Roughly speaking, there are two paradigms, the American and the Chinese. In the age of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States saw itself as the rightful warden of American seas. It forbade new colonial ventures during the nineteenth century, briefly claimed its “fiat” was “law” in these expanses in the 1890s, and ultimately settled on an “international police power” designed to foreclose European acquisitions of Caribbean naval bases. It was meddlesome and at times abusive toward Latin American republics. One thing Washington never did, however, was assert title to the waters and islands of the Gulf and Caribbean. Nor did it claim to set the terms by which foreign shipping navigated Western Hemisphere seas.
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