Gunboat Diplomacy

“Gunboat diplomacy” refers to a foreign policy that relies on force or the threat of force. To some extent, such an [Page 337]approach to foreign policy has always existed between empires and nations. But in the American political lexicon the term is most commonly applied to U.S. foreign policy in the Caribbean, Central America, and the northern tier of South America during the first three decades of the 20th century. Thereafter, this policy gave way to the “Good Neighbor Policy” formulated first by Herbert Hoover and then put into practice by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereby the United States would commit to refraining from armed intervention in Latin America.

One of the first examples of American gunboat diplomacy was the mission of Comm. Matthew C. Perry, who steamed with eight ships, one-third of the U.S. Navy, to “open” Japan to trade with the United States in 1853. When Perry returned, as promised, the next year, the Tokugawa Shogunate agreed to the Treaty of Kanagawa in part out of recognition of what unbridled European powers were doing in nearby China. Naval shows-of-force followed in Korea, Hawaii, and China.

The Spanish–American War in 1898 gave the United States an overseas empire after the seizure of territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The war made clear the advantages of an ocean-going Navy to defend both coasts, the benefits of a trans-isthmian canal in Central America to save the long sea voyage around the southern tip of South America, and the need to secure bases in the Caribbean at the canal's eastern approaches. This strategic interest, coupled with pressure from banks and other businesses in the region, prompted the State and Navy departments to commit naval and marine forces to the Caribbean and Central America after 1895. Between the war with Spain in 1898 and U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, the U.S. government established a virtual hegemony in these waters. Some in the United States, calling themselves anti-imperialists, expressed their opposition to such interventions.

The process was aided by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. To prevent German interference in 1904 in the affairs of the Dominican Republic, he declared and assumed the right of “an international police power,” a right that he and succeeding presidents later exercised in Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and other nations. Roosevelt had already interfered in Colombian affairs. A French company had failed at great cost to construct a canal across the narrow Panamanian isthmus, which was at the time a part of the province of Panama in Columbia. An official in that company and some Panamanian elites conspired in 1903 to establish an “independent” Panama; Roosevelt quickly recognized Panama as a sovereign nation and ordered U.S. naval forces to move toward the new country's coasts to defend against a possible response from Columbia. The leaders of the newly independent Panama signed a treaty giving the United States rights to build and operate a canal and to control land on either side until 1999. The canal, completed in 1914, remains an engineering marvel. More important in terms of gunboat diplomacy, the Panama Canal also drew U.S. government attention to the affairs of the Caribbean and Central America.

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