THE AMERICAS: Flocking Together

Just when everything seems to be going his way, Nikita Khrushchev has a habit of overreaching himself. Now he has obliged over Cuba. Until he brandished his rockets and mouthed his threats, the quarrel between the U.S. and Cuba met with a disquieting passivity in Latin America. Though governments might know better, their people generally side with Castro. Then Khrushchev proclaimed that any attack on Cuba would bring instant retaliation against the U.S. by Soviet intercontinental missiles. The Monroe Doc trine, he said, is dead, and should be buried “so that it should not poison the air by its decay.” At this point, 17 Latin American nations dropped their apathetic neutrality to side with the U.S. in mutual concern over a Soviet incursion in Latin America. The unilateral Monroe Doctrine was not dead after all; it has become the multilateral concern of the 21 members of the Organization of American States.

Oddly enough, it was a threat from Russia back in 1823 that led President James Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, to proclaim the original Monroe Doctrine, fencing off the hemisphere from European intervention.

Czar Alexander I, spreading his claims down the western coast of North America from the Bering Strait to Vancouver Is land, forbade all foreign ships to approach within “100 Italian miles” of shore on pain of confiscation. The U.S. put the world on notice that “the American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subject for further colonization.” Further concerned that the “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Prussia and Austria might launch a war to restore newly liberated Latin American nations to the Spanish throne, Madison and Adams warned that the U.S. would view interference as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the U.S.

For a nation so young and still so weak, such a stand was courageous and decidedly overambitious. “These United States of America,” snorted Austria’s Prince Metternich, “have astonished Europe by a new act of revolt, more unprovoked, fully as audacious and no less dangerous than the former”—meaning the American Revolution. But Lafayette called it “the best little bit of paper that God had ever permitted any man to give to the world.” Intervention License. Teddy Roosevelt amended the Monroe Doctrine to mean that continued disturbance in a Latin American country could force the U.S. to intervene to forestall intervention from Europe. Thus licensed for intervention, U.S. marines marched in and out of Caribbean capitals and customs houses to protect U.S. investments for nearly three decades. By the time of the Good Neighbor Policy, the doctrine was in bad repute. It has not been invoked since it was expanded to protect Greenland from German seizure in 1941.

But Khrushchev’s claim that Cuba was a Communist protectorate resurrected the Monroe Doctrine in a form close to the original. Eisenhower warned that “the U.S. will not permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international Communism in the Western Hemisphere.” Ike’s warning was unilateral, but as the State Department pointed out last week, the Monroe Doctrine has been built into joint policy by the nations of the Americas, in the OAS charter and the Rio Treaty of 1947.

Bad Neighbor Policy. Last week Peru called the OAS into session to consider convening the hemisphere’s foreign ministers to deal with “the problem of continental solidarity, the defense of the regional system and its democratic principles against any threat.” Argentina asked Cuba to disapprove publicly “any statement that may be construed as interference by an extracontinental power.” Castro charged that the OAS is a U.S. tool. He pointedly bypassed it to carry his own charges of U.S. “aggression” (for cutting Cuba’s sugar quota) to the U.N.

But Latin American nations were in no mood to be bypassed that way. In the Security Council, delegates from Argentina and Ecuador drew up a plan to confine U.N. discussion to presentation of charges by Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa and a rebuttal by U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, before referring the charges to the OAS, where they belong.

At the OAS, 17 of the 20 hemisphere nations—the only exceptions: Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico—supported Peru in calling together the foreign ministers to deal with the threat of Communist penetration through Cuba.

In doing so, they gave the U.S. its first real opportunity to prove the fairness of its own attitude towards Cuba and the firmness of its determination to keep Russia out of the Americas.