Sublime

Roosevelt was just getting started. In 1903 the Dominican Republic’s finances collapsed. Its president, Carlos Morales, intimated that he would welcome annexation by the United States—the second time that country had offered itself up. A decade earlier, Roosevelt would have jumped at Morales’s offer. But now, exhausted by the Philippine War, he

Those were not empty words. In 1852 Fillmore’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, gave speculators carte blanche to sail to the guano-laden Lobos Islands off the coast of northern Peru and scrape them clean, promising naval protection and dispatching a warship for that purpose. It was a bold yet dangerous plan, as Peru claimed sovereignty over the

Japan began the nineteenth century the same way it had begun and ended the two previous centuries, largely isolated from the outside world. In 1853, the United States (a Pacific country looking for new markets) led the charge to open Japan to trade with the outside world. When American warships showed up uninvited to demand access to Japanese

In 1904 Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in “chronic wrong-doing”—that is, did anything to threaten perceived US economic or political interests—would be disciplined militarily by the United States, which was to serve as an “international police

The policy of the Americans in relation to the whole world is exceedingly simple; for it may almost be said that no country stands in need of them, nor do they require the co-operation of any other people. Their independence is never threatened.