Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

Impact

The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, as it soon came to be known, was much discussed during 1905 as the president sought Senate approval of his arrangements with Santo Domingo. Since Democratic opposition persisted, Roosevelt elaborated on his views about the Monroe Doctrine in his annual message of December 5, 1905. “It must be understood,” he wrote in that message, “that under no circumstances will the United States use the Monroe Doctrine as a cloak for territorial aggression.” To further reassure his critics, the president added that any action to enforce the Roosevelt Corollary “will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance and when it has become evident that every other resource has been exhausted.”

Despite these assurances of discretion in its use, the Roosevelt Corollary was implemented at various times by Roosevelt himself in the case of Cuba in 1906 and by Woodrow Wilson during his presidency in Nicaragua and Haiti. The public appetite for these adventures receded after World War I. By the late 1920s the Roosevelt Corollary seemed like a diplomatic relic, and President Calvin Coolidge repudiated it in 1928. Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the good neighbor policy, which no longer claimed the authority to have the United States supervise the political behavior of countries in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, the corollary came to be seen as an example of how the United States exercised its military and diplomatic supremacy at the turn of the twentieth century in a manner that a century later seemed unwise and inappropriate.