End of the Monroe Doctrine.

On November 18, 2012, Secretary of State John Kerry announced the end of the Monroe Doctrine in a speech given to the Inter-American Dialogue. He claimed that it was no longer the United States' policy to intervene in the politics of other countries in Latin America. The original Monroe Doctrine was laid out in a speech given by former president James Munroe in his seventh annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. It was first used to protect lands in the Western Hemisphere from colonization by European powers and then to conquer the American West and Southwest in a grand effort to acquire land in North America and territories in South America. Although originally limited to refer to countries in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine was invoked for use during many future interventions in other countries. The cornerstone of Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine assured US dominance on the international political sphere. It was later used by extension as the de facto reason to intervene in the affairs of countries around the world, to bring democracy and the American way to other cultures, and to stop the empire-building aspirations of Germany during World Wars I and II and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The assumption was that American ideology should be spread to other misguided cultures that could be changed to follow the American way. In the 2010s, President Barack Obama substantially reduced US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also claimed in his foreign policy speech in May 2014 that the greatest threat to US interests was terrorism, a nebulous enemy that was not contained by the borders of nation-states or hemispheres. Obama changed the focus of US foreign intervention from direct use of the US military in other countries to aiding forces sympathetic to US policies in other countries in fighting terrorist networks. A portion of Secretary of State John Kerry's speech speech follows: