As the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was uniquely positioned to turn the United States into a world power. In 1904—the same year that his government initiated the construction of the Panama Canal—he responded to the threat of European intervention in the Dominican Republic by issuing the “Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” 

This proclamation revised the passive language of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which had claimed the Americas as the U.S. sphere of influence but without specifying a strategy. The Roosevelt Corollary asserted the right to actively intervene. 

Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, the Corollary justified the use of U.S. military force in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, and other countries in order to secure the ideological and economic alignment of those countries with the United States.