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statesmen and scholars—the Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed by the U.S.
and the Latin American states at Rio in 1947, practically repealed the Monroe Doctrine. Under that treaty, "an armed attack by any State against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States." The argument is that the basic purpose of the Doctrine—safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of New World nations against aggression from outside the hemisphere—has been taken over by the multilateral Rio Pact, rendering the unilateral Doctrine obsolete.
Not so. As a declaration of national policv, the Monroe Doctrine rested upon the U.S.'s right of self-defense. The U.S., as a sovereign nation, retains that right, and it is explicitly recognized in the Rio Pact. U.S. policymakers have made it unmistakably clear that the U.S. has not surrendered that right. The late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that "no member of the Rio Pact gives up what the Charter of the United Nations calls the inherent right of self-defense; that right is reserved." President Eisenhower made the same point in relation to the Organization of American States: "I think that the Monroe Doctrine has by no means been supplanted." The U.S.'s commitment to the OAS, he said, did not prevent the U.S. from looking after its own interests "when the chips are finally down." And last year, shortly after the tragic failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy declared: "Let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the inter-American doctrine of noninterference merely conceals or excuses a policy of nonaction—if the nations of this hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside Communist penetration—then I want it clearly understood that this Government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations, which are to the security of our own nation." Multilateral Flypaper. So the Rio Pact did not erase the Monroe Doctrine. It only tangled the doctrine up in a lot of multilateral flypaper. Before the U.S. can invoke its own Monroe Doctrine, it must theoretically exhaust the possibilities of action under the Rio Pact. But the Rio Pact machinery would be an awkward means of coping even with overt armed attack; and it has proved to be hopeless as a way of grappling with Communist penetration by subversion, infiltration and revolution.
The U.S. did deal with Communist infiltration in Guatemala under President Jacobo Arbenz in the 19505. But in so doing, the U.S. bypassed the inter-American machinery. At the Inter-American Conference in Caracas in 1954, Secretary Dulles persuaded the delegates to pass a resolution declaring that domination "of any American state by the international Communist movement" would call for an inter-American meeting "to consider the adoption of measures in accordance with existing treaties" (Arbenz' Guatemala voted against; Argentina and Mexico abstained). But no inter-American action followed these words; what toppled Arbenz from power was an invasion led by Guatemalan exiles and covertly sponsored by the U.S.
Communist Cuba is a far graver challenge to the U.S. and