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104 4 Pax Americana In the three decades after the war with Spain, the United States expanded its interests in Latin America by every political, economic, and military measure. It had displaced the Spanish Empire in Puerto Rico and Cuba. In the western Caribbean, it had already begun to chart a more direct role for American power on the isthmus. In South America the United States had assumed a protective role over Venezuela in the 1895 boundary dispute between that country and Great Britain. With the encouragement of the Brazilian foreign minister, the Baron of Río Branco, Washington fashioned what a later generation would call an unwritten alliance. Rejecting Argentine arguments for a hemispheric collective statement on such diverse matters as the forcible collection of international debts and the obligations of aliens to settle their disputes in the courts of the country in which they did business, the United States followed a unilateral course in the region. It asserted its military power in the Caribbean, intervening in the internal affairs of smaller states and creating a string of protectorates from Hispaniola to Panama. Its justification rested on understandable strategic arguments, questionable economic policies, and, in retrospect, political and cultural pretensions bordering on the arrogant.1 As the British had already discovered, informal empire with its large benefits and modest overhead ultimately gave way to formal empire with its obligations and increasing imperial surcharges. By the end of the century, a disconsolate inner group of British imperialists had come to the somber conclusion that the British Empire on which the sun never set had gotten too costly, but it had to be defended from without and, increasingly, from within. The United States had no colonial service, no colonial army, and no colonial economic bureaucracy , nor did U.S. officials feel a need to create them. Taking on the imperial burden for the noblest of intentions, however, did not lessen the obligation of defending it. As German interest in the Caribbean and in Mexico heightened after the turn of the century, so did U.S. opposition to it. As American companies intruded in the tropics, especially in Cuba and Central America, U.S. political leaders articulated a Caribbean strategy in political and economic terms. 105 Pax Americana When the charges of empire became unruly or defiant, they were “chastised” with stern warnings or, if they persisted in the “revolutionary frame of mind,” with a “spanking” by U.S. military forces. If their outburst proved threatening to long-term American interests, they suffered occupation, which meant sternminded military proconsuls in charge of their affairs. In Theodore Roosevelt’s day, Americans enthusiastically took on the imperial mission. By Franklin Roosevelt’s day, they had grown weary of it.2 New World Policeman To describe the Pax Americana as a U.S. version of the Pax Britannica, as some historians have done, is to gloss over two distinctions between the U.S. role in the Western Hemisphere in the first third of the twentieth century and that played by Great Britain during the “long” nineteenth century. First, and perhaps most important, one of the fundamental credos of the American Revolution—a belief that persisted through the nineteenth century —was that of self-determination. Throughout its history, the United States has violated that principle in the name of security or its own self-interest , but the nation’s reluctance to create a colonial bureaucracy, a colonial army, or a tradition of colonial service has signified deep-seated doubts about its willingness to carry out the kind of imperial mandate the British assumed. Second, the United States, unlike Britain or even Rome, acquired an insular empire and took on its controversial policing role before it had matured to nationhood. Put differently, the United States did not become a nation in the modern sense of that word during the Revolution or even as a consequence of the Civil War, despite the symbolism of a union forged in blood and iron, as was Bismarck’s Germany. Rather, it achieved its nationhood in the first two decades of the twentieth century, contemporaneously with Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina. These were years in which the United States wrestled with the sometimes violent and divisive political and social convulsions identified with labor unrest and immigration, exercised an expanded presence in world affairs, and exhibited an economic growth that rivaled the major European nations. In the Caribbean, the model of U.S. empire was not so much the string of protectorates...

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