Latin America Is No Longer the ‘Backyard’ of the United States
Published |Updated
James Cooper
On Dec. 2, 1823, during his seventh annual message to Congress, later to be called the State of the Union address, President James Monroe provided the foreign policy position of the United States that would dominate the Western Hemisphere for the coming 200 years: The Americas were for the United States to influence and the United States only. The U.S. would view any interference by foreign powers — the Europeans who had once colonized the region — as a hostile act. Washington would tolerate no colonies, no puppet monarchs, nor any political influence from Europe.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt provided his eponymous Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to Congress, extending it to mean that the U.S. reserved the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of countries in the Americas as “the international police power.” While the Monroe Doctrine was meant to keep foreign powers out, the Roosevelt Corollary was used to justify the U.S. sending its military into countries around the region. The U.S. intervened in Mexico in 1914, in the Dominican Republic in 1904, in Nicaragua in 1911, and in Haiti in 1915.
Many more interventions ensued in the subsequent years. When the Soviet Union was constructing missile sites in Cuba in 1962, the U.S. government again invoked the Monroe Doctrine, albeit symbolically.
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