MARE NOSTRUM U.S. Security Policy in the English-Speaking Caribbean

...British naval intelligence understood that this meant an end to London's long-cherished dream of controlling an interoceanic canal through Central America...

...One of its first historians, Robert T. Hill of the United States Geological Survey, carried a copy of Froude's book with him when he visited the islands...

...The British understood very well that behind this missionary zeal was the link between commercial expansionism and naval power, which Admiral Alfred Mahan had laid out in 1890 in his book The Influence of Sea Power in History...

...The annexation of Puerto Rico and the occupation of Cuba offered the United States vital naval bases to protect Panama...

...In Trinidad he found disturbing signs that British pre-eminence was threatened by an aggressive new power...

...Every product of these islands," he continued, "were it not for the political conditions, would as naturally find a market in the United States as the magnetic needle finds the north...

...Official chroniclers and freelance propagandists travelled the globe, to laud the conquest of India, half of Africa and a string of possessions stretching across the oceans...

...This issue of Report on the Americas looks at how the Yankee came to be "sovereign of these waters," and at what cost...

...Froude little dreamed," he noted, "that in so short a time those wooden frigates would have disappeared from our navy, and that one of the most effective, if not one of the largest, iron-clad navies of the world, manned by these same Yankees, would be in their place, hammering at the gates of Cuba, preliminary to the establishment of American domination in the Great Antilles...

...Though it held back from extending direct control to the British islands, the long-term intentions were clear from Secretary of War Elihu Root's comments in 1902: "We must certainly bring the West Indies, from the point of Florida to the gateway of the isthmian canal, under the political and naval control of the United States, and must with equal certainty create special economic relations between them and the United States, quite different from those which they or we bear to the rest of the world...

...He came to celebrate the Empire, but instead foresaw its decay...

...It took charge of the finances of the Dominican Republic in 1905, and landed Marines there and in Haiti in 1916...

...market, "as the magnetic needle finds the North...

...By that time the old wooden frigates in Trinidad had given way to helicopter gunships and Special Forces in Grenada...

...For men like Hill, the war was a mission of salvation to release Cuba and Puerto Rico from their "unnatural political and trade conditions...

...Spearheaded by its new ironclad navy, the United States seized Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898, and occupied Cuba the same year...

...One such traveller-historian, James Anthony Froude, arrived in the British West Indies in the summer of 1888...

...For the moment, though, the eastern sea approaches, straddled by the small Leeward and Windward Islands, remained in colonial hands...

...As Froude has said, 'The Yankee, whether we like it or not, is sovereign of these waters...

...It took eighty years for the erosion of British power to be complete...

...a canal, under sole U.S...

...His prescriptions, however, were directed as much against British colonialism as against Spain's geriatric monarchy...

...The Spanish-American War of 1898 fulfilled Froude's bitter predictions that slovenly British rule would be replaced by a visionary and energetic challenger...

...When we arrived," Froude wrote, "there were three American frigates, old wooden vessels out merely on a cruise, but heavily sparred, smart and well set up, with the Stars and Stripes floating carelessly at their stems, as if in these Western seas, be the nominal dominion British, French or Spanish, the American has a voice also and intends to be heard...

...In 1903, the United States sponsored a secessionist revolution in Panama...

...Since the invasion, Washington has indeed tried to direct the economy of the English-speaking Caribbean toward the U.S...

...jurisdiction, followed...