ing the U.S. the rights to the Panama Canal.
Note the date the treaty was originally negotiated as well as the remarkable
statement in Article I.
Alarmed at the prospect of European intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American nations, Roosevelt also toughened and extended the historic Monroe Doctrine (1824) with his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. After clicking on the following link, first read the editors note then scroll down and read the text of the "Roosevelt Corollary" as delivered to Congress in 1904. (See the section entitled "Policy Toward Other Nations of the Western Hemisphere.") What did Roosevelt promise would happen if Latin American countries invited foreign aggression? What assumptions does he make regarding the relative status of the U.S. in comparison with its Latin American neighbors?
Roosevelt further confidently intervened in world affairs by practicing a unique form of
presidential diplomacy. In 1905 he personally led negotiations to end a war between Japan
and Russia, resulting in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A year later he
successfully handled a similarly explosive colonial conflict between France and Germany.
Overall, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the U.S. Navy and solidify previous gains
in the Pacific.
President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy was much like his predecessors but
informed more by paternalism than aggressiveness and opportunism. Much of Wilsons concerns focused on Asia
where the rising Japanese Empire competed with the old European empires for dominance in
China. Seeking to maintain an open
door for American trade with China, Wilson, like both his predecessors and
successors in the White House, struggled to balance the dangers of either European or
Japanese dominance in that region.
Period of Cautious Non-entanglement, 1920-1937
Traditionally historians have assigned the label of isolationist to
American foreign policy in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Clearly the mood of the American people became more and more isolationist as the
years went by. The decision to reject the
League of Nations certainly gave the appearance that U.S. policy was isolationist, as
well. Yet, recent historians have emphasized
the continued role America played in world affairs.
What best describes the policy of the period, then, is cautious non-entanglement. Policymakers sought not isolation but a free
hand to operate, according to diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber. Two notable foreign policy achievements from the
era tend to bolster this view.
The dangerous 1930s
international economic collapse of the 1930s helped to create an ever more dangerous
world. Beginning in the 1920s, totalitarian
fascist parties rose to power throughout Europe promising both economic resurgence and
protection from the communists. Benito
Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Germany and Francisco Franco in Spain each rose to
power by exploiting fears of the left. In the
case of Germany and Italy, a combination of calculation, ideology and megalomaniacal
leadership would drive those nations toward ever more explosive confrontations with nearby
states. Meanwhile, a similarly militaristic
coterie gained power in Japan and set that increasingly powerful nation down the path of
Franklin Roosevelts Struggle to Return to Internationalism, 1937-1941
The American people remained staunchly isolationist although the president tried to rouse
them with the famously cautionary
speech" of 1937. Meantime, facing equally ant-war public sentiment, the
governments of Britain and France charted a diplomatic path of appeasement in order to
keep peace with Hitler. The low point of this policy of appeasement arrived with the
Peace Conference with Hitler, 1938 . Desperately gambling for peace at any price,
the British and French countenanced the take-over of western Czechoslovakia under the
terms of the Munich treaty. The folly of appeasement became undeniably clear the
following year when Hitler's war machine roared into Germany's neighbor to the east,
Poland, starting World War II in Europe.
. Desperately gambling for 