Visiting a forgotten chapter in American history
Nowadays few Americans could identify what the Monroe Doctrine signifies. Named for the fifth US president, the point of the 1823 policy had been succinctly stated fifteen years earlier by the third, Thomas Jefferson: “The object... must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere.” Sean Mirski terms the Doctrine “revolutionary” in his impressively erudite We May Dominate the World, an astonishingly comprehensive and stylishly written account of US foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere during the years 1860 to 1945. Calling the period a “missing chapter” in American history, he rightly asserts that “the story of the United States’s rise to regional hegemony has not received anywhere near the attention it deserves.
