Roosevelt's Pursuit of a Temperate Caribbean Policy

Neither Theodore Roosevelt's critics nor his admirers have known quite what to make of his views on diplomacy and warfare, despite Roosevelt's voluminous writings on these subjects. "TR's" more bombastic statements-he once told an audience at the Naval War College "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war"-lend themselves to the view that he lusted for martial glory.1

Mark Twain professed affection for "Theodore the man" but proclaimed that "Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible."2 To Carl Schurz, the firebrand vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, TR's "master nature" was well fitted to the era of the Crusades, "but this Republic does not want in the Presidency a master¾least of all one who cannot master himself."3 And historian Thomas Bailey branded Roosevelt "an apostle of Mars" whose bellicose tendencies were held in check¾barely¾by public opinion.4
 
Similarly hostile views were commonplace among foreign-policy thinkers for decades. Roosevelt has been largely rehabilitated in recent years.5 But even many scholars who are favorably disposed toward TR seemingly assume he held a bleak world view in which armed force was the final arbiter of international affairs. Henry Kissinger, to name one, declared that Roosevelt had practiced an amoral brand of realpolitik-high praise from perhaps recent history's foremost practitioner of power politics.6 TR's admirers, then, have tended to agree with his critics on one fundamental point: The use of military force, largely bereft of moral or legal considerations, was the keystone of his diplomacy.

H. W. Brands sounded a similar theme in a recent article in Naval History, arguing that Roosevelt was a kindred spirit of the Norse god Thor, as portrayed in TR's favorite poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Saga of King Olaf. Thor insists, rather plaintively, that "Force Rules the World Still," despite the advance of more enlightened times.7 Professor Brands' choice of passage was telling, implying as it did that TR felt a kinship not for the hero, King Olaf, but for the Nordic deities and their worshippers who had lived by the sword. But Longfellow's message was quite different. In the saga, the youthful king and his champions vanquish barbarism and spread civilization, albeit at the point of a sword. Exults Olaf:

    All the old gods are dead,
    All the wild warlocks fled;
    But the White Christ lives and reigns,
    And throughout my wide domains
    His Gospel shall be spread!8

For Theodore Roosevelt, Olaf's exploits were the stuff of which "an appeal for brave action can be made," not an endorsement of war for its own sake.9 Roosevelt's views on the proper uses of force were subtler than scholars such as Brands allow. As president, despite his reputation for bloodlust, Roosevelt neither instigated an open-ended naval buildup nor sought out the titanic naval clash he seemed to relish-a battle he could have easily had in 1902, when he ordered a powerful U.S. Navy squadron to shadow a European flotilla that had blockaded and bombarded the Venezuelan coast.10 Olaf's civilizing mission impelled him to tame the Salten Fjord region of Norway; Roosevelt's geopolitical views impelled him to seek out naval supremacy in the Caribbean basin. But America's advantages in the Caribbean were such that the United States was able to defend its vital interests without resorting to arms. With that, TR was content.

The Influence of Mahan

Roosevelt's geopolitical views aligned to a great extent with those of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 and other influential works on sea power. Indeed, while TR was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy in 1897, he wrote Mahan, "I suppose I need not tell you that as regards [U.S. annexation of] Hawaii I take your views absolutely, as indeed I do on foreign policy generally."11 After reading The Influence of Sea Power upon History, moreover, TR told Mahan, "I can say with perfect sincerity that I think it very much the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind with which I am acquainted."12 High praise from someone who himself had earned acclaim for his scholarship on nautical warfare.

It is worth examining the foreign-policy views of the man who commanded this level of respect. Mahan wrote of sea power founded on international commerce, merchant and naval fleets, and naval bases scattered along vital trade routes to support fuel-thirsty warships.13 "Zero-sum" thinkers such as Mahan, who believed there was only so much trade to go around, resigned themselves to the likelihood of conflict with the great imperial powers.14 To wrest away its rightful share of foreign commerce, the United States needed a battle fleet able to "fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against it."15

Where should the U.S. Navy focus its efforts to amass sea power? Here, too, Mahan furnished guidance. In 1901, while serving as vice president, Roosevelt applauded The Problem of Asia, Mahan's most distinctly geopolitical work, declaring himself in "entire agreement" with the book's thesis.16 Mahan urged Americans to cast their strategic gaze on China, a vast market for American goods and a "carcass" fated to be devoured by Western "eagles" as a part of the "onward movement of the world."17

Focusing on the Caribbean

But an Asia-centered foreign policy required attention to strategic conditions closer to home. The United States needed to dig an isthmian canal across Central America, linking its East Coast with Asia by sea. To protect the canal, it needed to obtain naval bases in the Caribbean, "America's Mediterranean," and to prevent potential European rivals, notably Imperial Germany, from getting bases of their own. The "gateway to the Pacific for the United States is the Isthmus," Mahan proclaimed, while "the communications to the Isthmus are by way of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea."18

The Caribbean, observed Mahan, was "pre-eminently the domain of sea power."19 Cuba was the most promising site for a naval station. While Cuba was best situated geographically to dominate the Caribbean and the Gulf, Jamaica would be an acceptable substitute, since it also held a central location. The sea approaches to the canal formed a triangle with Jamaica approximately in the center, in easy reach of maritime traffic along each route. "Jamaica flanks all lines of communication," declared Mahan's commentary on one of his maps of the Caribbean basin.20 That predominantly European rival naval powers should be excluded from the Caribbean was implicit:

[T]he roads which on either side converge upon the Isthmus lie wholly upon  the ocean, the common possession of all nations. Control of the latter, therefore, rests either upon local control of the Isthmus itself, or indirectly, upon control of its approaches, or upon a distinctly preponderant navy. In naval questions the latter is always the dominant factor [emphasis added].21

Mahan feared that the European navies would encroach on this American preserve. Debt-ridden Venezuela, for example, was ideally sited to menace the approaches to the Isthmus of Panama and was a frequent target of European naval action. The United States' quest for outposts far across the globe amplified anxieties about naval competition in waters much closer to home.22
 
Fortunately for the United States, it enjoyed a distinct advantage in the Caribbean. The U.S. Navy could muster a local superiority of force there, despite its inferiority on paper to European fleets. The Royal Navy had worldwide commitments, limiting its ability to concentrate in the Americas; the Royal Navy and Germany's High Seas Fleet were embroiled in a naval arms race, vying for supremacy in the North Sea. The United States could not safely entrust the security of the world's seas to the uncertain goodwill of powerful rivals. But, the naval theorist and TR calculated, it would not need to do so. Deft diplomacy backed by ample force-they envisioned a modest force of about 20 battleships-would meet U.S. strategic objectives.23

Extent of U.S. "Practical Sovereignty"

In fixing their attentions on the Caribbean Sea, Roosevelt and Mahan had in fact scaled back and focused their ambitions for U.S. sea power. Mahan published The Problem of Asia in 1900, a full decade after he had issued his more general¾and vastly more influential¾call for sea power in The Influence of Sea Power upon History. For his part, TR had initially espoused the notion that the United States should exercise control throughout the Western Hemisphere by virtue of dominant sea power. In 1895 he applauded President Grover Cleveland and Secretary of State Richard Olney, who had interceded in a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. In a tart exchange of correspondence with British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Olney proclaimed that

Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. . . . It is not simply by reason of its high character as a civilized state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States. It is because . . . its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.24

By invoking the doctrine of sovereignty-the legal prerogative, that is, of governments that controlled national territory by imposing a monopoly of force-the secretary of state suggested that physical might entitled the United States to do as it saw fit in the New World. A newly industrialized United States, said Olney, had the moral stature, the geographic advantages, and the power to enforce its will. Lord Salisbury registered a strong protest against the Cleveland administration's policy. Great Britain nevertheless ended up withdrawing its North American squadron to home waters, there to confront the burgeoning menace of the High Seas Fleet. Faced with the German threat, the Royal Navy had neither the means nor any pressing need to keep its edge over the U.S. Navy in American waters.
 
If Salisbury objected to the doctrine of practical sovereignty, Roosevelt heartily welcomed it. "I most earnestly hope that our people won't weaken in any way," wrote TR to a confidant, Republican Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He reported gleefully that the Harvard Graduates Magazine, which deplored Olney's handling of the situation, was "assailing me with the ineffective bitterness proper to beings whose cult is nonvirility."25 On another occasion Roosevelt asserted that it was "for the interest of civilization that the United States themselves . . . should be dominant in the Western Hemisphere."26 He declared that "it would be well were we sufficiently farsighted steadily to shape our policy with the view to the ultimate removal of all European powers from the colonies they hold in the western hemisphere," as a liberal reading of the Monroe Doctrine would seem to require.27

Despite this expansive view, TR and his cohort of expansionists disagreed mildly about how far southward the Monroe Doctrine ought to extend. Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out that the naval power of the United States dwindled with distance from American shores¾particularly when the U.S. Navy had no bases to support power projection. That was the Navy's predicament south of the Caribbean basin. Olney's "fiat" could go only as far as the nation's naval power could carry it. In 1901, Lodge informed Roosevelt that Mahan "takes the view that we should not undertake to keep Europe out of South America below the Caribbean Sea, that Northern South America and Central America are enough for us to protect."28 Mahan had come to believe that, whatever the political merits of extending the Monroe Doctrine throughout the hemisphere, the Navy should enforce it only in the Caribbean.

Opposite Mahan stood William Howard Taft, who held fast to a vision resembling that of Olney. "By virtue of this doctrine," he informed a Columbus, Ohio, audience in 1908, "we in effect and for defensive purposes extend the frontiers of the United States far beyond the actual confines of our territory, to Central America and the islands of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, to the mouths of the Orinoco and the Amazon, to Magellan and Tierra del Fuego."29

In the end, Roosevelt inclined to Mahan's less ambitious vision. He refused to explicitly limit the Monroe Doctrine, for fear of signaling that the United States would tolerate European mischief beyond a certain line on the map. During his presidency, the United States nonetheless refrained from meddling in Latin American affairs south of the Caribbean littoral. Defending the approaches to the Isthmus of Panama, the future gateway to the Asia trade, was task enough for the Navy.

Finally, Roosevelt gave the Monroe Doctrine his own twist in 1904, announcing that the United States would henceforth exercise "an international police power" when "chronic wrongdoing" or "an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society" threatened to leave a European power in possession of Latin American territory.30 In TR's day, the European great powers routinely used naval force on behalf of their creditors when foreign governments defaulted on their debts. Their most common tactic was to seize the customhouse in the defaulting country-the government's primary source of revenue-and apportion the tariff proceeds among the aggrieved creditors. Such action could leave Europeans holding American territory-potential naval stations-adjoining vital sea-lanes.

That was intolerable to Roosevelt, who vowed to take over and manage the finances of Caribbean states unable or unwilling to repay their debts. Preventive action would deny European powers that coveted maritime influence in the Americas any excuse to seize outposts there. "If we are willing to let Germany or England act as the policeman of the Caribbean," declared TR, "then we can afford not to interfere when gross wrongdoing occurs. But if we intend to say 'Hands Off' to the powers of Europe, then sooner or later we must keep order ourselves."31 His modest interventionist policy would accomplish this goal while avoiding an armed showdown with the imperial powers.

Contested Zones, Past and Present

In essence, then, President Roosevelt anticipated heading off European intervention that might lead to European encroachment in the Caribbean basin, contravening the Monroe Doctrine. He worried least about Great Britain, despite the continuing supremacy of the Royal Navy, because the United States had at its disposal what in present-day parlance is called asymmetric means. "I do not care a rap whether [England] subscribes to the Monroe doctrine or not," he told Lodge in 1901, "because she is the one power with which any quarrel on that doctrine would be absolutely certain to result to our immediate advantage. She could take the Philippines and Porto [sic] Rico, but they would be a very poor offset for the loss of Canada."32

Then there was preventive police action. In 1905 the Roosevelt administration interceded in the Dominican Republic, which had defaulted on its foreign debt and seemed at risk of having its customhouse seized by European warships. The intervention turned out to be a low-key affair, with a U.S. customs agent stationed on the island to parcel out repayments among the Dominicans' creditors and a U.S. warship stationed nearby to deter interference with the arrangement from Dominican rebels.
 
And finally, in the event of an engagement with one of the European fleets, the U.S. Navy would be able to mount a local superiority of force, leveraging the geographic advantages of which Mahan had written. TR recalled asking the German ambassador during the 1902 European blockade of Venezuela to "look at the map, as a glance would show him there was no spot in the world where Germany in the event of a conflict with the United States would be at a greater disadvantage than in the Caribbean Sea."33 The United States might not be able to overcome the entire German fleet, let alone the British fleet, in some hypothetical clash of entire navies. Again, it did not need this capability. To deter European encroachment, the U.S. Navy only needed the ability to concentrate preponderant force in its own geographic environs.

In short, Roosevelt was not attempting to launch an open-ended naval buildup or to pick a fight with the European powers. Instead, he was trying to erect what MIT scholar Barry Posen, in reference to present-day international affairs, has termed a "contested zone." According to Posen, as U.S. military forces draw closer from the sea to another country's territory "the more competitive the enemy will be. This arises from a combination of political, physical, and technological facts. These facts combine to create a contested zone-arenas of conventional combat where weak adversaries have a good chance of doing real damage to U.S. forces."34 The ability of the early 20th-century United States to create such a zone in the face of powerful European navies provides a cautionary tale for the present-day United States, the world's preeminent maritime power.

Like Roosevelt's America, present-day defenders usually enjoy the home-court advantage, including greater political motivation, more war-fighting assets in-theater, and a surer grasp of local circumstances. By concentrating force in littoral waters, even a navy inferior to the U.S. Navy-China's, for example-stands a good chance of doing damage to U.S. forces that is unacceptable from a political standpoint. U.S. leaders need to think ahead now about how to preserve their naval mastery, whether by augmenting forces in key regions, managing alliances with regional maritime powers more adroitly, or reaching out to potential competitors such as China in an effort to forge partnerships that avert conflict.35 Forewarned is forearmed.