Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s trusted ally, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, recounted in his 1940 report on a mission to Europe that Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had informed him when they met March 1, 1940 that Nazi Germany’s aim in Europe was to secure “nothing more… than what the United States possessed through the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere:” recognition of Germany’s “sphere of influence” and “world position,” and access to “the raw materials she could not herself produce.”
Welles corrected Ribbentrop: the Monroe Doctrine did not entitle the United States “to exercise some form of hegemony in the Western Hemisphere or to intervene in one way or the other in the affairs of our neighbors,” as some previous U.S. administrations had claimed, he told him. The Doctrine “had never implied the exclusion by the United States of non-American powers from having the same trade relations with the other American Republics such as we ourselves possessed, and on equal terms. It had never rightfully implied the assumption of any political control by us over our neighbors.” Under FDR, the Monroe Doctrine had been restored to its original intent in which “the United States was an equal partner in a partnership of twenty-one partners,” said Welles.
Now to today:
On August 11, Marco Rubio’s State Department released a five-and-a-half-minute video, in English and Spanish, portraying “The Monroe Doctrine” in the same terms as Ribbentrop used to justify the Hitler onslaught across Europe. Narrated by the U.S. Ambassador to Panama, Kevin Marino Cabrera, the video piles up lies about the doctrine’s original intent, to then assert proudly that under Teddy Roosevelt, the “U.S. stepped onto the world stage as a genuine imperial power"—a point illustrated with the infamous cartoon of Teddy waving his big stick as he strides over the map of the Caribbean. The climax of this paean to imperial force is a celebration of the January 2026 invasion of Venezuela to seize its President Nicolás Maduro (and Venezuela’s oil), by showing President Trump declaring at that time that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
