"A matter of extreme urgency": Theodore Roosevelt, Wilhelm II, and the Venezuela Crisis of 1902 - United States-Germany conflict over alleged German expansionistic efforts in Latin America

Naval War College Review, Spring, 2002 by Edmund Morris

A secret memorandum from Rear Admiral Henry Clay Taylor, chief of the Bureau of Navigation (an office then close to the center of naval policy making), warned the president that Germany's disclaimer of territorial ambitions was less trustworthy than Britain's. Taylor felt sure that if Castro resisted the blockade, the German navy would bombard Venezuela and then demand an indemnity But President Castro had no money. Admiral Taylor laid out in logical steps what would likely follow:

Item--Venezuela...could offer nothing but territory, or she could mortgage her revenue in such a way as to place herself in complete political dependence on Germany. The United States could not allow either of these, and yet Germany's right to indemnity would be incontestable. The only courses open to the United States [would be] payment of the indemnity taking such security as she can from Venezuela or war. (4)

Admiral Taylor's argument had a certain crude force, and the president was saddened by the prospect. "I have a hearty and genuine liking for the Germans," he said, "both individually and as a nation." (5) German blood flowed in his veins; (6) he could recite long passages of the Niebelungenleid by heart; Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck were among his heroes. He welcomed the idea of German capital investment in Latin America, on the ground that countries like Venezuela would benefit from outside development. However, Roosevelt agreed with Taylor that Germany seemed to want more than dividends in the New World. He noted an ominous sentence in Berlin's written commitment to Britain: "We would consider the temporary occupation on our part of different Venezuelan harbor places."

The adjective "temporary" reminded TR that in 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II had "temporarily" acquired Kiaochow in China, on a lease that His Majesty had somehow lengthened to ninety-nine years. Germany's well known shortage of lebensraum--"living space"--had translated by 1902 into an explosive need for new horizons. Burgeoning yet constrained on both east and west, Germany had to feed a million new mouths every year, and it had to market the output of an economy doubling in size every decade. Its army was already, in 1902, the most formidable in the world, and now it was building a new navy. This combination of social, economic, and strategic aggrandizement indicated to a president well versed in German history that a new European empire was rising, just as the sun was beginning to set on German South-West Africa. What better place to establish a collection house today, a colony tomorrow, than lush, fertile Venezuela?

Baron Speck von Sternburg, a German diplomat and a longtime friend of the president's, had given TR over the years a shrewd idea of the worldview of Germany's militaristic ruling class. Expansionists like Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow regarded the Monroe Doctrine as an insult, at most a hollow threat. Naval secretary Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz made no secret of his desire to establish naval bases in Brazil, where three hundred thousand Germans lived already, and in the Caribbean. Germany, therefore, had TR's particular attention as he braced himself for foreign intervention in South America.