Roosevelt Corollary announced

On December 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Roosevelt Corollary in his annual message to Congress in Washington. Roosevelt declared that chronic wrongdoing or impotence in Latin American republics could require intervention by the United States as an international police power in the Western Hemisphere. The statement grew directly out of the Venezuelan debt crisis of 1902-1903, when Britain, Germany, and Italy used naval force to pressure Venezuela over unpaid debts.

The corollary reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine by shifting it from a warning against new European colonization to a justification for American intervention in the Caribbean and Central America. Roosevelt and his advisers argued that if the United States did not stabilize debt-ridden governments, European creditors might use force and establish a more permanent presence in the region. Latin American critics and many anti-imperialists in the United States saw the corollary as a claim of hegemony that turned a defensive doctrine into an instrument of American control.

The Dominican customs receivership agreement of 1905 followed directly from the Roosevelt Corollary, because the United States took over Dominican customs collection to manage debt payments and keep European powers out. The corollary also shaped later interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti, making Roosevelt's 1904 announcement a durable precedent in early twentieth-century American foreign policy.