Roosevelt Corollary
Roosevelt stated that in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. was justified in exercising "international police power" to put an end to chronic unrest or wrongdoing in the Western Hemisphere.
In late 1902, Britain, Germany, and Italy imposed a naval blockade of several months against Venezuela after President Cipriano Castro refused to pay foreign debts and damages suffered by Europeans in a recent civil war.
[3] The dispute was referred to the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which concluded on 22 February 1904 that the blockading powers involved in the Venezuela crisis were entitled to preferential treatment in the payment of their claims.
The Corollary went towards ensuring that U.S. interests abroad were protected from, in future, European powers using this ruling at The Hague as justification for military action and/or occupation in Central and Latin America.
If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States.
So what Roosevelt does here, by redefining the Monroe Doctrine, turns out to be very historical, and it leads the United States into a period of confrontation with peoples in the Caribbean and Central America, that was an imperative part of American imperialism.[10]U.S.
President Herbert Hoover also helped to move the U.S. away from the imperialist tendencies of the Roosevelt Corollary by embarking on good-will tours, withdrawing troops from Nicaragua and Haiti, and abstaining from intervening in the internal affairs of neighboring countries.
[14] In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt further renounced interventionism and established his "Good Neighbor policy" that led to the annulment of the Platt Amendment by the Treaty of Relations with Cuba in 1934, and the negotiation of compensation for Mexico's nationalization of foreign-owned oil assets in 1938.
Indeed, leaving unchallenged the emergence of dictatorships like that of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba,[15] Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and François Duvalier in Haiti were each considered to be "Frankenstein dictators" due to the mishandlings of the American occupations in the countries.
[16] In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles invoked the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary at the Tenth Pan-American Conference in Caracas, denouncing the intervention of Soviet communism in Guatemala.
Veeser sees it as a part of the transition into the progressive era of American politics, with Roosevelt working towards combining U.S. foreign policy goals with private economic activity abroad, as seen with the SDIC in the Dominican Republic.
[8] Maass is equally complimentary of the role played by the Roosevelt Corollary, which he sees as being an updated version of the Monroe Doctrine suited to the modern circumstances of global imperialism.
[3] Although he acknowledges that it wasn’t necessarily a foregone conclusion, the political, economic, and military climate in the Americas at the beginning of the twentieth century made a declaration from the U.S. vital if they were to become the main police power of the Western Hemisphere and ward off European intervention in what they deemed their territory.
