For the complete documentation index, see llms.txt.Skip to main content
U.S. foreign policy doctrine, associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, of non-intervention and reciprocal cooperation with Latin American states.
The Good Neighbor Policy was the guiding framework of United States relations with Latin America beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in March 1933, in which he pledged to dedicate the nation to the policy of the "good neighbor" who respects the rights of others. It marked a formal repudiation of the interventionist posture associated with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), under which Washington had claimed a right of police power in the hemisphere and repeatedly deployed Marines to countries such as Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
In practice the policy had several concrete components:
Strategically, the policy also served U.S. interests by consolidating hemispheric solidarity ahead of and during the Second World War, culminating in inter-American defense cooperation and the 1947 Rio Treaty. Critics note that non-intervention coexisted with continued U.S. support for friendly authoritarian regimes, including Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The doctrine's spirit eroded during the Cold War, when covert interventions—Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965—resumed under anti-communist rationales.
It is conventionally dated from Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration in March 1933 through the early Cold War, with its non-intervention pledge formalized at the 1933 Montevideo Conference.
The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary asserted a U.S. right to intervene in Latin American states to maintain order; the Good Neighbor Policy explicitly renounced that right and emphasized sovereign equality and reciprocity.