The Second World War and the Monroe Doctrine

When the United States eventually entered the Second World War after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there was, therefore, little question about which side the Latin American republics would join.

The Germans, in 1940, effectively replied that such a principle would be respected, but only as long as the United States did not intervene in Europe. It was a ‘trade-off' that was ignored in Washington at the time but would cause great embarrassment to American policy-makers in the decades to come as critics wondered how the United States could demand non-intervention in the Western Hemisphere while denying other powers the right to declare their ‘Monroe Doctrines' in other parts of the world.

see Chapters 8 and 9

During the Second World War such concerns worried relatively few. Helped by its easy access to Latin American raw materials, the United States was able to act as the ‘arsenal of democracy', as Roosevelt had called it already in 1940, and, as one of the ‘Big Three', it eventually emerged as the most powerful country in the world in 1945. Its neighbours to the south — with the exception of Argentina, which refused to break completely with Germany until less than a month before the end of the European war — found themselves taken for granted as a resource base for the Allied war effort.

Such obvious American dominance notwithstanding, it would have been difficult for the United States simply to revert to its old pattern of domination and intervention in 1945. One of Roosevelt’s favourite themes in planning for a post­war world was the reshaping of the League of Nations into a more effective international organization in which the United States would play a key role. When it came down to translating such internationalism to the Western Hemisphere, however, a clash over internationalism and regionalism was inevitable. In 1919 the opponents of the League of Nations in the United States had insisted that American membership in the League contravened the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. In 1945 the Roosevelt administration was determined to avoid giving such an opposition a leg to stand on.

These issues and the future of inter-American relations in general were dis­cussed in February 1945 at a pan-American conference in Chapultepec, Mexico. By declaring that any attack on any American state was an attack on them all, the Act of Chapultepec represented the first step towards a post-war military alliance in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, the Act declared that such arrangements would be formalized after the war ended. Later in the year, in San Francisco, all Latin American countries — including Argentina, which had finally declared war on Germany in March 1945 — participated in the formation of the United Nations (UN).

United Nations (UN)

An international organization established after the Second World War to replace the League of Nations.

It was in San Francisco that the question over the seeming conflict between regionalism and internationalism — the Monroe Doctrine and the UN — was solved in a way that gave America’s hallowed foreign policy doctrine a new lease of life. Originally, the UN and its Security Council were to have strong powers over regional issues. The problem with this for the Monroe Doctrine and American dominance over the Western Hemisphere was obvious. As one member of the American delegation in San Francisco, the future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, put it, having a UN with universal powers would mean that a non­American power such as the USSR or Britain would be given the ability ‘to veto American regional action in the Western Hemisphere’. The counter-argument, however, reflected the growing concern over the post-war designs of one of America’s key allies in the war. According to Leo Paslovsky, a Russian-born American who was a key adviser on UN matters to the State Department, weakening the UN’s ability to play a role in regional affairs ‘would be tantamount to throwing all Europe into the hands of the Soviet Union, and would break the world up into regional units’.

Rio Treaty (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance)

Signed on 2 September 1947, and originally ratified by all twenty-one American republics. Under the treaty, an armed attack or threat of aggression against a signatory nation, whether by a member nation or some other power, will be considered an attack against all.

After much bargaining and brainstorming both within the delegation and with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Britain and the Soviet Union), the ‘regionalists’ got their wish. The approved UN Charter included four articles (51—54) that, while not explicitly mentioning Latin America or the Monroe Doctrine, effectively preserved the American ability to exercise preponderant influence in the Western Hemisphere without breaking the rules of the new world organization. That is, the four articles preserved the right of collective regional organizations to solve disputes and revert to individual or collective self-defence. By 1947, with the United States at its helm, the American republics concluded the Rio Treaty, a collective defence pact that became the model for many other military alliances formed by the United States in the first decade of the Cold War.