Bilateral Relations: For the Better

Bilateral Relations: For the Better or for the Worse?

The relationship between the Dominican Republic and the United States between the historical period of 1960 and 2000 is a long-standing relationship like a marriage between humans, which can be reported as mutually symbiotic at some times in history, but more often than not, was sycophantic in nature on the part of the Dominican Republic and imperialistic on the part of the United States. This research is concerned with the presentation of how the relationship between the two countries has evolved throughout the centuries; has it been for the better or for the worse? This research should be found useful to readers who are looking to better understand the complexities of an old history of servile dependency (on the part of the Dominican Republic) and profitability (on the part of the United States). This relatively understudied relationship, especially when taken outside the body of work on military interventions, is an important one. There is much more research to be written on this subject, as much more work appears likely as the Dominican Republic's strategic as well as cultural significance in the United States will only increase into the next century. Readers will this paper useful for providing a succinct overview of the relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic.

First, in examining U.S.-Dominican Republic history, the State Department web site reports, "The U.S. has a strong interest in a democratic, stable, and economically healthy Dominican Republic. The country's standing as the largest Caribbean economy, second-largest country in terms of population and land mass, large bilateral trade with the United States, and its proximity to the United States and other smaller Caribbean nations make the Dominican Republic an important partner in hemispheric affairs" (2005). Furthermore, as over 50,000 U.S. citizens live in the Dominican Republic, many holding dual nationality, make the Dominican Republic a crucial area of interest for the United States. Conversely, there are also more than one million Dominicans whom reside in the United States, most of them in the metropolitan Northeast and some in Florida. The State Department's figures also find that "U.S. exports to the Dominican Republic in 2003 totaled $4.2 billion and the Dominican Republic exported $4.4 million to the U.S. In 2003, equaling some 87% of its export revenues" (2005). Taking note of these population and monetary figures, it's clear to see why both countries have a political, social and economic interest in each other. The Dominican Republic's proximity to the United States, strategic location, and raw materials and markets have guaranteed U.S. involvement in the nation's domestic affairs, leading to near annexation and two major military interventions. While U.S. interest has peaked and subsided throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the last two years, Sammy Sosa, Hurricane Mitch, and the tourist industry have revived attention. This research is also specifically concerned with the idea that the Dominican Republic has amply benefited from U.S. foreign policy that was mostly interested in containing the Soviet expansion. The main two reasons for the American interest in the sustaining of this "marriage" are: 1) The Dominican Republic's geographical position at the center of the Caribbean region and 2) because historically, the Dominican Republic has depended on its Northern neighbor like no other insular territory in the Caribbean. Now that the Cold War has come to a conclusion, the United States has diminished its role played in modern politics and as a result, the Dominican Republic is the member of the relationship that suffers most egregiously.

President Ulysses S. Grant's appeal for the Annexation of Dominican Republic is without a doubt, one of the most important documents in the history of the bilateral relations between the U.S. And the Dominican Republic. It explains the position of the American President regarding the commercial viability of the Dominican Republic that the nascent empire looked to gain if able to annex this territory. This request to the Congress was delivered at a time when the Dominican Republic had just become an independent republic. With significant eloquence, Grant's address to the Congress responds to the question of why the U.S. should annex the Dominican Republic. This appeal was followed in December of 1870 by Charles Sumner's speech, who gave a rousing monologue on the Senate floor against the proposed annexation of the Dominican Republic. In a speech titled "Naboth's Vineyard," he called the proposed annexation a "dance of blood" and "a new step in a measure of violence." He compared the Grant administration's action with that of King Ahab of the Old Testament who had coveted his neighbor's vineyard and taken it by deceit and dishonesty. The Massachusetts senator called for a rejection of the annexation pact in "the name of Humanity insulted, in the name of the weak trodden down, in the name of Peace imperiled, and in the name of the African race, whose first effort at independence is rudely assailed." Sumner's denunciation helped defeat Grant's plan but interestingly enough, nearly one hundred years later, similar battles have exploded over the Dominican Republic between the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the president. As the Sumner episode demonstrates, U.S. policymakers have focused on the Dominican Republic for many years.

In the 1986 book entitled "The Dominican Republican Politics and Development in an Un-Sovereign State," author Jan Knippers-Black focuses on the deep-rooted idea of "unsovereignty" and disproportionately unbalanced relationship between the U.S. And the Dominican Republic, most directly speculated that the cause is from a situation of dependency that has formed regarding the Dominican Republic facing its northern partner. Similarly, in the introduction of their book, "The United States and the Americas," Atkins and Wilson outline their ideas about the relationship. They describe the "U.S. relationship as one of 'super-sovereignty' and the Dominican Republic as an 'unsovereign state'"(1998, 5). In this context, the authors argue that U.S.-Dominican Republic relations have evolved from imperialism to a modern transnationalism focused on issues of the debt, the illegal drug trade, and Dominican migration to the United States.

The U.S. Role

How has the United States contributed to the building of this "patron-client" relationship as defined by Atkins and Wilson? They emphasize that Washington has sought to exclude foreign competition and maintain stability in the Caribbean for centuries. In the Dominican Republic, the fundamental themes of U.S. involvement have been built on the "rise and fall of the Dominican Republic's strategic importance, the legacy of military intervention and occupation, the problem of Dominican dictatorship and instability, and vacillating U.S. efforts to 'democratize' the country" (Atkins and Wilson 1998, 1). This could be attributed to, among other things, the Dominican Republic's constant and continuous involvement in the Organization of American States and the United States' unremitting commitment to the Dominican Republic's democratization and economic goals. To ensure that all the U.S. goals for the Dominican Republic are met, the United States has employed policies that were "coercive and cooperative, and unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral" (Atkins and Wilson 1998, 1)

Aside from social and economic matters, Atkins and Wilson also provide analysis of important political issues in U.S.-Dominican Republic relations. An example is their discussion of the U.S. responsibility for the rise of Rafael Trujillo. They take a very moderate position, underscoring that the United States "was at least indirectly responsible for Trujillo" by its creation of the National Guard (1998, 62). Yet, they note that President Horacio Vasquez promoted Trujillo and that many Dominicans accepted his rule in exchange for stability and order. Atkins and Wilson argue that the United States "did not intend for the Dominican armed forces to be used as an instrument for overthrowing constituted government or for maintaining a military dictatorship" (1998, 63). In Eric Roorda's book, we note the relationship between the United States and the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo during what is known as the "Good Neighbor era" (1998, 6). In the introduction, Roorda argues that the "formation of the Trujillo regime showed that a foreign policy based on the principles of national sovereignty and self-determination, the guise of the President Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor policy," which means having to accept as gracefully as possible the nearby existence of regimes antithetical to the principles of peace and democracy" (1998, 1). "The Good Neighbor policy demonstrated to a generation of Caribbean dictators," Roorda adds, "that they were free to run their countries however they pleased, so long as they maintained common enemies with the United States" (1998, 1). This is a primary example of how the United States exercised its control over the government policies of the Dominican Republic. Anna Scheiber's article concerning the economy also backs this suggestion, in which she demonstrates how vulnerable the Dominican Republic is with regard to U.S. economic power and how that dependency allows the United States to control the nature of the relationship.

Roorda also argues that "upon close examination of 'bilateral' relations between the countries, the appearance of a unified 'policy' on the part of the United States begins to blur, and multiple sources of influence instead come into focus. All of these together constitute the full relationship, and it is confusing and contradictory" (1998, 3). The cast of public characters included U.S. diplomats, Navy and Marine officers, and congressmen. Private citizens, including bankers, journalists, lobbyists, and businessmen, rounded out the ensemble. All these groups interacted to influence U.S. relations with Trujillo, although rarely in a consolidated fashion. While the Dominican Republic became a difficult place to do business, a querulous participant in negotiations, and a major cause of Caribbean disquiet, including genocide, war scares, and assassinations" Trujillo still continued to obtain U.S. support (1998, 3). Even after the Trujillo government was overthrown, the U.S. government insisted on maintaining its power over the region by insisting on "approving the new head of the army and keeping the military intact." In short, Washington moved to create a "guardian system" it could control or manipulate (McSherry 2003, 2). The United States support continued strongly well off into the 1980s, when according to Richard Newfarmer's article published in the Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, U.S. President Ronald Reagan demonstrated significant geopolitical interest in the region, after establishing a friendly relationship with the "Father of Dominican democracy," President Balaguer. Balaguer was an open admirer of the United States' model of democracy and sought to reproduce the same economic and political policies in the Dominican Republican. This is clear to see by Balaguer's statement to Reagan in the 1980s, "Thank you, President Reagan. Believe me; your economic policies leading to the recovery of the American economy are also leading to the recovery of economies throughout the world. You will continue always to be an inspiration and a guide to me" (Reagan Archives, 1998). While it is clear from these comments that the Dominican Republic's leadership strove to become as much as the United States as possible, that could be the only reason that the Dominican Republic was so willing to accept military intervention on the part of the U.S. The causal relationship by this allowance of the U.S. imperialistic actions into the Dominican Republic suggests that the U.S. has instilled fear and dependency into the hearts of Dominicans. This was echoed by a statement made by a Dominican woman to her child, as observed by a naval officer, "There comes an American. Quiet or he will kill you" (Grabendorff 1982). The most recent example of this form of American imperialism was observed in the Johnson Administration in 1965, when U.S. military forces invaded the Dominican Republic because of fears that a Communist regime was taking hold in the country. Author Patrice McSherry argues that President Johnson's decision to send in the Marines sent a clear signal to all of Latin America: that the United States "was prepared to use its devastating military power to maintain its tight hold over the region" (2003, 2). McSherry and Chester supply convincing evidence that Johnson's goal was "the installation of a compliant regime in Santo Domingo" (2003, 2) and ultimately, the U.S.-approved choice for president was a Trujillo functionary, Joaquin Balaguer, who took office after an election marked by fraud and intimidation and ruled for many years. After the rebels were defeated, largely as a result of U.S. military might, an internal State Department memo concluded that Washington was "in a position to exert our full influence, both militarily and politically, to insure that whatever the outcome may be, it will not be incompatible with our fundamental interests" (2003, 2).

Though the evidence proved that the Communism fears were unjustified, it was the fourth time the U.S. forces (under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Taft respectively) found themselves in the Dominican Republic protecting American interest in 58 years. Though this was the last U.S. "exercise of power" intervention to date, the United States has continued to explore and execute various means to sustain its control over the Caribbean while maintaining this interventionist philosophy. Chalmers Johnson, in an article published by John Foster and Robert McChesney has written with regard to this interventionism in his Sorrows of Empire, "As distinct from other peoples on this earth, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not choose to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent but Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire" (2004, 1). The list of tools beyond military intervention available to the U.S. ranged from export quotas, manipulation of international institutions like the OAS, capitalizing on the Dominican Republic's economic dependency, as well as its strategic support for caudillos and dictators whenever the need called for it. Indeed, U.S. behavior was not and has never been irrational but always strictly adhering to a realist prescription of competition and domination, from which "followed logically the overriding goal of maintaining U.S. strategic and economic hegemony throughout the Western Hemisphere" (McSherry 2003, 2). As McSherry continues on to say, the United States has had a clear interest in gaining hegemony over Latin American, in addition to the Dominican Republic interventions and as the "countercoup against nationalist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela seems to demonstrate" (2003, 2). The moves of the United States have underlined the utility of a conceptual framework that stresses the pursuit of hegemony as an organizing principle of modern U.S. foreign policy.

The Dominican Republic Role

In my opinion, the Dominican Republic has a much higher responsibility for this patron-client relationship, as the government has allowed itself to be manipulated by the United States over the years. This began very early on in history, when President Roosevelt agreed to takeover the country's debts under the condition that the U.S. would take over the Dominican import duties. This was more or less an example of Dollar Diplomacy, which is also a branch of imperialism, where the U.S. decided that they would take over the Republic's debts after it had nowhere else to turn on the condition that the U.S. would run the import/export duties. When confronted about this, Roosevelt justified his action by extending the Monroe Doctrine. In this admission, he wrote that the U.S. acted as a policeman or as a "good neighbor" to Latin American countries. Though Latin countries, and specifically the Dominican Republic were infuriated by this declaration, they continued to allow themselves to be manipulated. This is continued permission granted by the Dominicans to be taken advantage of is also stressed by Atkins and Wilson's (1998) suggestion of the Dominicans' strategies of resistance and accommodation. These include "foreign policy ends and means adopted from a position of relative weakness, ambivalent love-hate views toward the United States, emphasis on economic interests and the movements of Dominicans between the two countries, international political isolation, the adversarial relationship with neighboring Haiti, the legacy of dictatorship, and the uneven evolution of a Dominican-style democratic system" (1998, 2). In response to U.S. policies, especially during interventions, the "Dominicans reacted with a combination of harsh criticism, xenophobia, and appeals to international law" (1998, 3). Nevertheless, Atkins and Wilson conclude that "most Dominican governments, however, found it necessary to accommodate the economic and political realities of their U.S. relations" (Atkins and Wilson 1998, 3). Economically speaking, the Dominican Republic found themselves in a compromising situation under the thumb of American imperialism in the book entitled, "Sugar and Power in the Dominican Republic: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Trujillos." The author of this book provides a distinct economic analysis of the significance of sugar production by the Dominicans and the Dominican dependence on the American economy that provides a key element in economic relations between the two nations. Early economic history tells us that almost all of the Dominican exports were concentrated in the sugar market of the United States; as in early history the Dominicans lived in an agrarian society whose basic staple was the production of sugar cane. Michael Hall, the author of this book, holds the perspective that the U.S. had little interest or need for sugar imports, but capitalized on the Dominican's need for their money in order to spread their powerful reign of control over the region, specifically during the threat of Castro's push for communism. Authors Volgi and Kenski agree with this opinion, suggesting that while the U.S. had little economic necessity with the Dominican Republic, that they favored this nation over others in order to push for their geopolitical strategic interests.