|
Roosevelt Corollary
Excerpts from Speech to Congress, December 6th, 1904
[Reasserted the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, Warning European Powers not to Intervene
in
the Western Hemisphere; the Dominican Republic had Defaulted on its Debts
and was at Risk for European Intervention]
...
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. 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. 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.
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. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable,
which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors
have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. 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. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness,
the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all
mankind, is the attainment of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes
when each nation is not merely safe guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously
recognizes and performs its duty toward others. Generally peace tells for righteousness;
but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first to the
cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is
rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility
for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced. One of our great poets has
well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands
of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too
dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which
is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside
foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or
thoughtless shortcomings.
If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are so kept
before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy in its larger
aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation has no more right
to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than an individual has to
do injustice to another individual; that the same moral law applies in one case
as in the other. But we must also remember that it is as much the duty of the
Nation to guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the
individual so to do. Within the Nation the individual has now delegated this
right to the State, that is, to the representative of all the individuals, and
it is a maxim of the law that for every wrong there is a remedy. But in international
law we have not advanced by any means as far as we have advanced in municipal
law. There is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before
which the wrongdoer can be brought. Either it is necessary supinely to acquiesce
in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality and aggression, or else
it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly to stand up for its rights.
Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international
control over offending nations, it would be a wicked thing for the most civilized
powers, for those with most sense of international obligations and with keenest
and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to
disarm. If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely
disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one
form or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament would have to
be kept up to serve the purposes of international police; and until international
cohesion and the sense of international duties and rights are far more advanced
than at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of
doing good to others must have a force adequate for the work which it feels
is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows
that a self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand endeavor
by every means to aid in the development of the various movements which tend
to provide substitutes for war, which tend to render nations in their actions
toward one another, and indeed toward their own peoples, more responsive to
the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind; and on the other hand
that it should keep prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself,
to repel any wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more
advanced stage of international relations would come under the head of the exercise
of the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to all
mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.
We are in every way endeavoring to help on, with cordial good will, every movement
which will tend to bring us into more friendly relations with the rest of mankind. In pursuance of this policy I shall shortly lay before the Senate treaties of
arbitration with all powers which are willing to enter into these treaties with
us. It is not possible at this period of the world’s development to agree
to arbitrate all matters, but there are many matters of possible difference
between us and other nations which can be thus arbitrated. Furthermore, at the
request of the Interparliamentary Union, an eminent body composed of practical
statesmen from all countries, I have asked the Powers to join with this Government
in a second Hague conference, at which it is hoped that the work already so
happily begun at The Hague may be carried some steps further toward completion. This carries out the desire expressed by the first Hague conference itself.
It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any
projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as
are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring
countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. 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 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, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country
washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization
which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left
the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly
and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their
affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors
are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their
borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to
them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest
assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy.
We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became
evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad
had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression
to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism
to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires
to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the
right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making
good use of it.
In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in
regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the
theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have
acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There
are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved,
strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and
more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and
material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better
the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own
to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general
uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic
corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than
by passing resolutions and wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional
crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us
doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval
of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must
be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made
to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove the beam
from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What
form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that
is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases
in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop
to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to
be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of certain very obvious
shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by its consistent practice its belief
in the principles of civil and religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people
among whom even the worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than
sporadic, so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental
rights--it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression
to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishenef,
or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression
as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims,
and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.
...
— President Theodore Roosevelt
Return to
Historic Speeches Page
|
|
