David E. Sanger

And the real estate he has in mind here is pretty big.

It goes from Canada over to Greenland.

It runs down through the newly named Gulf of America.

through the Panama Canal, which, of course, he said we never should have given away, all the way down to the tip of Argentina.

And the president's idea here is that the United States should have complete and total dominance of the Western Hemisphere.

And so the president advocates in this document that we return to and expand on the Monroe Doctrine.

Now, at the risk of making some of our listeners shake in fear as they try to recall 11th grade history.

Absolutely.

We're slipping you the copy right now, Natalie.

The Monroe Doctrine, which dates back to 1823, declared that the Western Hemisphere would essentially be closed to European colonization.

The Europeans had to stay out of our territory, which was a pretty bold thing to say, but

for a country that was about 45 years old and barely had a navy at the time, right?

But over the following 200 years, we both expanded from and retreated from the Monroe Doctrine.

How so?

Well, Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 issued a Roosevelt corollary to this doctrine that basically said we reserve the right to intervene in Latin America if we see governments that are coming together that are not to our liking.

And we did exactly that, right?

We got involved in a civil uprising in Colombia and we ended up with the Panama Canal.

I mean, we did a whole bunch of actions up through the 1950s when the CIA was conducting coups in the region.

But then we turned away for a bit.

We had the Cold War.