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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
For nearly three decades after the turn of the twentieth century, the United States took upon itself the policing of the Caribbean and Central America. Under an expanded interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine known as the Roosevelt Corollary, American policymakers justified numerous military interventions in those small republics until Monroeism became a synonym in Latin America for imperialism and expansionism. By 1930, this policy of attempted hegemony by force was a failure: Public opinion at home and abroad had opposed the “big stick” concept of hemispheric relations almost from the beginning; the interventions seldom achieved their nebulous goals.
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21 Right to Protect Citizens, 9, 21–22. This is the subject of the only footnoting in the covering letter. Memorandum, xviii–xix.
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