Although the title of this work may suggest a hostile ideological stance or doctrinaire assertions, the text is remarkably successful in avoiding those pitfalls. Lael presents a short historiographical summary of the conflicting interpretations surrounding the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, and then identifies himself as one who finds that U.S. policy produced imperialistic results without necessarily having been malicious in intent. Few leaders consciously sought an exploitative domination—either politically or economically—over Latin America. Nevertheless, the ethnocentrist assumption that what served U.S. interests served civilization and what did not was undesirable led to policies that were imperialistic in nature.
The Colombian experience serves to illustrate this thesis, although the wolk does not necessarily reveal much that is startlingly new. The abortive Root-Cortés- Arosemena agreements (chap. 3) and the Murray Contract incident (much of chap. 4), for example, are well known. Among the more innovative sections is the author’s discussion of the Wilson administration's emphasis on extending foreign trade by subsidized expansion of the merchant marine, by revisions of the U.S. banking structure to permit foreign transactions, and by loosening of antitrust laws to encourage multinational corporations.
The work is a useful retelling of diplomatic history from 1903 to 1920, one of the few overviews available other than E. Taylor Park’s standard survey, Colombia and the United States, 1765-1934 (1935). One may disagree with Lael’s interpretation, but not with his well-documented and even-handed presentation. It can be juxtaposed with Stephen Randall’s The Diplomacy of Modernization: Colombian- American Relations, 1920-1940, for an up-to-date overview of U.S.-Colombian relations covering much of the first half of the twentieth century.
