Who Rules the World? Reframings

by Noam Chomsky

The State Department Policy Planning Staff warned that “the primary danger we face in Castro is … in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries. … The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the United States, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half”—that is, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, when the United States declared its intention of dominating the hemisphere.15 The immediate goal at the time of the doctrine was to conquer Cuba, but that could not be achieved because of the power of the British enemy. Still, that grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, informed his colleagues that over time Cuba would fall into our hands by “the laws of political gravitation,” as an apple falls from the tree.16 In brief, U.S. power would increase and Britain’s would decline.