p A major part in shaping imperialist ideology was played also by a group of prominent politicians who combined the propagation of expansionist theory with the implementation of an imperialist foreign policy. In literature it is known as the Roosevelt-Lodge group. Most researchers agree as to who comprised that group. ’The dynamic element in the movement for imperialism,’ wrote Richard Hofstadter, ’was a small group of politicians, intellectuals, and publicists, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Whitelaw Reid, editor of The New York Tribune, Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews, Walter Hines Page, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and Henry and Brooks Adams.’  [100•1  Charles A. Beard gives practically the same list of ’ imperialist agitators’, who, ’taking advantage of the national furor over the war against Spain and the unrest created by the populist upheaval at home ... put their creed over on the country for a brief season’.  [100•2 

p Most of this expansionist elite belonged to distinguished American families of Anglo-Saxon origin, were educated at the finest American universities, and made a successful career of politics. The theories of Fiske, Strong, Burgess, and Mahan were instrumental in moulding the views of the imperialist practitioners of 1898. At the time of transition from words to action, their armoury consisted of social 101 Darwinism, Anglo-Saxon doctrine, and other theories. Many members of the Roosevelt-Lodge group were linked not only by an affinity of outlook but also by personal friendship. Lodge and Roosevelt got to know each other in the early 1880s on the Republican bandwagon in the presidential election campaign (the nominee was James G. Blaine). The Adams brothers yielded to their influence. Nobody in the group questioned Mahan’s views.

p Each of these men was prominent on the political Olympus and contributed to the propagation of expansion and the preparations for the war with Spain. Henry Cabot Lodge, a member of the Boston financial elite, was the leading orator of the group of expansionists in the Senate. He was bitter in his criticism of what he believed was President Cleveland’s irresolute policy relative to the Hawaiian Islands and tireless in demanding the building of a big navy and developing far-reaching plans of expansion. His article ’Our Blundering Foreign Policy’ (1895) was particularly characteristic in this respect. Rejecting the argument that the annexation of Hawaii would be a violation of the Monroe doctrine, he wrote that the doctrine simply held that no European power should establish itself in the Western Hemisphere or interfere with American governments and did not by any means discountenance the extension of American ’institutions of liberty’.  [101•1  He outlined the following foreign policy programme: ’...from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Ocean there should be but one flag and one country. Neither race nor climate forbids the extension ... every consideration of national growth and national welfare demands it. In the interests of our commerce and of our fullest development we should build the Nicaragua canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian Islands and maintain our influence in Samoa. England has studded the West Indies with strong places which are a standing menace to our Atlantic seaboard. We should have among those islands at least one strong naval station, and when the Nicaragua canal is built, the island of Cuba, still 102 sparsely settled and of almost unbounded fertility, will become to us a necessity.’  [102•1 

p Albert Beveridge was no Less fervent in championing expansion, saying: ’God has not been preparing the Englishspeaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and selfadmiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead the regeneration of the world.’  [102•2  With rare bluntness Beveridge expatiated on the economic motivation of expansion: ’American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours. And we will get it as our mother [England] has told us how. We will establish trading-posts throughout the world as distributing-points for American products. We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness. Great colonies governing themselves, flying our flag and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade. Our institutions will follow our flag on the wings of our commerce.’  [102•3 

p Identical views were aired by John Hay, architect of the Open Door doctrine, and Orville H. Platt. Brooks Adams, an influential member of the Hoosevelt-Lodge group, who, to quote William A. Williams, was ’something of the chairman of an informal policy-planning staff’,  [102•4  read his writings to a select circle, theoretically substantiating the principles of US foreign policy. In the much-talkecl-of book America’s 103 Economic Supremacy (1900), Adams applied the laws of physics in an attempt to prove that the USA was the concentration point of the world’s social energy, and developed ambitious plans of expansion.

p In its plans of propaganda and expansion the RooseveltLodge group had many supporters in the machinery of power. In Congress Lodge’s partisans included Frye, Morgan, and Teller. Senator William E. Chandler seconded Lodge in demanding the seizure of the mouth of the Orinoco and American control of the Caribbean, while Senator Money joined Roosevelt in asserting that war would improve the nation’s qualities. Many were motivated by a desire to ’punish Spain’.

p The Roosevelt-Lodge group had similarly strong support among the high-ranking military. Sea power proponents of the Mahan school, who included William T. Sampson, Richmond P. Hobson, Henry C. Taylor, and G. W. Melville, suggested concrete ways and means of building up sea power: a big navy, the Nicaragua canal, a canal linking the Great Lakes with the Atlantic, and coaling stations and naval bases on foreign territory. Of course, there were proponents of expansionism also among army officers, prominent among whom were Russel A. Alger, a Civil War colonel and then Secretary of War, Nelson A. Miles, Commanding General of the United States Army, and Leonard Wood, the future military governor of Cuba and governor-general of the Philippines.

p Unquestionably, the most colourful figure among the expansionists was Theodore Roosevelt. The group admired his talents and dynamic nature, recognised him as their leader, and forecast that he would hold high office, believing that he could implement the desired policy better than anybody else. Brooks Adams wrote to Roosevelt in 1896: ’Wall Street has desperate need of men like you.’  [103•1  For his part, Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography: ’Without the active support of these men I would have been powerless.’  [103•2 

p A terrorist bullet in Buffalo fatally wounded President McKinley on 6 September 1901. He died a week later, and 104 the then 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt became president. His name is rightly associated with US imperialist expansion and a policy of flexible bourgeois reforms at the beginning of the twentieth century. But already in the 1890s he was well known and even popular in the USA. By the time he was 40 he had made a dazzling career: he had been a member of the legislature of New York State, President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, commander of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and elected Vice-President of the USA (1900).

p He was not an ideologue of the ’first rank’ or the creator of any new expansionist concept, but he interpreted AngloSaxonism, the frontier thesis, and the sea power doctrine in his own way and, more importantly, applied them to imperialist actions. The programme of foreign expansion proposed by him in the 1890s had earlier been theoretically substantiated in his work The Naval War of 1812 (1882) and, in particular, the many-volume The Winning of the West (1889–1896), as well as in his articles.

p A pupil of Burgess, he was, naturally, profoundly influenced by the Germanist doctrine, but it was not an influence that rose to the surface. Of Dutch extraction, he rarely, even in private correspondence, let alone in his public pronouncements, used the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, preferring the expression ’English-speaking nations’, while relative to Americans h» spoke of ’our race’, the ’new mixed race’. This did not, of course, alter the substance of his convictions. ’During the past three centuries,’ he wrote, ’the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance ... the sons of the unknown Saxon, Anglian, and Friesic warriors now hold in their hands the fate of the coming years.’  [104•1  He followed the stereotype of the Anglo-Saxon school when he spoke of the ’voice of blood’, the ’destiny of the race’, and visualised the highest political achievement of the Americans in combination of local and 105 state interests, in the smooth functioning of the political machinery of the states in the federal union.

p A major hallmark of Roosevelt’s views was their social Darwinist thrust. One of his favourite views was that a great nation, a great race could be such only if it consisted of strong individuals. In many of his writings and speeches he urged educating virtues in soldiers. (In his Autobiography he wrote with pride how he used his fist to settle arguments, and, in a letter to Lodge in July 1898, of the thrill he had felt at killing a Spaniard with his own hand.) The People, newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party, in 1898 described Roosevelt as the writer of books on man-hunting and bearhunting.  [105•1  Roosevelt turned worship of strength and the strong individual into a Nietzschean apologia of the ’ superman’ set above social and racial distinctions. An apologia of this kind in art form had been expressed by his favourite poet, Rudyard Kipling. Declaring that there was unending hostility between East and West, he exclaimed:

p But there is neither East nor West, Border,
nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come
      from the ends of the earth!

p Roosevelt considered war the finest school of valour and courage. War, he said, was as natural to men as motherhood was to women, and the loss of these virtues in individuals led to the decline of a whole nation. In a speech before the Naval War College in June 1897, he said: ’No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.... We of the United States have passed most of our few years of national life in peace. We honor the architects of our wonderful material prosperity.... But we feel, after all, that the men who have dared greatly in war, or the work which is akin to war, are those who deserve best of the country.’  [105•2  In a speech delivered in the spring of 1899 he was most explicit about the need for moulding the character of a conqueror in every American: ’The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized 106 man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty life that thrills “stern men with empires in their brains"—all these of course shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties.’  [106•1 

p The social Darwinist tenets on the struggle for existence were applied by Roosevelt also to relations between states, peoples, and races. May the strongest win. The natural selection of the ‘finest’ nations and races took place in a brutal struggle. Progress was achieved by blood and sacrifice. The subjugation of backward by more civilised nations ultimately benefitted the subjugated. These were Roosevelt’s principal conclusions. He extolled war against ’ savages’, the conquest and subjugation of coloured people by the ‘superior’ white race.

p He spoke of the superiority of English-speaking peoples, bur regarded Americans as their highest branch. Unlike the historians of the Anglo-Saxon school, who gave their attention to the ’European past’ of the Aryan peoples, he was more attracted by the American historical experience. His main work, The Winning of the West, is devoted to the settlement of the North American continent by Europeans. Roosevelt regarded the ousting and extermination of the Indians as the natural process of the disappearance of an ’inferior race’ allegedly incapable of forming developed state institutions and creating a civilised society. He violently attacked Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor and George W. Manypenny’s Our Indian Wards, which were an indictment of American official policy towards the American Indians: ’These foolish sentimentalists not only write foul slanders about their own countrymen, but are themselves the worst possible advisers on any point touching Indian management.’  [106•2  He declared that a war against ’savage foes’ was the most just of wars, writing: ’It is as idle to apply to savages the rule of international morality which obtains between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of 107 Britain by the standards of today.’ He paid tribute to the white colonialists with the words: ’All honor to the missionary, all honor to the soldier, all honor to the merchant who now in our own day have done so much to bring light into the world’s dark places.  [107•1 

p Alongside the doctrine of the superiority of English– speaking peoples and social Darwinism, a deep imprint was made on Roosevelt’s outlook by the frontier thesis. His turn towards a study of the American West was due to, among other things, his personal experiences. For two years, from 1884 to 1886, he lived on a ranch in North Dakota, where he observed the life of the American frontier—- backwoodsmen, Indians, and frontier folk. In The Winning of the West he not only developed his views about the superiority of English-speaking peoples but also underscored the influence of local, American conditions on the progress of ’ AngloSaxon’ civilisation.

p For Roosevelt the frontier was the crucible forging the bellicose, aggressive character of the American nation. He depicted the Western settler as the ideal fighter, characterising the frontier folk as relentless and fearless, ’best fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers’.  [107•2  The conquerors of the American West, tempered by hardships and in the fighting with Indians, and knowing the value of strength and resourcefulness for their very existence, were for Roosevelt the bearers of the true ’American spirit’, the spirit which he compared with the bayonet. Seeing in the democratic ideals of frontier settlement only aggressiveness, he proclaimed US imperialist expansion of the turn of the century to be the direct and natural continuation of Westward colonisation. ’The history of the nation,’ he said, ’is in large part the history of the nation’s expansion.’  [107•3 

p In his expansionist views Roosevelt gave total support to Mahan’s big navy doctrine and programme. He was one of the first to note the significance of Mahan’s ideas and enthusiastically welcomed the appearance of each of his 108 writing. In October 1890, immediately after the publication of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power Upon History, he wrote about it in the Atlantic Monthly as ’distinctively the best and most important ... book on naval history which has been produced on either side of the water for many a long year’.  [108•1  In his review of the book in Political Science Quarterly he accepted all the points of the sea power concept and concluded: ’...we need to have the lesson taught again and again, and yet again, that we must have a great fighting navy in order to hold our proper position among the nations of the earth and to do the work to which our destiny points.’  [108•2  Roosevelt’s speeches, articles, and letters were virtually studded with the words ’sea power’ and ’great navy’. He subscribed entirely to Mahan’s programme for US expansion. In May 1898 he wrote: ’My dear Captain Mahan: This letter must, of course, be considered as entirely confidential, because in my position I am merely carrying out the policy of the Secretary and the President. I suppose I need not tell you that as regards Hawaii I take your views absolutely, as indeed I do on foreign policy generally. If I had my way we would annex those islands tomorrow. If that is impossible I would establish a protectorate over them. I believe we should build the Nicaraguan canal at once, and in the meantime that we should build a dozen new battleships, half of them on the Pacific Coast.’  [108•3 

p While Roosevelt did not add anything fundamentally new to Mahan’s big navy doctrine, he did more than anybody to put it into effect. Suffice it to note that during the first four years of his tenure in the White House the USA built 10 first-class battleships, four cruisers, and 17 other warships of different classes with a total displacement of 250,000 tons. By 1906 the American Navy had grown second in size only to the British.

p Long before the war with Spain, Roosevelt tried to influence government foreign policy personally and through his friends, and urged the earliest unleashing of war. ’We ought to drive the Spaniards out of Cuba,’ he wrote to his 109 sister, Anna Roosevelt Cowles, ’and it would be a good thing, in more ways than one, to do it.... I always hate words unless they mean blows. But Cabot [Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.—/. D.\ and his followers do mean blows.’  [109•1  Writing to William W. Kimbal, a naval officer, on 19 November 1897, he noted: ’I would regard a war with Spain from two standpoints: first, the advisability on the grounds both of humanity and self-interest ... second, the benefit done our people by giving them something to think of which isn’t material gain, and especially the benefit done our military forces by trying both the Navy and Army in actual practice.’  [109•2 

p In order to compel the government to make up its mind fast, the temperamental Roosevelt sometimes took a gamble. For instance, on 25 February 1898, when John D. Long, the Secretary of the Navy, left his office earlier than usual, Roosevelt, who was his assistant, overstretched his authority by sending the following telegram to Hong Kong: ’Dewey: Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in Philippine Islands. Keep Olympia until further orders. T. Roosevelt.’  [109•3  The next morning Secretary Long found that Roosevelt had acted prematurely.

p As a matter of fact, Roosevelt’s plans relative to the course of the future war had been well considered and his forecasts were amazingly accurate: the entire problem had evidently been closely gone over and discussed. In the summer of 1897 he submitted his recommendations for the conduct of the war to President McKinley, and he wrote to Lodge on 21 September 1897 that ’if ... we throw as quickly as possible an expeditionary force into Cuba, I doubt if the war would last six weeks so far as the acute phase of it was concerned. Meanwhile, our Asiatic squadron should blockade, and if possible, take Manila’.  [109•4 

p When war broke out, Roosevelt went to Cuba as a volunteer. From the theatre of hostilities he wrote to Lodge on 25 May 1898: ’I earnestly hope that no truce will be granted and that peace will only be made on consideration of Cuba being independent, Porto Rico ours and the Philippines taken away from Spain.’  [110•1  Lodge was in full agreement. ’We ought to take Porto Rico as we have taken the Philippines and then close in on Cuba,’  [110•2  he replied to Roosevelt on 31 May 1898. These were not merely wishful thinking, but points of the expansionists’ programme whose fulfilment they were vigorously urging. On 12 June, from aboard a naval transport carrying troops of an expeditionary force to Cuba, Roosevelt wrote to Lodge: ’I know what a fight you have on strictly the line of your own duties, old man, and of course you must neglect that, no matter what happens to the Administration. You must get Manila and Hawaii; you must prevent any talk of peace until we get Porto Rico and the Philippines as well as secure the independence of Cuba.’  [110•3  (What the ’independence of Cuba’ meant became clear when Theodore Roosevelt himself became President.)

p Roosevelt had always had close ties with big business. Historians note that upon becoming President he listened to the advice chiefly of industrial and bank capital: Mark Hanna, Robert Bacon, and George W. Perkins of the House of Morgan; Elihu Root, Nelson W. Aldrich, and A. J. Gassat of the Pennsylvania Railroad; Philander C. Knox and James Stillman of the Rockefeller interests.  [110•4  However, he often scoffed at the commercial psychology of businessmen in areas where, he felt, they failed to understand ’national tasks’. For instance, he angrily brushed aside the calls of business circles for prudence and circumspection on the eve of the Spanish-American War. He was intimately involved in US political life and had no illusions about the honesty of politicians or about the links of politics with business. ’If I had money enough to keep in National 111 politics it would not be difficult, because the average New York boss is quite willing to allow you to do what you wish in such trivial matters as war and the acquisition of Porto Rico and Hawaii, provided you don’t interfere with the really vital questions, such as giving out contracts for cartage in the Custom House and interfering with the appointment of street sweepers,’  [111•1  he wrote to Lodge on 31 July 1898.

p Unlike the ‘unpatriotic’ businessmen, Roosevelt was tireless in championing the idea of the greatness of the American nation and the role he felt it had to play in world politics. In The Strenuous Life, a programme speech delivered on 10 April 1899 before the Chicago Hamilton Club, he said: ’We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.’  [111•2 

p ’I preach to you, then, my countrymen,’ he said, ’that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavour. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.’  [111•3 

p One can conclude from individual pronouncements by Roosevelt that he saw a cause-and-effect relationship between the solution of acute social problems in the nation and broad political and economic expansion: ’...we have also tremendous problems,’ he wrote in August 1899, ’in the way of the relations of labor and capital to solve. My own belief is that we shall have to pay far more attention to this than to any question of expansion for the next fifty years, and this although I am an expansionist and believe that we can go on and take our place among the nations of the 112 world, by dealing with the outside problems without in any way neglecting those of our internal administration.’  [112•1 

p Roosevelt is associated with a new interpretation of the Monroe doctrine. In this doctrine there was a deep-seated contradiction: on the one hand, it propounded the anticolonialist idea of national sovereignty and demanded noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations; on the other, it contained the seed of future expansionist tendencies, representing a claim to US continental leadership. At the turn of the century an end was put to the contradictory character and vagueness of many provisions of the doctrine. ’America for Americans’ was in its time aimed against the attempts of European powers to consolidate colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. This was gradually converted into the slogan of ’America for North Americans’, which spelled out the aspiration to establish US political and economic domination in Latin America. The 1895 doctrine of Richard Olney and the additions made to it by Theodore Roosevelt in 1901–1905 were milestones of this transformation.

p In 1895 the USA intervened in the old border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in order to strike at the positions held in Latin America by Britain and other European powers on the pretext of safeguarding the interests of the Western Hemisphere and bolstering the defence of a small American republic. In an unusually strongly-worded Note to Great Britain US Sectetary of State Olney stressed the alienation of Latin American nations from Europe and declared that their alliance solely with the USA was natural and expedient: ’The States of America, South as well as North, by geographical proximity, by natural sympathy, by similarity of governmental constitutions, are friends and allies, commercially and politically, of the United States.’  [112•2  But, more importantly, Olney gave a new interpretation of the Monroe doctrine, clearly formulating the idea of the USA’s supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. ’To-day,’ the Note said, ’the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the 113 subjects to which it confines its interposition.... It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources, combined with its isolated position, render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.’  [113•1  Olney invoked the Monroe doctrine to declare that US arbitration was mandatory in any conflict of a Latin American nation with a European power. (The Russian Ambassador in Washington wrote with obvious reserve to St. Petersburg^in 1896: ’The theory, proclaimed by President Monroe in 1823, has since been strongly developed.’  [113•2 )

p Expansionist circles in the USA hailed this new interpretation of the Monroe doctrine. Lodge declared: ’The path which we should follow lies closer before us. We must be leaders in the Western Hemisphere.’  [113•3  Mahan, McKinley, and Albert Shaw, among others, saw eye to eye with him. Roosevelt was one of the most ardent adherents of this policy. As early as 1893 he revealed the plans of the American expansionists relative to Latin America, declaring: ’I believe in ultimately driving every European power off of this continent, and I don’t want to see our flag hauled down where it has been hauled up.’  [113•4  He was entirely with the government on the Venezuelan issue. His business and private letters of this period are replete with mention of the crisis. ’I earnestly hope,’ he wrote in December 1895, eagerly expecting a war with Britain, ’our government don’t back down. If there is a mess I shall try to have a hand in it myself! They’ll have to employ a lot of men just as green as I am even for the conquest of Canada; our regular army isn’t big enough.’  [113•5 

p The new interpretation of the Monroe doctrine was crystallised during the first years of Theodore Roosevelt’s Presidency. The Roosevelt Corollary was formulated in 1901– 1905 in a number of official speeches and statements. The 114 Soviet historian N. N. Inozemtsev writes that it boiled down to US preventive intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American nations on the excuse of forestalling possible interference by other, notably, European powers, to a unilateral commitment by the USA to undertake the functions of an international police force allegedly in the interests of civilisation and security.  [114•1 

p Roosevelt repeatedly aired his addition to the Monroe doctrine. In his first presidential message to Congress, 3 December 1901, in which he sought to press the Latin American nations into discharging their international financial commitments, he wrote: ’We do not guarantee any state against punishment if it misconducts itself, provided that punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American power.’  [114•2  In a letter to the Secretary of War Elihu Root in May 1904 he characterised the situation in Santo Domingo, defining the Monroe doctrine as follows: ’...if we intend to say “Hands Off" to the powers of Europe, sooner or later we must keep order ourselves ’  [114•3 

p These ideas were given their fullest expression in Roosevelt’s presidential message to Congress on 6 December 1904: ’Any country whose people conduct themselves well, can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may iu America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.’  [114•4  The American historian 115 Julius W. Pratt justifiably writes that in reformulating the Monroe doctrine Roosevelt remained a pupil of Burgess.  [115•1 

The new interpretation of the Monroe doctrine ideologically justified US interventionist policy towards Latin American states in the early years of the twentieth century, a policy that is known as the Big Stick. Theodore Roosevelt, who was, to quote Henry Adams, the embodiment of action, used the doctrine to resolve the second Venezuelan crisis. A vivid example of how Roosevelt invoked the doctrine was the US intervention in Colombia in 1903 and in Cuba in 1906. The USA’s ‘right’ of intervention was even recognised in the Constitution of Panama, Article 136 of which states: ’The Government of the United States of America shall enjoy the right of intervention throughout the territory of the Republic of Panama with the purpose of restoring peace and order in the spirit of Constitution in the event they are violated, inasmuch as by virtue of a formal treaty the aforementioned Nation shall assume or has assumed a guarantee of the independence and sovereignty of this Republic.’  [115•2