The United States Has Now Gone Full Villain |
In March 1933, United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address in the dismal depths of the Great Depression. With the financial system near implosion, civic collapse loomed. Roosevelt famously set out to calm a terrified nation with his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” line.
But as critical as the domestic situation was, Roosevelt understood the US, and all other countries, needed to restore international trade while avoiding war. So, he included the following resonant observation:
This became known as FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” although the idea originated with his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s involvement is significant.
The Republicans of the 1920s had been isolationists with regard to Europe and much of the world, but in Latin America, they were enthusiastic imperialists. The US occupied Nicaragua between 1912 and 1933 in order to hold the land for a second cross-isthmus canal, an occupation which spawned a brutal six-year war with insurgents between 1927 and 1933. In Haiti, the story was similar. So, too, the Dominican Republic. There were also briefer invasions and occupations of Panama and Honduras.
American corporations—notably the United Fruit Company, which begat the term “banana republic”—loved this approach. So did corrupt elites in Latin American countries. Ordinary Latin Americans were not so enthusiastic. The leader of the insurgency in Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, became a folk hero across the whole region.
To Hoover’s credit, he recognized that these squalid wars and occupations were a foolish waste of........