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What especially galled the leaders of Europe's great powers was the audacity of the Monroe Doctrine, unbacked by any commensurate military power. In 1823, in its usual state of between-wars unpreparedness. the U.S. had virtually no standing Army and only a picayune Navy, consisting of five sloops of war.
The European powers, even those that became allies of the U.S., never accorded the Doctrine recognition. To this day it has no standing as a principle of international law. It remains a unilateral declaration, binding upon U.S. Presidents only as a traditional policy, and binding upon the rest of the world only to the extent that the world respects the U.S.'s power and determination to enforce it.
After Appomattox. Despite all the obvious obstacles—European hostility, U.S. unpreparedness, lack of legal force—the Monroe Doctrine, judged by the pragmatic verdict of history, has been an enormously successful policy. Since Monroe enunciated it, not a single Latin American state has lost its independence as a result of outright aggression from outside the hemisphere. In only two instances—aside from Castro's Cuba—did New World nations fall under European rule, even temporarily. Significantly, both exceptions occurred while the U.S. was preoccupied with its own Civil War. In 1861, at the invitation of the Dominican President, Spain declared that its former colony of Santo Domingo was once again under Spanish rule; and in 1863, with the help of Mexican royalists, France set up an Austrian prince as Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico. These adventures came to an end soon after Appomattox. The Spaniards got out of Santo Domingo in 1865. At the insistent prodding of U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward. France started withdrawing its troops from Mexico in 1866. and a year later Maximilian died before a Mexican firing squad.
The Monroe Doctrine guarded not only the independence of the Latin American states, but their territorial integrity too.
The violent march of European imperialism virtually bypassed Latin America. In the 1830s, Britain annexed the barren Falkland Islands, now claimed by Argentina, and added to its Central American colony of British Honduras some lands now claimed by Guatemala, but in both cases the territory taken was virtually uninhabited, and no Latin American state was exercising effective sovereignty.
The Deterrent Effect. The success of the doctrine was largely in its deterrent effect: its very existence tended to stop trouble before it happened. Not until the Spanish-American War (in which the Monroe Doctrine played only a negligible part) did Europeans really look upon the U.S. as a great power; but the U.S. was nevertheless formidable enough that nations with appetites for New World territory—Britain, France, Spain and later Germany—were wary of getting involved in a fight. Time and again, during the latter part of the 19th century. German admirals urged their government to take over sites for naval bases in the Caribbean; every time, cooler heads insisted that the inevitable clash with the U.S. was too high a price to pay.
In short, the Monroe Doctrine, as European leaders