In the 1820s the United States’ immediate neighborhood looked different than some
years earlier. Many states in the South of the continent had freed themselves from Spanish rule and were welcomed by Americans as sister republics. But their new independence seemed threatened by possible interventions of the Holy Alliance (Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia) and British efforts to extend its power into the vacuum. Furthermore Russian explorers were active in the Pacific Northwest and the czar demanded exclusive rights for his country from Alaska to California. It appeared necessary to take precautions against this menacing potential of interven- tion.

   On December 2, 1823 President James Monroe delivered his annual address to Congress. He formulated

„a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved
that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they
have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects
for future colonization by any European power. (...) [To the European Powers
we] declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their
system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and
safety.“[27]

   In return he promised the European powers that the United States would not inter- fere in their internal affairs or the existing overseas territories and would recognize their governments - although essentially different - as legitimate and establish friendly relations with them.[28]

   German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler emphasizes the equivocal character of the Monroe- Doctrine as an isolation from European intervention in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere but being to the same degree an isolation for an extension of American influence in that part of the world. The Monroe-Doctrine has to be taken out of its historical context and considered as a document of geostrategic thinking that expressed a long term objective of the USA: establishing a U.S. entitlement over a sphere of interest of its own.[29]

    But at the time of its declaration the unilateral Monroe-Doctrine must have estranged the European powers. As regulated in the Constitution, the United States had no standing army, their naval power was negligible and all of its energies were consumed in pushing the frontier westward. Jürgen Heideking concludes, „den europäischen Regierungen blieb natürlich die Diskrepanz  zwischen rhetorischem Anspruch und dem tatsächlichen politisch-militärischen Durchsetzungsvermögen der Amerikaner nicht verborgen.“ (transl.: the discrepancy between rhetorical demand and actual political-military potential did, of course, not remain obscure to
the european governments. -B.Wahler)[30]

   However, Americans had drafted a warning to the world that they would never tolerate any intervention of non-hemispherical powers and  had interwoven their own fate with that of the Latin American nations by expanding the notion of ‘U.S. national security’ to the entire continent.