5 Times the US Invoked the Monroe Doctrine

When James Monroe was elected president in 1816, the United States had only been an independent nation for 40 years. It had also recently emerged from the War of 1812, a second confrontation with Britain that tested American sovereignty. European powers like Great Britain, Spain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia posed a threat of recolonizing or claiming new territory throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Former Spanish colonies in Latin America were particularly vulnerable. From 1810 to 1822, 15 Latin American colonies declared independence from the Spanish empire, including Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela. Undefended, these countries could be reabsorbed by Spain or colonized by other European powers.

In an 1823 address to Congress, Monroe boldly declared the Western Hemisphere was off limits to European colonization.

“As a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for colonization by any European powers,” said Monroe.

When Monroe issued his declaration—later called the “Monroe Doctrine”—the U.S. didn’t yet have the military power to enforce it, but the policy’s significance would grow over the centuries.

“In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was much more of an aspirational goal than it was a declaration of capacity,” says Britta Crandall, a political science professor at Davidson College who specializes in Latin America. “This was a nascent United States really hoping to keep colonial powers at bay, both in terms of the region as well as its own borders.”

Over the past 200 years, several U.S. presidents have expanded and reinterpreted the scope of the Monroe to address potential threats, including communism and drug trafficking. Here are five times when the U.S. invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 1902, a fleet of British, German and Italian gunboats set up a blockade of Venezuela’s ports after the nation defaulted on its debts to European lenders. In the decades since the Monroe Doctrine was first issued, the U.S. had grown into a substantial military power. President Theodore Roosevelt, as part of his foreign policy to “speak softly, but carry a big stick,” issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that gave the U.S. “international police power” over the Western Hemisphere.

“In terms of Venezuela,” says Crandall, “Roosevelt basically said to Europe, ‘We’re taking over. We’ll make sure Venezuela pays back its debts, but you guys have to go home. We’re in charge.’ But there was more to the Roosevelt Corollary. It shifted the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine from ‘Europe, stay out!’ to ‘We, the United States, have the right to go in.’”

Addressing Congress in 1904, Roosevelt explained why the U.S. intervened in Venezuela two years earlier, as well as Panama in 1903 and Cuba in 1904.

“In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela and Panama...we have acted in our own interest, as well as in the interest of humanity at large,” Roosevelt said. “...[I]n the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

Subsequent U.S. presidents used the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to justify incursions into Latin America to depose elected leaders in Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

During the Cold War, combating the spread of Soviet-style communism dominated U.S. foreign policy. From the 1950s into the 1980s, U.S. presidents invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a justification for multiple anti-communist interventions across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Many of these interventions were covert operations orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, Crandall says, including CIA-backed coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973). Both of which resulted in the installation of brutal dictators.

Cuba became a prime target for U.S. intervention after Fidel Castro’s 1958 communist revolution. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was a CIA-sponsored attempt to overthrow Castro’s government that failed miserably and ratcheted up tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“The Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t have taken place without the Bay of Pigs invasion,” says Crandall, who co-authored (with Russell Crandall) “Our Hemisphere”? The United States in Latin America, from 1776 to the Twenty-First Century. “That’s an example of a real global crisis emerging from a smaller-scale regional intervention.”

After decades of covert CIA operations to combat communism in Latin America, the 1983 intervention in Grenada was a full-fledged U.S. military operation aimed at ousting the Marxist leader of the small Caribbean nation.

In 1979, a lawyer named Maurice Bishop led a Marxist revolution in Grenada and established the People’s Revolutionary Government. The new government received critical support from Cuba, which sent hundreds of engineers to Grenada to help build a new international airport to encourage tourism.

In 1983, fellow Marxists arrested and executed Bishop, then installed a new communist leader. At the time, Grenada was home to a medical school attended by roughly 1,000 American students. When protests and riots broke out in the streets, President Ronald Reagan invoked the Monroe Doctrine in order to safeguard American lives in Grenada and rid the island of Cuban and communist influences.

Operation Urgent Fury was a U.S.-led military operation to evacuate students, restore peace and replace Grenada’s revolutionary government with freely elected leaders. The eight-day campaign in 1983 was criticized for poor planning and execution, but it achieved its goals. Grenada’s Marxist government collapsed and was replaced by one the United States considered more acceptable.

Reagan called the invasion of Grenada the first successful “rollback” of communist influence since the start of the Cold War.

Manuel Noriega, the longtime dictator of Panama, was a close ally of the United States during its decades-long fight against Cuba and other communist regimes in Latin America. But Noriega was also a corrupt drug smuggler who brutally cracked down on his political opposition.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush decided it was time to sever the relationship with Noriega, who had become a political liability. More than 24,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of aircraft participated in Operation Just Cause, which succeeded in arresting and extraditing Noriega on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering.

Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. justified the Panama invasion by arguing Noriega’s corrupt regime posed a direct threat both to the safety of American citizens living there and to the security of the Panama Canal, a critical shipping lane for the United States.

“Noriega had threatened multiple times to take over the operation of the canal,” Crandall says. “That made a clearer case for a Monroe Doctrine intervention, because of the uniquely Panamanian risk of the canal falling into the wrong hands.”

In 2026, President Donald Trump cited the Monroe Doctrine (or “Donroe Doctrine,” as he called his updated version) as justification for the arrest and extradition of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife on drug trafficking charges. Maduro and his wife have pleaded not guilty as they await trial.

According to the Trump administration’s national security strategy, the U.S. military action in Venezuela was part of the “Trump Corollary,” an extension of the Monroe Doctrine aimed at “restor[ing] American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”