James Monroe, call your office — or, better yet, ring President Biden — for it looks like Communist China, intensifying a competition for control over the South Pole, is building in Antarctica a satellite base that could serve as a surveillance hub in the very hemisphere that the Monroe Doctrine was intended to protect.

China is getting help from Argentina, now governed by a left-of-center regime. The Chinese, the director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ryan Berg, tells the Sun, are leveraging their relationship with Buenos Aires to advance their interests in the South Atlantic. 

“Satellite bases can prove critical to the collection of intelligence and communication with advanced weapons, such as hypersonic glide vehicles,” Mr. Berg says. “There are clear military dimensions to some of this infrastructure, making it dual-use in nature.”

It’s not merely the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that’s being ignored. There is also the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which has been signed by all countries that have operations on the southernmost continent. They include the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Chile, and Argentina. The scroll says there should be “no acts or activities” that could be identified as “asserting, supporting, or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica.” 

“We can’t just go with the floe,” is how it was put in 2020 in a publication of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. A senior fellow there, Anthony Bergin, and his co-author say that Beijing may be seeking a “territorial claim.” Communist China’s activities in the past have “demonstrated Beijing’s willingness to ignore international law when it identifies a compelling strategic reason to do so,” they write.

Beijing currently has four Antarctic research stations and is building a fifth in the region of the Ross Sea. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Communist China sees “near-term economic opportunities in Antarctica,” which include a fishery and tourism. In the past, the Beijing government has expressed interest in exploring for oil and minerals there, and in building the first nuclear-powered icebreaker.

Given Beijing’s “track record in moving rapidly on a broad front,” Mr. Bergin says, the member countries of the Antarctic Treaty must be “prepared to respond to a rapid increase in the speed and scale of actions” of Communist China’s actions in Antarctica.

Since 1980, Communist China has failed to report the “extent of its military activities in Antarctica” and the military use of its scientific projects, a professor at Gateway Antarctica, Anne-Marie Brady, has warned as far back as six years ago. “China’s military activities in Antarctica have the potential to shift the strategic balance that has maintained peace in the Asia–Pacific, as well as in Antarctica, for nearly 70 years,” Ms. Brady said.

Communist China’s new satellite base would be built at Beijing’s Zhongshan scientific research center, situated in East Antarctica, near Prydz Bay, facing the Indian Ocean. A state-owned space contractor, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, would build the base. The project would be overseen by Communist China’s National Satellite Ocean Application Service. 

As yet, the Antarctic Treaty is not prepared to deal with the current geopolitical situation, a professor of strategic studies at Deakin University, Elizabeth Buchanan, says. Beijing is well aware of the gray areas in the treaty, and “has its eyes on the entire continent,” she added.

President Xi has been pressuring Buenos Aires to build a new base at Argentina’s southern tip, Tierra del Fuego. The military base would allow Beijing to control the passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and monitor communications, Argentinian press outlets report. Beijing already has one station in Argentina’s Patagonia, which has stirred concerns among Western officials.

Since 2002, Communist China has launched eight satellites into orbit, with a ninth scheduled to be launched this year. Its global network of ground stations has raised alarms from some nations that claim they could be used for espionage. 

All this is coming into focus not only in the wake of the tumult over Communist China’s espionage balloon, which America brought down last week off the Carolinas, but as America prepares to mark in December the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, which the American National Archives call the “the best known U.S. policy toward the Western Hemisphere.”

Monroe spoke up for countries in the Western hemisphere whose independence America has acknowledged. In such cases, he told Congress, America “could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

The doctrine itself was articulated by Monroe in his annual message to Congress delivered in December 1823. At the time, the Archives note was a warning to European nations that America would not tolerate further colonization or what the Archives characterize as “puppet monarchs.” It has been derided by weaker American administrations and more broadly interpreted by the stronger American presidents.

They have included, say, Theodore Roosevelt, who used it when in 1904 he sent Marines into Santo Domingo. Under the cover of the Monroe Doctrine, Marines went into Nicaragua in 1911 and Haiti in 1915. The doctrine was invoked — “symbolically,” the National Archives say — by the Kennedy administration during an attempt by the Soviet Union to put nuclear-armed missiles into Communist Cuba.

In 2013, President Obama’s state secretary, John Kerry, suggested that the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” That was in a speech to the Organization of American States at Washington, D.C. Presidents pushing a more robust foreign policy, though, have taken an opposing view.

One of President Trump’s national security advisers, John Bolton, asserted what the Atlantic called “a right to intervene in the region to prevent the growth of Russian and Chinese influence.”