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President Trump’s new corollary to the Monroe doctrine will provide more triggers for forceful action in the Western Hemisphere, but the focus on Latin America could motivate the US toward more cooperation.

A little over a century ago, as the Old World was going up in flames during the Great War, Dr Alejandro Álvarez, a lawyer and diplomat who would later become the first and only Chilean to sit as a judge of the International Court of Justice, delivered a series of lectures at different American universities. The lectures, touching mainly on the teaching and practice of international law, were published in 1922 by the Division of International Law of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, featuring a preface by James Brown Scott (the American internationalist reportedly responsible for rehabilitating the Hispanic origins of international law).

In a lecture titled The New Monroe Doctrine and American Public Law, Álvarez revisited this much debated ideology in order to shed some light into its original meaning. Although admittedly articulated for posterity in the form of a speech delivered by US President James Monroe in 1823, Álvarez’s contention was that ‘The Monroe Doctrine is not, as generally believed (especially in this country [the US]), a personal policy of the United States, but an American international rule, professed and accepted by all the states of the New World’. It is, indeed, ‘an American continental doctrine’ and part of ‘American continental international law’, whose origins may be traced back to early Bolivarian Pan-Americanism.

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