The Monroe Doctrine was meant to be a shield for a fledgling country: no European empires in the Americas, no more carving up this hemisphere by outside powers. It sounded like a defense of sovereignty and self-determination. Two centuries later, that shield has been reforged into something else—a license to police the hemisphere and enforce an American Hemispheric Order on our terms.
We claim to oppose foreign domination, yet we have become the dominant foreign power in other sovereign countries. When a government in the region dares to stray from our economic dogma or security script, we don’t send in Redcoats—we threaten and impose sanctions. Loans are conditioned. Sanctions are tightened. Diplomats whisper, intelligence agencies “assist,” and suddenly regime change appears not as an invasion but as a “restoration of democracy.” The vocabulary is polite; the outcome is familiar. Governments that cooperate survive. Governments that don’t are labeled unstable, extreme, or illegitimate. It isn’t about drugs, oil, or national security—it is about ego, power, and distraction from domestic failures and salacious files.
Flip that. Imagine a coalition of Latin American nations deciding that our politics are too corrupt, our inequality too obscene, and our elections too tainted by money. Imagine they declare an “Inter-American Responsibility Doctrine” and openly call for regime change in Washington to protect “hemispheric stability.” Picture them funding opposition groups, manipulating our media, freezing our assets, and threatening intervention—“for the sake of democracy,” of course. We would be apoplectic. We would call it aggression, pure and simple.
The hypocrisy deepens when you look at security. We pressure neighbors to crack down on crime, migration, and drugs, as if their failures are the source of our problems. Yes, trafficking networks and corrupt officials exist everywhere. But the demand, the guns, and much of the money flow from our side of the border. Rather than confront the discomfort of our own consumption, our own political greed-induced paralysis, and our own profit structures, we cast the neighbors as the problem and ourselves as the savior sheriff.
We insist on the right to shape their regimes while insisting no one has the right to shape ours. We dress intervention in the language of freedom while guarding our own system—flawed, gridlocked, and heavily purchased—as untouchable. It’s a double standard that everyone can see, whether we admit it or not. So here’s the uncomfortable mirror: if the rest of the hemisphere treated us exactly as we treat them—economically, politically, and rhetorically—would we still call it “promoting stability,” or would we finally call it what it feels like to them: unwelcome domination dressed as doctrine for ego and power? NeverFearTheDream simplebender.com
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