Episode summary
Greg Grandin on How the Monroe Doctrine Became the Donroe Doctrine | Odd Lots
Odd Lots
· · 41 min · Hosts: Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway · Guests: Greg Grandin
Summary
Greg Grandin argues that the Monroe Doctrine began as a cautious, contradictory 1823 statement and only later hardened into a tool for U.S. power in the hemisphere. He says it combined anti-colonial language, a vague claim that events in the Western Hemisphere could affect the “peace and happiness of the United States,” and enough ambiguity to satisfy isolationists, expansionists, and commercial interests at once.
Grandin traces how later presidents turned that ambiguity into doctrine in practice: Grover Cleveland pushed toward absolute hemispheric sovereignty, Theodore Roosevelt used the Roosevelt Corollary to justify “international police power,” and Franklin Roosevelt reversed course in 1933 by renouncing intervention and recognizing Latin American sovereignty. In Grandin’s telling, that shift strengthened U.S. influence by making it more focused and politically durable.
He links the Venezuela crisis to a newer, more explicit version of America First nationalism. Grandin says Trump’s approach lacks a larger governing ideology and instead seeks tribute, spectacle, and unilateral leverage. He sees precedents for U.S. interventions and arrests in Latin America, but says the current mix of sanctions, oil demands, and vague “reconstruction” plans is unusual because it is so openly transactional.
Key takeaways
- Grandin says the Monroe Doctrine was never a clean legal instrument; it began as a short, cautious passage in Monroe’s 1823 State of the Union and only later became doctrine through power.
- He says Theodore Roosevelt turned the doctrine into a broader police power, while FDR’s 1933 renunciation of intervention actually strengthened U.S. influence by focusing it.
- Grandin argues Trump’s Venezuela policy is less a coherent strategy than a demand for tribute, with oil, migration, gangs, and drugs used as shifting justifications.
- He says the most relevant precedent is not Iraq but earlier Latin American interventions, especially the arrests of Manuel Noriega and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
- Grandin says international law is best understood as a moral arena shaped by power, not an enforceable equalizer among states.
Notable quotes
“It was never voted on. Uh, no court ratified it. It didn't actually assume the status of doctrine until a couple of decades after it was pronounced in 1823”
“the United States would interpret events that happened anywhere in the Western Hemisphere on how they bear on the quote peace and happiness of the United States”
“Theodore Roosevelt when he was president he expanded the doctrine with his own coralary to what he called international police power to suppress chronic wrongdoing in Latin America”
“Roosevelt's conceding to Latin America's demand to give up the right to intervention basically tilted the playing field to the left in Latin America”
“I think what is unprecedented is this idea that we are just going to accept oil tribute from Venezuela”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts, radio, news. — Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway
And I'm Joe Eisenthal. Joe, I love doing American history episodes in part because I feel like my own knowledge of American history is fairly simplistic and I do remember a huge culture shock when I went from high school to college and I think I told this story before. So I went to college, university in London and I had always heard the American Revolution described as the American Revolution, right?
And then as soon as I get to the UK,
I What do they call I never Yeah. What do they call it? — Yeah, they call it I think the American War of Independence, which has a different tonality to it. — Definitely. — But it definitely demonstrates just how subjective tensions, conflicts, and policies can actually be in history depending on who you're talking to. and we are going to talk about not just a pretty subjective American policy but one that has been reinterpreted and amended many many times in the past.
Right? So obviously for us this has been a Venezuela week and there's all sorts of immediate questions that are sort of most directly relevant to we've been talking about the market elements mostly. We talked about oil, we talked about the uh sovereign debt etc.
But then there's all these questions of course about international law and what is legitimate and what is illegitimate and I mean I couldn't even believe the headline when I saw it that we had arrested I know this I I I was flabber I just the idea that that we had arrested a head of state from another country is just absolutely gobsmacking and then people talk about international law and then they say does international law even exist and so forth and what it feels like to some extent truly uncharted territory.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- monroe doctrine
- trump foreign policy
- latin america intervention
- venezuela
- american dominance
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Venezuela stock exchange
- Big Oil
Watch the episode
Watch “Greg Grandin on How the Monroe Doctrine Became the Donroe Doctrine | Odd Lots” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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