Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. In treating of our foreign policy and of the attitude that this great Nation should assume in the world at large, it is absolutely necessary to consider the Army and the Navy, and the Congress, through which the thought of the Nation finds its expression, should keep ever vividly in mind the fundamental fact that it is impossible to treat our foreign policy, whether this policy takes shape in the effort to secure justice for others or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward our Navy. (Excerpted from Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1904) Roosevelt renounced interventionism and established his Good Neighbor policy within the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine had been sought to prevent European intervention in the Western Hemisphere, but now the Roosevelt Corollary justified American intervention throughout the Western Hemisphere. This so-called Roosevelt Corollary-a corollary is an extension of a previous idea-to the Monroe Doctrine contained a great irony. Roosevelt tied his policy to the Monroe Doctrine, and it was also consistent with his foreign policy of "walk softly, but carry a big stick." Roosevelt stated that in keeping with the Monroe Doctrine, the United States was justified in exercising "international police power" to put an end to chronic unrest or wrongdoing in the Western Hemisphere.
"Chronic wrongdoing.may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation," he announced in his annual message to Congress in December 1904, "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." To keep other powers out and ensure financial solvency, President Theodore Roosevelt issued his corollary. Many Americans worried that European intervention in Latin America would undermine their country’s traditional dominance in the region. For example, British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded Venezuela’s ports in 1902 when the Venezuelan government defaulted on its debts to foreign bondholders. foreign policy when European governments began to use force to pressure several Latin American countries to repay their debts. European intervention in Latin America (see the Platt Amendment ) resurfaced as an issue in U.S.
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