Synonyms

Capital export; Dollar diplomacy; Imperialism; Informal imperialism; Theodore Roosevelt; US foreign policy; William Howard Taft

Definition

This essay explores what is known as the ‘dollar diplomacy’ of the United States between the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Dollar diplomacy was a US foreign policy designed to further US economic interests in South America and East Asia by means of loans made to countries therein, as opposed to the use of military force. By the 1890s, at the forefront of those pushing for an aggressive American policy abroad were various industrial leaders who feared that the US would soon produce more than it could consume. New dependent states could provide markets for these surplus goods, while also securing the supply of raw materials necessary to burgeoning US industry. In 1912, President William Howard Taft claimed that his administration ‘sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse’ and that such ‘policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets’. Taft’s remarks gave formal definition to the term ‘dollar diplomacy’, a phrase synonymous with the diplomacy his administration pursued between 1909 and 1913. Dollar diplomacy would serve diplomatic means in turning the US into a commercial and financial world power. The export of capital to provide economic stimulus was revived through the Washington Consensus and again by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1980s and 1990s.

By the 1890s, many US leaders had begun to have new attitudes toward imperialistic adventures abroad. The reasons for this were numerous. At the forefront of those pushing for an aggressive American policy abroad were various industrial leaders who feared that the US would soon produce more than it could ever consume. New dependent states could prove to be markets for these goods. Some in business also perceived that in the future, industries would need raw materials that could simply not be found in America (e.g. rubber and petroleum products). In the future, the US would need dependent states to provide these materials. After experiencing a series of economic downturns in the 1870s and 1880s, the US economy had endured enough by the panic of 1893. Soon, business and political leaders needed to look no further than their own industrial over-production for the cause of their economic ills.

In 1912, President William Howard Taft claimed that his administration ‘sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse’ and that such ‘policy has been characterized as substituting dollars for bullets’. Taft’s remarks gave formal definition to the term ‘dollar diplomacy’, a phrase synonymous with the diplomacy his administration pursued between 1909 and 1913. Dollar diplomacy would serve diplomatic means in turning the US into a commercial and financial world power. Ever the lawyer, Taft surrounded himself with like-minded corporate lawyers and the bankers and businessmen who were their clients. The object of foreign policy became concentrated on assisting US businessmen in the protection and expansion of investment and trade, especially in Latin America and the Far East. Such efforts would raise significant dilemmas regarding the division of public and private responsibilities (Rosenberg 2003, p. 3).

In The New Empire (1963), Walter LaFeber argues that America’s ‘expansionist’ policies were a direct result of the maturation of industrialisation. Business and the capitalist economy needed new markets and this meant foreign ones. They would be backed up by a new navy and military power that would easily take away Spain’s former colonies in 1898 (and influence most of the Western Hemisphere). LaFeber also incorporates early labour and immigration policies into his argument. He highlights that Secretary of State Seward (1861–69) advocated importing ‘cheap labour’ and created the 1868 treaty with China to bring in ‘unskilled’ workers. This was, LaFeber argues, part of his plan for US expansion or imperialism. A central point of his work is that policymakers (mostly presidents, secretaries of state, and businessmen) feared class unrest at home (as strikes and violence reached unprecedented levels in the later decades of the 1800s). Expansion abroad would quell this by unifying the nation and providing jobs both in the Navy and in revitalised industry. The expansion of US economic and militaristic might clearly held implications not only abroad, but at home.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century the US would emerge as a major economic power. US investment bankers would come to play an important role in international lending. During this time, those nations that were deemed stable and had already been incorporated into the world financial system were able to attract capital investment through US private bank loans. Those which were considered unstable, and thus unattractive investment opportunities, became the locations where dollar diplomacy would flourish. These nations would be given loans on condition that they would be under the US government’s direct financial supervision in what is best understood as a receivership. Such practice involved the co-operation of three groups: private bankers, financial experts, and government officials. The process began with private bankers considering which of the ‘risky’ nations they would lend to, followed by the financial experts who would bear the task of fiscal reorganisation and administrative management of the borrowing country. Finally, government officials would be responsible for orchestrating the entire deal under the guise of furthering global economic integration and strategic alliances for both US national and international interests.

The Open-Door Policy

The basic strategy of the ‘open-door’ policy, as developed by Charles A. Conant and Paul S. Reinsch, was an alternative to war through developing a worldwide system of investment, rather than one that was globally segmented. It was intended to offer shares in world development rather than spheres of influence closed off by annexationist empires. Its doses of ‘insular imperialism’ allowed for more emphasis on investment in exercising expansion as opposed to the older territorial forms of imperialism. Reinsch, in particular, saw how investing would require new political relations between the investing and host societies (Sklar 1988, p. 84). This would be the primary method by which the US would begin its expansion into the Pacific, developing island stepping-stones to the major market areas. The modification was not outright colonialism, but its effects could be just as damaging. Historian Martin J. Sklar provides a detailed description of his conception of the basis for globalism and the theory behind establishing the Bretton Woods institutions (81–82).

America’s entry into the Spanish-American War and later annexation of territories such as Hawaii, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines was not a reflection of the Manifest Destiny credo, nor the venting of a ‘psychic crisis’. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Richard Hofstadter expresses US imperialism in the forms of ‘destiny and duty’, suggesting that ‘annexation of the Philippines in particular and expansion generally was inevitable and irresistible’ (1965, pp. 174–185). These new territories were specific targets for the implementation of coaling and cable systems and naval stations that would integrate a trade route which could facilitate America’s primary reason for entering the Pacific: to penetrate and eventually dominate the fabled China market (McCormick 1963, p. 156). It also marked a significant turn for US capitalism, which up to that point had been primarily focused on territorial expansion within North America. Such expansion was the result of a westward push to seize what had been Native American land and later nearly half of the Mexican territories at the end of the US–Mexican War (1846–48).

In ‘The Economic Basis of Imperialism’, Conant held that advanced nations had maximised their investment in production to what was considered profitably manageable. They now faced a ‘superabundance of loanable capital’ with rapidly diminishing rates of return. Eventually, Conant explained, restless capital would need to turn ‘to countries which had not felt the pulse of modern progress’ to find profitable rates of interest. Conant claimed it was ‘only a matter of detail’ whether the US took possession of other lands, established quasi-independent protectorates, or developed a strong naval and diplomatic strategy as the promotional avenue for investment in uncolonised areas. Regardless, the endgame was the restoration of profits and prosperity to the imperial nation while simultaneously spreading productive enterprise to areas receiving US capital (Rosenberg 2003, pp. 15–16).

Ingrained in Conant’s theory was a belief that both over-production and declining profits could be identified as the forces driving imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Both J.A. Hobson (1938) and V.I. Lenin (1939) would follow in developing similar theories. Yet, unlike Conant, these later theories had more to say about the adverse social conditions that would follow as a result of such practices. Since the late nineteenth century, Hobson and Lenin had recognised that colonial annexation in the era was a qualitatively new era of capitalism: the monopoly or imperialist stage. Hobson, in particular, argued that the emergence of widespread monopoly forms would eventually lead to under-consumption (or over-saving), growing foreign investment, and imperialist expansion. Both theorists held imperialism accountable for the formation, development, and expansion of the world market, one built on a competitive search and annexation of colonies as a means of extracting surplus and bringing natural resources back to the imperial acumen. According to Lenin, since the fifteenth century, the world capitalist system had been created and consolidated on a foundational practice that divided the core capitalist powers from peripheral economies. The process permitted the regimes in the developed metropolis to exploit under-developed colonies in the global South by extracting profit, payment, or tribute through a system of unequal exchange where capitalist monopolies controlled and dominated international trade and investment. To assist in the process, a ruling class in the periphery functioned as intermediaries by maintaining an interest in the corresponding patterns of production. As a result, Conant believed that prosperity and profits in the advanced nations would ripple out into moral uplift where all would benefit. Such an economic interpretation is viewed as a celebration of both capitalism and imperialism (Rosenberg 2003, p. 16).

By 1900, opposition to colonialism grew to be so formidable that policymakers had to assume that force was no longer an option for the US when acquiring new territory. Still, such a policy was not conducive to US interests. During the first 5 years of the twentieth century, the Roosevelt Administration developed clear and expansive policies that sanctioned the creation of dependencies but not colonies. New justifications, such as spreading civilisation and securing a favourable economic and geopolitical position, were now the rationales for dollar diplomacy. The aim was to establish a level of control that did not require outright colonial possession (32).

The transition here is a significant one in understanding the changes occurring in the practices of colonialism itself. Harry Magdoff has contributed greatly to our understanding of formal control and direct colonialism or settlement. He argues the importance of considering imperialism as a necessary means of reshaping the social and economic institutions of many of the dependent countries to the needs of metropolitan centres. In the case of the global South, and the US need for it, there is an intended exchange of capital accumulation for economic stimulus. After capitalist reshaping of local institutions has taken effect, economic forces (the international price, marketing, and financial systems) develop into adequate means of dominance and exploitation by the imperial centre. Reshaping allowed for political independence without making any essential changes or altering the initial conditions for conquest. Such reshaping can be another means of understanding the transition for an older imperialism to what is now referred to as ‘new imperialism’. We could surmise colonialism as merely a phase in the process. However, the primary distinction involves the development of two historical factors: (1) the loss of British hegemony and a global competition for territorial influence by advanced capitalist states; (2) the rise of monopolistic corporations in becoming the dominant actors in all the advanced capitalist states (Magdoff 2003, p. 17). Similarly, Lenin emphasised that imperialism did not necessitate formal control. Lenin said as much in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism when describing British imperialism in the nineteenth century: ‘The division of the world into … colony-owning countries on the one hand and colonies on the other’ did not discount the core–periphery relations between nation states (Lenin 1939/1916, p. 85). Lenin went on to claim that there was no distinction between dependent countries and those which were ‘officially’ politically independent.

Western observers have often treated the global South’s ‘under-development’ or economic crisis, that was frequently the pitch for securing dollar diplomacy as an original historic condition. It would be as if prosperity has never touched certain regions of the world due to their barren, infertile land or their unproductive people. In The Political Economy of Growth, Paul Baran analysed the role of imperialism in reinforcing the economic under-development of those countries considered to be in the Third-World periphery. He questioned the common practice of assuming all in those poorer peripheral economies had always been relatively backward. He questioned the lack of capitalist development in the periphery, unlike those core regions of advanced capitalist nation states. In addition, he explored the reasons why forward movement in the periphery had either been slow or altogether absent (Baran 1957, p. 136). In his analysis, Baran provided evidence that showed how European conquest and plundering of the rest of the globe had generated the great divide between the core and the periphery of the capitalist world economy that persists today. The analysis provided was clear: incorporation on an unequal basis into the periphery of the capitalist world economy was itself the cause of the plight of underdeveloped countries. This was the ‘development of underdevelopment’. Baran concluded that imperialism was inseparable from capitalism. Its central underpinnings were to be found in the mode of accumulation operating in the advanced capitalist world. An international division of labour had evolved which geared production and trade of the poor countries in the periphery significantly more toward the needs of the rich countries in the centre or core of the system than toward the needs of their own populations (Foster 2002).

Roosevelt’s Corollary En Route to Dollar Diplomacy

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt announced his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to Congress, which stated that the US had the right to intervene in any country in the Western Hemisphere that did things ‘harmful to the United States’. Along these same lines, the corollary also stipulated that the US would intervene in Latin America when nations in the region acted improperly. This was essentially a declaration that the US had cast itself as the ‘police officer’ in the region. ‘Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship’, Roosevelt said. ‘Chronic wrongdoing, however … may force the United States to exercise an international police power’. This was particularly true in the case of the Dominican Republic, which had repeated failed to repay loans to both Italy and France. Instead, by implementing the Roosevelt Corollary, the US intervened and seized control of Dominican customs collections and took responsibility for distributing the funds to repay both European nations.

During Roosevelt’s term, the US used the threat of military power to bring about its foreign-policy objectives in Latin America and the Caribbean. US marines were often deployed to Central America. While the foreign-policy approach of Taft’s presidency is referred to as ‘dollar diplomacy’, Roosevelt’s has been referred to as ‘gunboat diplomacy’. The Roosevelt Corollary strengthened US control over Latin America, and justified numerous US interventions in Latin American affairs in the twentieth century. As Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft was not as aggressive in foreign policy and favoured ‘dollars over bullets’, stating that US investment abroad would ensure stability and good relations with nations abroad. Dollar diplomacy should be regarded as the process by which US capitalism became deeply rooted in the political economy of the global South.

Unlike Roosevelt, Taft saw a more significant role for US business to play in foreign policy. Having been long concerned with foreign trade, he recognised an over-abundance of produced goods in the US and an overwhelming need to increase exports. It was by no mere coincidence that in 1910, under the Taft Administration, the US began to export more manufactured goods than raw materials. Herein, the focus of trade changed from industrial nations in need of raw materials to less developed countries that required finished products. Accordingly, those developing areas of Latin America and East Asia were vital in discovering new economic opportunities that provided many benefits. The shift in policy, according to Taft, would provide the solution to the over-production problem plaguing the US economy. In addition, the change would benefit recipient nations, allowing for economic progress and eventually political stability. Such stability would allow for economic development of US interests in these under-developed areas. In his first annual message at the end of 1909, Taft clearly indicated that the mission of ‘American capital’ was to seek ‘investment in foreign countries’ so that ‘American products’ could more readily seek ‘foreign markets’.

To fill his cabinet, Taft wanted lawyers, which is why Philander C. Knox was an ideal candidate for secretary of state. Knox was a wealthy conservative lawyer and former US attorney general and senator from Pennsylvania. He had been what is now known as a corporation lawyer, the Carnegie Steel Corporation being one of his clients. He was thus sympathetic to big business. Knox also shared Taft’s position that the protection and expansion of economic interests should be the focus of foreign policy. In doing so, the State Department would begin to support US financiers and businessmen by finding opportunities abroad. Certainly, the introduction and development of dollar diplomacy is significant because it was contrary to normal lending practices. However, its political and economic significance lie in the creation of ‘controlled loans’ as the vehicles of social reconstruction originally envisioned by Conant.

Fertile Soil: Latin America

In Latin America, where objectives of dollar diplomacy included deterring European intervention and maintaining regional stability, the Taft Administration’s approach represented an extension of both the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Together Taft and Knox viewed Latin America as a region ripe with opportunity for US interests to expand, while offering a jumpstart to what they considered to be an under-developed economy. Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, and Nicaragua were but a few of the states in the region targeted by Taft’s dollar diplomacy.

In China, where the US was a relative newcomer in terms of serious economic engagement, the goals of dollar diplomacy did not stretch far beyond the creation of a safe environment for US banking capital and surplus production. Since the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary did not apply to the Far East, the Taft Administration relied on the open-door policy crafted in 1899, in which the US decreed that all nations should have equal trading rights in China, as the basis for its dollar diplomacy there.

As president, Taft sought to extend what Roosevelt had established with his Corollary in securing the US position around the Caribbean. Rather than removing European influence from the region, as the Roosevelt policy had done, Taft and Knox sought to control the finances of the Caribbean countries. The means of doing this was by taking over custom houses as the Roosevelt Administration had done in the Dominican Republic. According to the Taft-Knox doctrine, it was important to get the Caribbean nations to repay European debts by means of loans from US businessmen or at least from multinational groups in which Americans participated. Concerned by the general instability of the Central American governments, Taft and Knox set a goal of stable governments and prevention of financial collapse. Fiscal intervention would make military intervention unnecessary. As Knox told an audience at the University of Pennsylvania on 15 June 1910: ‘True stability is best established not by military, but by economic and social forces …. The problem of good government is inextricably interwoven with that of economic prosperity and sound finance; financial stability contributes perhaps more than any other one factor to political stability’ (Rosenberg 2003, p. 63).

Such statements did not mean that Taft and Knox were unwilling to use military power in the Caribbean. They did use it. They thought that fiscal control would lessen the need for intervention. They believed that the US and nations of the Caribbean would both benefit. For the US, an increase in trade, more profitable investments, and a secure Panama Canal would result. For the local inhabitants, the benefits would be peace, prosperity, and improved social conditions.

The flow of foreign capital to Latin America has been massive. Even more than resources or markets, capital comes in search of cheap, easily exploitable labour. Commodities, produced with Latin America’s most precious resource (its labour), are destined for export to countries with well-developed markets which make selling at high prices easier. What results is a familiar enough story in under-developed countries. Dominated by foreign capital, they perpetually produce what they do not consume and consume what they do not produce.

Nicaragua

By 1909, relations between the US and Nicaragua had soured, largely due to the embittered reaction of Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya to the US building a canal in Panama rather than Nicaragua. Relations worsened as Zelaya accumulated European debt, was increasing hostile toward his country’s Central American neighbours, and made repeated threats to end the US–Nicaragua concession, a US-owned mining property.

In October 1909, the US supported a faction of rebel nationalists in a revolt against Zelaya. Taft, aligned with opposition leader Juan Estrada, sent US gunboats and other military forces to Nicaragua to assist in removing Zelaya from power. As Zelaya’s successor, Estrada formed a provisional government in 1910 after securing a loan from the US for the stabilisation and rehabilitation of the Nicaraguan economy. In January 1911, the US formally recognised the Estrada Government. However, after a turbulent start, Estrada stepped down after only 6 months in office. His replacement, Adolfo Diaz, signed a financial agreement called the Knox-Castrillo Convention, which in essence was a dollar-diplomacy package tailored for Nicaragua.

Under the new agreement, the US would provide a $15 million bank loan to pay off Nicaragua’s European debts. For their part, the US government would gain control of the Nicaraguan customs house to ensure loan payments, and would have the right to intervene in Nicaragua to maintain order when necessary. Additionally, Nicaragua would allow US banks to control the National Bank of Nicaragua and the government-owned railway. Praising the treaty, Taft said it was ‘of inestimable benefit to the prosperity, commerce, and peace of the Republic’ (Maurer 2013, p. 108).

At home, the Knox-Castrillo Convention faced stiff opposition, particularly in the Senate where it failed to win approval due to growing concern about its interventionist aspects. The reaction among Nicaraguans was equally hostile, resulting in a revolt against Díaz in June 1912. Taft responded to the crisis by sending several warships and a contingent of 2,700 marines to restore order and protect US interests. In the end, the Knox-Castrillo Convention was never ratified. Instead, it was replaced by the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, a watered-down version that lacked the interventionist powers of its predecessor. The new agreement was signed by both nations in 1914, when Taft was no longer president. In addition, as a result of revolt and the need to protect American interests, a US military presence would remain in Nicaragua until 1933.

Cuba

Of those nations that were ripe for dollar diplomacy, Cuba was probably the most fertile. After failing to achieve sovereignty at the end of its campaign for national independence ended in 1898, Cuba was first ruled by a provisional US military government and then became a protectorate of the US, as stated by the Platt Amendment to the 1902 Cuban Constitution. Such US influence was expected to ensure the creation of strong institutions and an underlying prosperous attitude, but neither materialised. Instead, the island nation was victimised by a wave of unrestricted foreign capital.

Foreign capital was an attractive short-term solution to finance the costs of reconstruction. It also promised to get the economy off the ground after 30 years of disruption. Employment, tax revenues, and exports were expected to soar. People would have money to spend and the government would obtain the necessary resources to finance projects of reconstruction. These promises were sufficient for the Cuban government to open the doors of the island to US money. The sugar industry became the main beneficiary of foreign investment, so much so that the national economy became almost entirely dependent upon its exports. In 1909, the year in which Taft was inaugurated and dollar diplomacy was made official, the total amount of US investments (not just sugar) in Cuba was $141 million. In 1924, US investment totals were nine times that of the previous figure, nearing $1.25 billion, of which $750 million, or 60%, were invested directly in the sugar industry.

During the dollar-diplomacy era, with the resurgence of sugar production, companies sought and purchased plots of land previously owned by local families in order to create large, profitable land-holdings. It wasn’t long before large numbers of peasants were unemployed as families lost ownership of land which had always been their most basic source of security. Foreign investment forced a shift in the state of affairs in two separate yet dependent areas. First, the infusion of foreign investment as a means to resuscitate sugar production allowed for it to become the focus of the Cuban economy. Second, the social structure was vastly changed with the transition in land ownership from mediumsized family-owned plots to large landholdings owned by foreign capitalist corporations.

In the dollar-diplomacy era, however, capitalist forces prompted a change. Because companies were constantly on the lookout for cheap labour to cultivate and harvest their immense landholdings, jobs became insecure and temporary. Seasonal workers had to leave the household during both the dry and the wet seasons in order to obtain a salary. Men were roaming the fields or the city streets for most of the year, which meant that a stable family life was no longer possible. For rural Cuba, this was a new state of affairs that furthered poverty and fuelled unrest. Jobs offered by US companies attracted record amounts of immigration and caused the breakdown of the traditional family structure. This allowed for a shift in the agricultural market in Cuba from one that was community-based, subsistence, and small-scale farming to one where large portions of land were owned by a single entity. The new system was wage-based and demanded large numbers of workers to maximise productivity.

The change in land ownership also reconfigured the system of labour to one that was wage-based and more conducive to capitalist enterprise. The new system also attracted record amounts of immigration from Haiti, Jamaica, and Spain, which caused rising populations on the island never seen before. The overcrowding also adversely affected the labour market as wages decreased with the rising demand for jobs. Due to the lack of sustainable employment, more men were forced off the plantations and into the cities to find work. This caused an increase in impoverished female-headed households and a significant drop in consensual unions. What the influx of foreign direct investment failed to account for was the stabilising societal power that the traditional family nucleus had provided. What was intended to increase the potential of becoming a prosperous nation had resulted in the destruction of the traditional family culture and an increase in the struggle to sustain a living (Smith 1966; Timoneda 2008).

Imperial Legacy

Imperialism is often explained primarily as an outcome of economic expansionism. This is certainly the case in Latin America, where, for example, in the cases of United Fruit in Guatemala and International Telephone and Telegraph in Chile, political and military initiatives were undertaken largely to support the interests of particular corporations and to create the political climate for the expansion of US economic interests as a whole (Harvey 2003, p. 49). However, in the development of neo-liberal capitalist imperialism there has also been the drive to maximise profits by lowering labour costs. The global South has offered numerous opportunities to discover new sources of cheap labour. Repeatedly, the arm of the US state has assisted corporate needs through enhanced government policies designed to lower the cost of labour by any means. This has allowed businesses to take advantage of the massive global over-supply of labour. In his own analysis, Stephen Hymer focused on the enormous ‘latent surpluspopulation’ or reserve army of labour in both the backward areas of the developed economies and in the under-developed countries, ‘which could be broken down to form a constantly flowing surplus population to work at the bottom of the ladder’. Like Marx, Hymer equated the ‘accumulation of capital’ with an ‘increase of the proletariat’. Herein, the Third World provided a vast ‘external reserve army’ that would supplement the ‘internal reserve army’ that already existed within the developed capitalist countries. Accordng to Foster and McChesney (2012), this would serve as ‘the real material basis on which multinational capital was able to internationalise production’, by maintaining a steady stream of ‘surplus population into the labour force’ (150). It was Hymer’s contention that this would eventually weaken labour globally through a process of ‘divide and rule’ (Hymer 1979, pp. 262–269).

Early in the twentieth century, when the US began to emerge as a global power, the central question concerning architects of US foreign policy was not whether the US should be a global power, but rather how the US should best go about becoming one. Between 1909 and 1913, President Taft’s answer to that question was dollar diplomacy, a series of policy initiatives that attempted to broaden the scope of US economic and political influence around the world through financial measures such as bank loans to developing nations. When those measures alone proved insufficient, dollar diplomacy relied on more traditional foreign-policy practices, such as military intervention, to achieve its objectives.

In the end, dollar diplomacy created more havoc then it originally intended to prevent. The question for the US has never been whether or not it should become a global force, but rather how it should become one. Taft’s implementation of dollar diplomacy from 1909–13 was yet another attempt to extend the borders of influence under US control. The exchange of capital accumulation for economic stimulus (the force driving dollar diplomacy) was later reinstated through the Washington Consensus and again by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1980s and 1990s. The imperialist nature of the US state is driven by the ever expanding nature of capitalist political economy and has been marked by more than a century of continuous military and economic intervention abroad.

Cross-References