Gunboat Diplomacy

Theodore Roosevelt’s was a President who believed that the United States should be a strong country by military strength. He believed that that we had to a power in the world and a force in the world. Roosevelt wanted a two ocean navy. He wanted a navy that could come and go to the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean. With the idea of wanting power in the both oceans he began plans for the construction of the Panama Canal. This is where the essence of the Gunboat Diplomacy comes in. Gunboat Diplomacy involves intimidation by threat or use of military force. He ended up taking Panama and then leaving the Congress to debate the situation out and while debating was building the canal.

The invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega was the root of Gunboat Diplomacy. Before the Panama Canal was constructed, the country of Panama was a province of Columbia. The Federal Government of the United States used the Monroe Doctrine to construct an imperial diplomacy, which initially staked out a sphere-of-influence that warned Old World powers not to attempt any further colonial adventures in the New World: the New World was to be dominated by the United States. The drive to build the canal as a short-cut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans came about largely from the interests of the United States Navy, which recognized that the strategic control of the continent would devolve on anyone who had control of a canal at the narrowest point in the land: and there was the geo-political aspect of control of the Pacific Ocean. The British Navy had already proven the necessity of controlling the ocean as a supply line for colonial expansion.

The biggest obstacle to building the Panama Canal was the issue of who would control it. The next biggest obstacle was the fact that the area was covered with jungle, which was a breeding ground for diseases Western medicine had never encountered. When President Roosevelt got behind the Navy to push its interests, influenced by the British Naval tradition, and intending to launch an American Naval tradition to rival the British in colonial expansion, he immediately embraced the plan to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. The only problem was that it belonged to another country.

The Isthmus of Panama was a backwater, an inconsequential country province with no pretensions of independence. The entire project for independence was a proto-type for the kind of covert CIA operations Americans would be famous for in the Third World later in the century. An American “adventurer” intrigue with locals who declared their independence from Columbia, which was back down from reclaiming the area by an American Gunboat. The new Government of Panama immediately signed special agreements with the United States that basically gave the United States Government rights to intervene in Panamanian affairs, but which gave the Panamanian Government the much needed credibility it needed by granting it diplomatic recognition. What proceeded to develop was a dictatorship, which became a key-feature of the client states the United States would prop up.

Under the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States assumed a position of hegemony over the countries of Central and South America. It was for the purpose of sustaining this hegemony that American troops have been sent to Cuba, Haiti, Grenada, Guatemala, and Mexico. American intervention in Guatemala and Nicaragua is directly responsible for the civil war that has raged in those two countries for 75 years, in which hundreds of thousands of basically innocent people have died. The way the CIA engineered the coup in Guatemala in the 1950s, to secure the property of the United Fruit, was a classic example of psyche warfare. Through a disinformation campaign the democratically elected panicked, and the CIA installed a puppet government that had bee educated in the United States, and didn’t have to wait to be told how to protect U.S. interests.

Gunboat diplomacy had its origins in the Opium War, when the Chinese rebelled against the British importation of opium into China, and the British response was to send a gunboat up the Yangtze River. The resort to force in diplomatic initiatives has roots in antiquity, from the original disputes in the Fertile Crescent; but every generation has refined the use of coercion, to the point that today government’s use of coercion is a well-oiled machine. There is almost an unwritten gentlemen’s agreement that national government attempts to overwhelm a weak nation’s government, the world community feigns disapproval. All action is deliberately confused, however, because underlying all of the appearance of law and order, the world community still honors the law of conquest.

The one seeming divergence in this was the Gulf War, which supposedly conducted to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control. George Bush was the CIA-man, and the whole