A good neighbor to Haiti

It was the right thing to do: when the earthquake hit Haiti last week, Barack Obama promptly sent over $100 million in aid.

It was easy to do, because the money was already available. The U.S. had given Haiti three times that amount last year, out of a sense of charity.

Haiti is like that family member that no one wants to talk about: that crazy uncle, that child with a birth defect, that aunt who is in an institution.

Haiti was a total mess even before the earthquake. Politically, it alternates between corruption and dictatorship. It has the geographic size and population density of Belgium, but one percent of the people own 50 percent of the wealth. Half of those who die each year do so of diseases that Western countries prevent in childhood.

You can see the border with the Dominican Republic from space, because the D. R. has managed its forests, while the Haitians have cut theirs down. About half of Haitians try to grow what they can from the eroded soil as they live on pennies a day.

The U.S. intervenes from time to time, whenever there's a natural disaster or an urgent need for regime change, but it's not enough. Haiti is America's responsibility because it's next door — and also because no one else will care for it.

There are historical reasons for this.

In 1823, as Central and South American countries were becoming independent from Spain, U.S. President James Monroe told the European powers to stay away from the Americas. Colonization there was finished. In exchange, the U.S. would not interfere in Europe. This statement came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine.

In 1904, following the Spanish-American War, which had started over a revolt in the Spanish colony of Cuba, President Theodore Roosevelt asserted that the United States would intervene in Central and South America when necessary. In his State of the Union address, he said:

"All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. ... Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in [the] America[s], as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation; and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power."

It took only until 1915 for the U.S. to send the Marines to Haiti after a series of coups there. We occupied that country until 1934. We pulled out because President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed the tone of the conversation. On the day he took office in 1933, he said:

"In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor: the neighbor who ... respects the rights of others... Such discipline ... makes possible a leadership which aims at the larger good."

The U.S. has gone back and forth between the two policies, but nowhere more so than in Haiti. The U.S. intervened militarily in 1994 and again in 2004. We've been there so often that the Haitians had to be reassured that our military has come this time only to help them stay alive.

Sometimes you wish your neighbors would mind their own business, but when something goes wrong, you're happy to have them. You can also be thankful for their powerful friends: the European Union has promised to send €400 million in aid.