Gordon Carrera

And that one historian who's the expert on the Monroe Doctrine who's now like, yes, everyone wants to talk to me.

So the Monroe Doctrine, David, reminding you of your history class, was not a formal treaty.

It was four paragraphs within James Monroe, President, a message to Congress, December the 2nd, 1823, about...

telling effectively those pesky other countries to stay out of the American Western hemisphere to keep clear.

It's interesting because of course, America is a pretty new state at that point, hasn't got much of a military.

Exactly.

Which is why it's good that you've got a Brit explaining the Monroe Doctrine.

But to be fair, it was only partly about keeping the pesky Brits out.

It's also trying to keep the Spanish out of Latin America.

And also, interestingly enough, I hadn't realized this, keeping the Russians out

out of what's the Pacific Northwest, obviously, you know, kind of close to Russia, famously, that part of the US, and trying to kind of prevent all these other countries ganging up or picking out bits of the Americas while America was kind of building its power.

And it basically said, keep clear, this is our backyard.

And I mean, it's...

It's interesting because we were talking about it before the break as well, that this idea that this is America's backyard and it has the ability to assert power, that is something that we've seen in the past.

If you think about it, we saw it, as you said, in Guatemala in 1954, there's a coup.

You see it with

You know, the attempts, which we've done on the pod, to get rid of Castro in Cuba, which failed.

But, you know, there's still that sense of we are not having a communist state Cuba in our backyard.

And you have the kind of Bay of Pigs.

And, you know, this wasn't just something from 1823.