importance the American government placed on the dispute. The key issue in the crisis became Britain's refusal to include the territory east of the Schomburgk Line in the proposed international arbitration. By December 17, 1895, President Cleveland delivered an address to the United States Congress which was perceived as direct threat of war with Great Britain if the British did not comply with Venezuelan demands (now openly championed by the United States). Almost immediately after Cleveland's statement to the United States Congress, the US military was put on combat alert for a potential war with Great Britain. Ultimately Britain backed down and tacitly accepted the US right to intervene under the Monroe Doctrine. This US intervention forced Britain to accept arbitration of the entire disputed territory. On December 18, 1895, Congress approved $100,000 for the United States Commission on the Boundary Between Venezuela and British Guiana. It was formally established on January 1, 1896. Jose Andrade, the Venezuelan Minister to Washington, on February 26, 1896 announced that Scruggs had been appointed by the Venezuelan President as his "agent charged with submitting information" to the United States Venezuela Boundary Commission, and to present "reports relative to the titles and rights of Venezuela." An Arbitration Tribunal was agreed between the US and Britain in 1896, and this concluded in 1899 in Paris (France). The Schomburgk Line was re-established as the border between British Guiana and Venezuela, which had been set in 1835. The Anglo-Venezuelan boundary dispute asserted for the first time a more outward-looking American foreign policy that marking the United States as a world power. This is the earliest example of modern interventionism under the Monroe Doctrine in which the USA exercised its claimed prerogatives in the Western Hemisphere. By standing with a Latin American nation against European colonial powers, Cleveland improved relations with the United States' southern neighbors, but the cordial manner in which the negotiations were conducted also made for good relations with Britain. However, by backing down in the face of a strong US declaration of a strong interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, Britain tacitly accepted the Doctrine, and the crisis thus provided a basis for the expansion of US interventionism in the [Americas]. Leading British historian Robert Arthur Humphreys later called the boundary crisis "one of the most momentous episodes in the history of Anglo-American relations in general and of Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America in particular."