land needed for it was ceded to the US. This
American presence was intended to ensure that
no European power could take over Cuba or
reach the inner naval defences of the US before
meeting the US navy in the western Atlantic.
The US also imposed conditions on Cuba which
allowed the US to intervene in case of internal
discord. Another Caribbean island, Puerto Rico,
was simply annexed for similar strategic reasons.
In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt extended the right
of the US to act as a policeman throughout
Central and Latin America, invoking the Monroe
Doctrine as justification. By helping the Pana-
manian revolutionaries against Colombia in 1903,
Roosevelt established another American protec-
torate in all but name in the new state of Panama.
Nor did the US hesitate to intervene in the inde-
pendent republics of Dominica and Nicaragua.
Although Woodrow Wilson, when he became
president, attempted to revert to the earlier spirit
of inter-American collaboration, he did not
himself hesitate to intervene in Mexico from 1914
to 1916.
In contrast to the advanced industrialised and
agriculturally developed North American conti-
nent, the habitable regions of South America sup-
ported a growing population in, for the most
part, abject poverty. (For a fuller discussion of
Latin America see Part XIV.) The descendants of
the Spaniards and Portuguese and the immigrants
from Europe who formed the minority of inhab-
itants enjoyed the wealth and political power of
the American ‘republics’. There was much variety
in the politics and society of Latin America. Their
revolutions, though, had been revolutions from
above in the early nineteenth century. The new
states remained authoritarian, despite their elab-
orate constitutions modelled on the French or
American, and their professed ideals of democ-
racy, with a few notable exceptions, proved a
façade for governments based on force: they were
governments of the generals or of dictators who
commanded the military forces of the state.
Violence was the language of politics. Trade
with Europe, especially (in the later nineteenth
century) with Britain and Germany, was consid-
erably greater than with the US, to which there
was much hostility, on account of its claims to
pre-eminence in the Americas. The possibility of
‘Yankee’ interference was the object of particular
Latin American suspicion and animosity.In 1900 strategic planners in the US clearly saw
the discrepancy between the pretensions of the
Monroe Doctrine and the inability of the US to
exert any military and naval influence south of the
Amazon in Brazil. What if the partition of Africa
were followed by European domination of South
and Central America? In fact, the conflicts in
Europe, the Mediterranean and Near East, in
Africa and in Asia absorbed the military resources
of the European Western powers. Britain, the
major European power with colonies and com-
mercial interests in Latin America and an empire
extending from colonies in the Caribbean to the
Dominion of Canada in the north, furthermore
made clear its intention not to challenge the US’s
claim for regional supremacy. At the turn of the
twentieth century Britain and the US signed
the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty which granted the US
the sole right of defence of the future Panama
Canal. This was followed by Britain withdrawing
its fleet from the Caribbean and settling all out-
standing disputes with the US. Britain could not
afford to risk the enmity of the US as well when its
interests were more endangered at home, first by
Russia then by Germany, in the Mediterranean,
in Asia and in Europe. And so a war between
Britain and the US became increasingly unthink-
able as the twentieth century progressed. In this
way the conflicts of the European powers in the
early years of the twentieth century continued to
serve the security of the US in its hemisphere.
But in the Pacific and eastern Asia the US
became more deeply involved and exposed.
US interests in the trade of China date back to
the foundations of the American republic itself.
Not until the close of the nineteenth century,
however, did the US acquire a territorial stake in
the Pacific. The annexation of Hawaii in 1898
could still just about be fitted in with the notion
that the island was an essential offshore base of
defence for the western seaboard of the US.
There could be no such claim for the annexation
of the Philippines after the Spanish–American
War of 1898. An American army crushed the