Every single country in North and Central America today was the product of revolution. It was the cycle of the creation of the Americas - first conquered, then overthrown - that defined revolutionism that the Americans valued in their ideology of the model republic. Although the armistice of Britain and America following the War of 1812 did strengthen the relationship between the countries, Great Britain could not yet be considered America’s ally - no European country at the time could. The United States was more concerned with building their own country, which was less than fifty years old compared to the European empires that had risen and fallen for centuries, than establishing ties with kingdoms that were the epitome of everything their Republican values opposed. The spreading of these values would disturb the evolution of the United States, which could not afford to be inevitably drawn into war had the European powers invaded nearby North and Central America. However, one country’s territorial sovereignty over part of the Americas would pose a threat to the United States, specifically Russia and its claim to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest with the Ukase of 1821. The ukase forbid non-Russian ships from approaching Russian territory closer than one hundred Italian miles (Higgins 37). Although the Congress of Vienna and …show more content…
Britain, Germany, and Italy posted a naval blockade against Venezuela. President Cipriano Castro assumed the United States would interfere under the Monroe Doctrine, broadly interpreting the policy, however the doctrine did not explicitly state that all intervention in the Americas by Europe would be met with American force. After the crisis, President Theodore Roosevelt addressed in his State of the Union the United States’ right to intervention, stating that the country could take action in Latin American-European conflict before it occurred. The Roosevelt Corollary is generally regarded as an addition to the Monroe Doctrine. However, “over the long term the corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe” (Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 1904). Nevertheless, it was reason enough for early 1900s American intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic (Bailey). Other interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine include Secretary of State Richard Olney’s, named the Olney Corollary, in 1895, and the Big Brother extension to the doctrine in the 1880s by James G. Blaine, who arranged the First International Conference of American States in 1889 (Lens and Howard 464). The