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Monroe Doctrine
(the Venezuelan Crisis and the Roosevelt Corollary)
America fought its war of independence not only to be rid of British rule, but also free of other European influences. Europe in those days was not the tidy union of stable nations sharing a common interest in peace and prosperity, as we may find today. It was instead made up of monarchies and principalities endlessly warring with each other over matters the new American nation wanted no part of. America desired to keep such quarrels away from the New World.
By 1823, some European colonies in South America, influenced by the American Revolution, had either obtained their independence from their mother country Spain or were close to it. America feared European attempts to recolonize these newly independent South American nations or otherwise meddle in their affairs, which would lead to a continuation of European squabbling and wars, but now would be fought on the territory of the New World.
To deal with this, President James Monroe, one of our Founding Fathers, in an otherwise routine message to Congress on December 20, 1823, stated the American position that North and South America no longer were available for European colonization. The purpose was the keep European interference away from the New World and far away from the United States. North and South America were thereafter considered to be within America’s sphere of influence, where European governments had to accept America’s paramount interest and subordinate their own prerogatives to it. This principle, to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, became a cornerstone of American foreign policy and has come to stand for American opposition to any foreign interference in the New World.
In 1865, thinking America was too engaged in its Civil War to forcefully oppose an attempt to establish a European monarchy in Mexico, France established a puppet emperor, Maximilian, in Mexico. The United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine to oppose it. Almost a century later, in 1962, President Kennedy relied on the Monroe Doctrine to oppose Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba. Today, not quite 200 years after President Monroe enunciated it, the Monroe Doctrine remains a living and crucial part of our nation’s foreign policy.
Venezuelan Crisis
By the end of 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt had been President for only about a year, the United States was faced with a crisis in the South American nation of Venezuela. The Venezuelan dictator, Cipriano Castro, had borrowed a great deal of money from British and German lenders and was unable to pay it back. Binding arbitration was proposed to find a way to pay the creditors, but the Venezuelan president rejected this. Their patience wearing thin, Great Britain and Germany warned the United States that coercion of Venezuela was contemplated. The American secretary of state, John Hay, appeared not to object so long as no Venezuelan territory was occupied on a permanent basis. He received assurances this was not the intention. But the President, while generally in sympathy with the plight of the unpaid lenders, was distrustful of German assurances.
Meanwhile, the two European countries, taking reassurance from Secretary Hay and recalling statements by Roosevelt before he became President that suggested foreign lenders were entitled to take reasonable steps to collect debts properly owed them, sent warships into Venezuelan waters. Still unpersuaded that the situation was desperate, Castro continued to refuse arbitration. Whereupon the British and German ships attacked and sank several Venezuelan gunboats and blockaded five of the country’s ports.
Now himself alert to the danger such action posed to American interests in South America, President Roosevelt took steps to discourage the Europeans from going too far. In a private meeting with the German ambassador, he made it clear the United States would intervene militarily if it looked like Germany was using the Venezuelan debt as a pretext for acquiring territory there. At the same time, he sent a large part of the American fleet to the Caribbean for “training maneuvers.” In the end, owing to a British public unenthusiastic about a joint military adventure with the Germans and German hesitation to expose its small fleet off the coast of Venezuela to the much larger American force there, both countries and Venezuela accepted the arbitration now forcefully demanded of them by the Americans, and the crisis passed.
America had kept the Europeans out, but the Monroe Doctrine worked only awkwardly to effect this. Nevertheless, its core canon - European powers no longer could acquire territory in the Western Hemisphere - had been protected.
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
In 1904, the Dominican Republic, an independent nation sharing the island of Hispanola with Haiti, was in financial trouble, as Venezuela had been in two years earlier. Its government, also controlled by an irresponsible dictator, had borrowed money from Europe, but could not pay it back. Its European creditors, this time France, Germany and Italy, were threatening to send in their armed forces to take over the country for so long as was necessary to pay themselves what they were owed. And again it was made clear to President Roosevelt that financial lapses by countries in the Americas could be used by Europeans to acquire influence over them and recreate what would be in effect colonial status for them.
But when the Dominican president asked the American government to establish a protectorate for his country - a dramatic step - President Roosevelt hesitated. Instead, he enunciated what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. “Chronic wrongdoing” by a Western Hemisphere nation would justify the “exercise of an international police power” by the United States to intervene in that nation’s affairs in order to protect that nation’s and America’s own interests. Putting it another way, America would not permit Europeans to come into the Western Hemisphere as creditors, only to remain as colonizers or occupiers.
Although justified as a logical extension on the Monroe Doctrine - and to the extent its premise that fiscal irresponsibility by a nation can lead to foreign influence as great as would colonizing can be squared with the reason for the Monroe Doctrine in the first place - the Roosevelt Corollary was a leap forward. Now action the United States would not permit by a European power it could itself take, i.e., intervene in the affairs of Western Hemisphere nations. And in fact, that is just what America did in the Dominican Republic. It took control of the nation’s customs, and used the money collected to pay the Venezuelan debts.
It should be recognized that the Roosevelt Corollary, later used to justify America sending its Marines to Nicaragua in 1911 and Haiti in 1915, would never really cause friction between the United States and the European countries against which on its face it was directed. But it would cause resentment in the Latin American nations it sought to protect.
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