Martial law is declared before the treaty is even signed

Renda gives the order of operations, which she treats as the substance of the thing. Before securing Dartiguenave's signature, Caperton took control of the customs houses, detailed a regiment under the newly arrived Colonel Waller to fight the Cacos in the north, and on 3 September 1915 consolidated his own authority by declaring martial law. Under considerable pressure Dartiguenave signed the treaty on 16 September, the Haitian Congress approved it on 11 November, and formal ratification followed in May 1916. In December 1915 Smedley Butler was detailed to create the Gendarmerie. Although Washington recognised Dartiguenave's government once he had signed, Caperton's martial law continued alongside the nominally constitutional administration. Caperton left in April 1916 with the countryside relatively quiet and American military control reasonably well established in the capital, leaving Waller in command and Butler over the new police force.

The armistice signed at Mudros on 30 October 1918 by the government of Ahmed Izzet Pasha marked the Ottoman defeat in the First World War. Officers and intellectuals had seen the outcome coming since 1917 and had begun to think about what would follow, since a multinational Ottoman state could not be rebuilt and a Turkish national state barely existed as an idea. The Allies had already agreed among themselves how to divide the empire. Allied troops landed at Istanbul on 13 November 1918 and set up a military administration. In the spring of 1919 French forces moved into Ayntab, Marash and Adana, the Italians landed at Antalya and the British at Samsun and the Dardanelles. Sultan Mehmed VI accepted the occupation and turned to persecuting the surviving Union and Progress leaders. An empire that had lasted six centuries was being taken apart by agreement among its conquerors.

During the first United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934, opposition in the countryside was often led by Vodou priests and priestesses. Bellegarde-Smith puts the number of Haitians who died fighting the invading army at perhaps fifty thousand, and describes the religion as the popular vehicle of a wider culture of refusal. He reads the missionary side of the occupation as policy. Detaching Haitians from Roman Catholicism and from the French hold on the Haitian elite was expected to turn enemies into friends, and the written record of the period carries the argument openly. Washington had tried the same approach in Puerto Rico after 1898, where replacing Spanish and Catholicism with English and Protestantism was supposed to pacify the island. The French bishops who ran the Haitian church were nervous accordingly. Decades later Francois Duvalier replaced every French bishop with a Haitian of his own choosing and brought American fundamentalist Protestants in against Rome.

In 1916 the United States disbanded the Haitian army and created the Gendarmerie d'Haïti in its place, a force trained, armed and officered by American personnel. The army it replaced had taken part in twenty uprisings between 1908 and 1915, which was the argument for abolishing it. The new body crushed the Caco rebellion, enforced the corvée, and kept the order the occupation required. It was renamed the Garde d'Haïti in 1928. When the marines left in 1934 the Garde became the whole of Haiti's armed forces, and in 1947 it was renamed the Armée d'Haïti. The institution built to hold the country down for a foreign power became the machine every Haitian strongman afterwards used to take it. Paul Magloire came out of it, François Duvalier bent it to his purposes, and Raoul Cédras used it in 1991. The Americans had removed the one instrument capable of overthrowing a Haitian government and put a better trained one in its place, then handed it over on their way out.