United state of america (USA)



In 1898, the United States won a quick victory in the Spanish American War and liberated Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam from Spanish colonial rule. But the war sparked the greatest foreign policy debate in American history as best minds of the age considered whether the United States should grab, “civilize,” and dominate foreign lands or leave the people of those countries to rule themselves.


source
Expansionists led by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge with the help of news baron William Randolph Hearst ultimately won the argument then, but a closely divided nation questioned the new imperialism as influential thinkers including Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie warned against foreign intervention and cited the terrible consequences of European empire, including the brutalizing of colonial subjects.

source
And it was a time when the United States forces evolved from liberators to occupiers who crushed the independence movement in the horrific Philippine American War (1899-1902), leaving over one hundred thousand Filipinos dead—mostly civilians—in a conflict fueled by a sense of American superiority and divine exceptionalism that presaged our future wars of intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Award-winning foreign correspondent and expert on foreign policy Stephen Kinzer chronicles this overlooked history in his new book The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (Henry Holt & Company). He covers the raging debate in detail over intervention based on extensive research of official documents, letters, diaries, and other resources. He stresses how this debate erupted on the role of the U.S. in the world and dominated news and discussions at the turn of the twentieth century.


Mr. Kinzer’s book appears at a time when America is again examining its role in the world, and the issues argued in this forgotten history are still relevant today—although these concerns likely will not garner anywhere near the wide attention they received almost 120 years ago.

The title of the book, The True Flag, comes from a speech by prominent anti-imperialist Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who served as a Union general, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of the Interior:

Let us raise the flag of our country—not as an emblem of reckless adventure and greedy conquest, of betrayed professions and broken pledges, of criminal aggression and arbitrary rule over subject populations—but the old, the true flag, the flag of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the flag of government of, for, and by the people, the flag of national faith held sacred and of national honor unsullied, the flag of human rights and of good example to all nations, the flag of true civilization, peace, and good will to all men.

source
In his study of this period, Mr. Kinzer demonstrates the dangers and folly of a foreign policy of violent intervention and domination.

Mr. Kinzer, an award-winning journalist, worked as The New York Times’s bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and Nicaragua and as The Boston Globe’s Latin America correspondent. His other books include The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War; Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future; A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It; Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua;Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds; andBitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, with Stephen Schlesinger. Mr. Kinzer also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and writes a column on world affairs for The Boston Globe.

Mr. Kinzer talked about The True Flag by telephone from his office in Boston.

Robin Lindley: You’ve written widely on American foreign policy and diplomatic history. Now, in The True Flag, you examine the period of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. Your book could be entitled The Origins of American Imperialism, and you describe the tremendous debate over expansionist policies then. What sparked this book now?

Stephen Kinzer: All American foreign policy questions can be narrowed down to one sentence and, in fact you could narrow them down to one word, which is intervention. All of our major questions in the world now are about where we intervene and for what purposes and with what means.

source

We are the country that intervenes more frequently in more other countries that are farther away from our own borders than other countries. Why are we like this? How did we get this way? Where did it begin? I’ve always been intrigued by these questions. Often we look for the answers to these questions in the period after World War II when the U.S. truly became a global empire.

Actually, when I looked more deeply into the background of those questions, I saw that the crucial decision was made earlier, in the period around 1898 to 1900. Looking back at that time made it very clear to me how aware everybody involved was in the debate that would shape the future of the United States. Everybody debating the issue in 1899 in the U.S. Senate, for example, understood that he was not debating only one issue such as whether the U.S. could take the Philippines. Those senators and other opinion makers across the country, as one senator called it, were debating the greatest question that had ever been put before the American people.