Theodore Roosevelt

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ROOSEVELT AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE His Foreign Policy. The Army and Navy I DISCUSS the Monroe Doctrine, foreign policy, and the army and navy in this order for the reason that the size of our army and navy is somewhat dependent upon the views held both of the Monroe Doctrine and of our foreign...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ROOSEVELT AND THE MONROE DOCTRINE His Foreign Policy. The Army and Navy I DISCUSS the Monroe Doctrine, foreign policy, and the army and navy in this order for the reason that the size of our army and navy is somewhat dependent upon the views held both of the Monroe Doctrine and of our foreign policy generally. Roosevelt denned the Monroe Doctrine as a declaration that there must be no territorial aggrandizement by any non-American power at the expense of any American power on American soil. He said: ? We have deliberately made our own certain foreign policies which demand the possession of a first-class navy. The Monroe Doctrine should be treated as the cardinal feature of American foreign policy; but it would be worse than idle to assert it unless we intended to back it up, and it can be backed up only by a thoroughly good navy. As to which the London Spectator said: ? If the Monroe Doctrine is not to be consigned tothe waste-paper basket, it must rest in the last resource upon the naval and military power; and if America has not a fleet strong enough to say Thus far, and no farther to those who shall challenge the doctrine, that doctrine in the future will not prove worth the paper on which the Presidential Message of 1823 was written., Commenting further upon the Monroe Doctrine and our duty to our sister American republics, Roosevelt said, in substance, in his message of December, 1905, that under no circumstances would the United States use the Monroe Doctrine as a cloak for territorial aggression, nor should it be used by any nation on this continent as a shield to protect it from the consequences of its own misdeeds against foreign nations, but that the punishment by the foreign nation must not take the form of territorial occupation...