Smoke of the Shore, 53rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I consider a walk of five to six miles a "Monroe," named for the fifth president of the United Snakes. My Monroe Doctrine is to walk at least five miles every other day, although between the cold weather, early sunsets, and recent Rohatsu practice period, I've only been getting four-mile Madisons in lately. 

The other Monroe Doctrine was outlined by James Monroe in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. Monroe, a Virginia planter, owned as many as 250 slaves throughout his lifetime. He inherited some of the slaves from his father and worked them on his family's plantations, and some were brought to the White House with him to work as household servants. Some of the slaves remained in bondage even after his death. He did support the American Colonization Society and its goal of colonizing freed slaves in Africa, but the plan was not a commitment to freeing his own slaves. 

In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling. Beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to claim their independence and in just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had previously restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. 

As president, Monroe and his advisors worried that the newly independent nations in South and Central America could revert to alliances with the European colonial powers, severing their new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting their allegiances back toward Europe. In his message, Monroe warned that “the American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The United States would consider any attempt by Europe to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. 

In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt established what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He noted that there was no judicial way of enforcing international laws, and so military powers have to serve as international police. Such policing included protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention and also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose unwillingness to support U.S. goals "violated the rights of the United Snakes or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” 

Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries and established a U.S. sphere of influence over the Americas. However, the two world wars in Europe and the Pacific during the 20th Century illustrated the danger of spheres of influence, in which less powerful countries are controlled by regional superpowers, and the emergence of nuclear weapons and ICBMs rendered the embrace of localized spheres of influence quaint.  

The Stable Genius' Deviant of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine promises not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to reward and encourage the region’s governments to align with U.S. principles and strategy. The Stable Genius says he will promote stability in the region by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then, he says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.” Already, he's blasting suspected drug-running boats out of the water and seized an oil tanker off the Venezuela coast, and has announced his intention to keep the oil seized.  

The U.S.-led international system and pacts such as NATO have kept the world relatively safe since World War II. But the antiquated notion of spheres of influence, a system in place before World War II,  is once again favored by Vladimir Putin, among others. The Stable Genius is abandoning Ukraine to the whims of Russia as that's not in the United Snakes' perceived sphere of influence, and he has recalled the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, the world's largest aircraft carrier and the largest warship ever constructed, from the Middle East to the Caribbean. The military buildup in the Caribbean region is the largest unrelated to disaster relief since 1994, when Bill Clinton sent two aircraft carriers and more than 20,000 troops to Haiti.

This isn't going to end well.