U.S. attacks Mexico (1914)

The opening of vast new oil reserves in Mexico, coupled with the conviction that the existing Mexican government under Victoriano Huerta was friendly to British oil interests, spurred the United States to a policy of armed intervention in an attempt to topple the Huerta government. In addition to the economic motivations for U.S. policy in Mexico, Woodrow Wilson, believing in the universal efficacy of the democratic process, was particularly hostile to Huerta who had attained the presidency through violence. With regard to his policy toward the Huerta regime, Wilson stated that he intended “…to teach the Latin American republics to elect good men.”

In its drive to topple Huerta, the Wilson Administration enforced an arms embargo on Mexico. This policy was abandoned when the pro-U.S. Constitutionalists began winning and required additional arms to topple Huerta. The final U.S. intervention against Huerta, the seizure of Vera Cruz, ostensibly to obtain satisfaction for an affront to the American flag, served the more important purpose of cutting Huerta off from vital military supplies and customs revenues coming from Vera Cruz. The occupation of Vera Cruz ultimately led to the ousting of the Huerta government and the installation of the pro-American Constitutionalists. With the triumph of the Constitutionalists, American oil companies were to gain pre-eminence in the Mexican oil fields.

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Teddy Roosevelt and "Protective Interventionism"

In 1904 when Theodore Roosevelt announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring in a message to Congress that:

“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 in 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, exercise an international police power.”

Ostensibly invoked to forestall European interventions for debt collections in the Hemisphere, Roosevelt’s “protective interventionism”, in fact, laid the basis for frequent U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean, and the final incorporation of the area into the U.S. sphere of influence. With the advent of the Roosevelt Corollary it was no longer necessary for a European or Latin American government to do any thing concrete to trigger a U.S. intervention. All that was required was the unilateral decision of the United States that intervention was appropriate. With the construction of key naval installations and the adoption of Theodore Roosevelt’s ideology of the “Big Stick”, the United States established a strategic hegemony in the Caribbean and nominated itself to the position of international police power for the area.

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