History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (37 page)

At the time, Monroe had almost no ability to enforce his word. No multinational treaty, summit, or agreement gave him the authority to proclaim hegemony in the region. Militarily, Europe collectively had more than forty times the army and navy he did. In addition, the only immediate threats to U.S. security in the region were buccaneers (in Monroe’s tenure alone, American merchant vessels suffered more than two thousand pirate attacks in the Caribbean). But the proclamation contained a democratic air to it, while simultaneously demonstrating American bravado. It made for good print. For later generations, it also made for aggressive policy, as presidents adopted the “M
ONROE
D
OCTRINE
” as if it were irrefutable international law. And therein lies its impact, as the primary justification for a litany of questionable endeavors.
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James Polk’s administration used it to swallow Texas, supposedly to block Britain from taking the territory for itself. Rutherford B. Hayes invoked it in opposition to France’s attempt to build a canal across Panama. The doctrine was a cornerstone to William McKinley’s declaration of war against Spain in 1898. Woodrow Wilson referred to it when he sent occupation forces into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Panama. Not surprisingly, on the doctrine’s one-hundredth birthday in 1923, the American public marked the anniversary as a national holiday.
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James Monroe, aided by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, engineered a doctrine that Americans used for generations to come.

Since the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has engaged in more than seventy military engagements in Central and South America, ranging from small expeditions to all-out wars. Nicaragua and Panama have seen the most interventions (twenty-two), followed by Mexico (eleven) and Cuba (nine).

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. MANIFEST DESTINY (1845)

Some view Manifest Destiny as a glorious demonstration of the pioneer spirit. Others see the process as an act of genocide against millions of Native Americans. Oddly, both extremes commonly fail to recognize that it was, in its base nature, a foreign policy.

Journalist John O’Sullivan coined the phrase in 1845, and the Democratic Party of James Polk took it as its mantra. The sentiment had been in place long before. Several of the original thirteen colonies had no western border, on the assumption that their jurisdiction stretched to the end of the continent, wherever that was. After the victorious Revolution, Thomas Jefferson viewed the Republic as “the nest from which all America, North & South is to be peopled.” Providence itself appeared to have ordained the new nation to succeed, to expand as far as geography would allow, from pole to pole eventually. In 1845, it seemed destined. In less than a lifetime, the country had grown 100 percent in land area, 400 percent in population, and 700 percent in economic production. No other nation in the world, including Britain, could match such numbers.

Yet territorial expansion was not a major policy goal among presidents, until James K. Polk made it so in his 1845 inauguration. Standing in a pouring March rain, as thousands listened to his address from the Capitol’s East Portico, Polk assured the nation and its neighbors: “Our Union is a confederation of independent States, whose policy is peace with each other and all the world.” And then he added his doctrine: “To enlarge its limits is to extend the dominions of peace over additional territories and increasing millions.” Ten times he mentioned the annexation of the Republic of Texas, which he misleadingly called a “reunion.” Concerning land to the northwest, jointly controlled by the United States and Britain: “Our title to the country of the Oregon is ‘clear and unquestionable,’ and already are our people preparing to perfect that title by occupying it with their wives and children.”

He told his audience that the safety of the United States was in peril and the only way to ensure national security was to acquire Texas and Oregon—by force, if needed. Like a true expansionist, he argued that Manifest Destiny had now become the responsibility of his earthly government. “It is confidently believed,” he shouted, “that our system may be safely extended to the utmost bounds of our territorial limits, and that as it shall be extended the bonds of our Union, so far from being weakened, will become stronger.” True to his intent, Polk acquired half of the Oregon Territory (through negotiation) and half of Mexico (through war). Inspired by the latter success, many Americans, especially established planters in the South, supported an “All Mexico” movement, as well as the acquisition of Cuba.

The territory acquired during the four years of the Polk administration was approximately 1.19 million square miles, or greater than the land area of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, and Portugal combined.

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. THE ROOSEVELT COROLLARY (1904)

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to the German ambassador, “If any South American state misbehaves toward any European country let the European country spank it.” He changed his mind two years later, when German gunboats sailed to Venezuela to collect a debt owed by dictator Cipriano Castro involving a sum of seventy million marks—plus interest. Very publicly, a snide Castro refused to pay. Berlin eventually settled for arbitration, but the potential for more European armadas coming to the New World was too great for Roosevelt to accept.
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In December 1904, Roosevelt added a “corollary” to the M
ONROE
D
OCTRINE
. He told Congress that if any Central or South American country defaulted on loans in the future, it would “force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
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As much as Monroe distrusted Europe, TR despised Latin America more. To him, Western Europe was “civilized,” while his neighbors to the south were more like spoiled children. The heads of Colombia were the “bandits of Bogotá” and “homicidal corruptionists,” while in the Dominican Republic, “the successful graspers for governmental power were always pawning ports and custom-houses.”
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To ensure domestic tranquility, Roosevelt sent an expeditionary force to Santo Domingo in 1905, a nation more than thirty million dollars in debt to European creditors. By 1906, he was sending troops to Cuba in an attempt to stabilize the country (where they would remain for three years). In 1907, the U.S. Navy was heading to Honduras as the country descended into a border war with Nicaragua.

For his “Big Stick” diplomacy, Roosevelt was often accused of wanting to acquire an empire, which he repeatedly denied. When a rumor surfaced that the Dominican Republic was his for the taking, TR insisted, “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gored boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.” He also refused to take Cuba, stating, “Emphatically we do not want it,” but he added privately that he was “so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth.”
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As assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt labored intensely to modernize the fleet. As president, he was able to enjoy the fruits of his labor and enforce his policy of aggressive U S. involvement in Latin America without fear of European interference.

In the fight between Theodore Roosevelt and Latin America, the latter may have gotten the last word. During a post-presidential expedition to the Amazon, Roosevelt contracted malaria, from which he never fully recovered.

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. TRUMAN DOCTRINE (1947)

Throughout the Cold War, much of the American rhetoric in foreign affairs involved the dangers of “losing” countries to communism. The concept originated in the myth that a frail and exhausted Franklin Roosevelt willingly gave up Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta. Few bothered to acknowledge that the region was not Roosevelt’s to lose; the Red Army had taken it meter by meter from the Third Reich at a cost of twenty-seven million dead.

But historical memory is selective. Rather than a brutal consequence of the Second World War, the Soviet occupation came to be seen as a gradual, subversive, and calculated attempt to take over the world one country at a time (a.k.a. “domino theory”). Harry Truman established the doctrine that no further “losses” would occur on his watch, and he began by defending two unstable countries where communist parties were a major part of the political landscape—Greece and Turkey.

Like much of the photography at the time, Truman saw the world in black and white. In that world, communism was the manifestation of ultimate darkness.

In March 1947, Truman requested four hundred million dollars in weapons and financial aid to bolster anticommunist forces in the two nations, but a Republican Congress and a savvy State Department were highly skeptical. The venerable Senator Robert Taft, son of the twenty-seventh president, protested that Truman was aiming to start a war with the Soviet Union. Russian expert and diplomat George Kennan, who initially believed the Soviets to be expansionists, began to view the situation in Europe as more stable than first thought. To win over his opponents, Truman overemphasized the danger, depicting the fall of both countries as imminent and disastrous if American assistance was not forthcoming.
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The strategy worked—with consequences. Greece and Turkey received military and economic assistance, but the shock and awe of “us versus them” sermons began to have a profound effect on the U.S. population. While the Soviet hierarchy gave little attention to Truman’s dire statements, the American public started to accept the hypothesis as fact. The hyperbole soon grew into obligations on a global scale. After getting involved in the Balkans, the United States established a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean. Then came the multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan for the rest of Europe. Intervention in Korea followed soon after. Truman also began sending advisers, weapons, and supplies to the French in Indochina. At home, fear of communism also had the unfortunate consequence of making Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of communist infiltration of the U.S. government sound entirely plausible.

One of the more popular items provided to Greece through the Truman Doctrine was twenty thousand strong and healthy Missouri mules. The United States initially intended them for use as pack animals in mountain warfare. The Greeks preferred to use them to plow their fields.

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. EISENHOWER DOCTRINE (1957)

Ike promised money, men, and material for anyone willing to fight communism. “We face a hostile ideology,” Eisenhower warned, “global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.” By the 1950s, both the GOP and Democrats were beginning to believe that communism was aiming to take over the world. The only question was which political party was going to be more aggressive in fighting it.
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