The Caribbean, a Theater of Conflict (Part 3)

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the locus of Caribbean power shifted decisively toward the United States. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine declared the hemisphere closed to European colonization. Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 corollary converted that warning into a warrant for intervention. Washington would police the Caribbean to keep Europeans out and debts paid. Gunboat diplomacy followed, customs receiverships, occupations, and protectorates that stitched strategic interests, not least the approaches to the Panama Canal, to commercial ones. The US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 displayed the pattern at maximum intensity, control of finances, creation of a constabulary, and coercive stabilization in the name of order often met with fierce resistance, the legacy, political centralization, economic restructuring, and trauma outlasted the Marine's final departure. The Dominican Republic saw a similar cycle. Washington's primacy in the basin was no longer in question. These early interventions established what Caribbean political analysts today describe as the Imperial playbook, a consistent pattern of demonizing local leaders, manufacturing crises, and using military force to impose favorable political arrangements. The template would be refined and repeated throughout the 20th century.