Presidential Doctrines: An Introduction

"If you want war, nourish a doctrine," William Graham Sumner asserted in 1903. Sumner, one of America's leading public intellectuals, was writing in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, a conflict brought on by expansionists citing the Monroe Doctrine as grounds for forcing Spain out of Cuba. The words suited the moment, but they were also quite prescient, for while at that time American politics knew but the one presidential doctrine (Monroe's), during the next hundred years doctrines would multiply, and all would explicitly threaten or broadly imply the use of American military force. The articles in this special issue examine several presidential doctrines, starting with the Monroe Doctrine and ending with the Reagan Doctrine. Various issues emerge in the examination, the first involving what qualifies as a doctrine. Until the twentieth century, Monroe's was the only doctrine that bore the name of a president, but it was hardly the country's only doctrine--in the sense of a clearly articulated tenet of American foreign policy. Had anyone thought to apply the label to George Washington's farewell advice to the American people about avoiding permanent alliances, the "Washington Doctrine" would have been the oldest of American presidential doctrines. William McKinley could have been credited with a doctrine when John Hay articulated the Open Door policy during McKinley's first term. An insistence on America's neutral trading rights amid other countries' wars was a staple of American diplomacy from Washington to Woodrow Wilson. And even the first doctrine of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt's extension of the Monroe Doctrine, received the label only of "corollary" (although in the present issue it receives an article, by Serge Ricard). There are other problems in identifying presidential doctrines. If some doctrines-in-fact were not doctrines in name, the Nixon Doctrine, according to Jeffrey Kimball, was closer to the opposite: a doctrine in name rather than in fact. Chester Pach notes that the Reagan Doctrine was discovered by columnist Charles Krauthammer before it came to the attention of Reagan himself. Certain of the doctrines were concisely stated by their eponymous presidents at particular moments in time; thus Mark Gilderhus can cite the few sentences from James Monroe's 1823 annual message that constitute the Monroe Doctrine, and Dennis Merrill can quote the canonical expression of the Truman Doctrine from Truman's March 1947 speech requesting aid for Greece and Turkey. Yet even doctrines that are concisely identifiable can take time to be recognized as doctrines, as Gilderhus explains regarding the Monroe Doctrine. The nomenclature problem emerges in another respect as well. Starting with the Monroe Doctrine, standard practice has accorded presidents the named credit for the doctrines put forward during their administrations. But as Gilderhus indicates, the Monroe Doctrine should have been named for John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state who advocated and formulated the policy. Stephen Rabe reveals that what came to be called the Johnson Doctrine would have been called the Kennedy Doctrine had Kennedy not been assassinated mere days after asserting it. Presidential doctrines have ranged in breadth from the regional to the global and in duration from the fleeting to the essentially permanent. The Monroe Doctrine warned against European aggrandizement in the Western Hemisphere. The Roosevelt Corollary applied to the same area, adding a claim of right of U.S. military intervention against unruly Latin American regimes. The Eisenhower Doctrine focused on the Middle East, promising U.S. resistance to Communist encroachment. The Carter Doctrine was even more specific, zeroing in on the Persian Gulf as a region the United States would defend against Soviet expansion. The Truman Doctrine, by contrast, was global in its pledge to resist communism, and the Reagan Doctrine was equally unbounded in promising support for anti-Communist insurgencies. …