America to prop up a hostile, corrupt Sharia state, with all our training and equipping of Afghan military forces subordinate to Afghanistan’s approval.
The treaty includes this passage: “The United States shall have an obligation to seek funds on a yearly basis to support” the defense and security of the Afghan state. This massive new entitlement program even specifies that “relevant Afghan institutions” will dole out the dollars, so perhaps we should call them “navigators” who will be expediting Afghan-o-care.
During Obama’s 2008 campaign, he said that George Bush “had taken our eye off the ball” by invading Iraq instead of concentrating on Afghanistan, and Kerry charged that Bush “hoodwinked the American people” into the Iraq war. Obama presumably wanted us to look upon the war with Afghanistan as a good war with which he was glad to be personally identified.
