The Dawn of Universal History by Raymond Aron

Author:Raymond Aron [Raymond Aron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

The war against Spain broke out after a U.S. battleship blew up in Havana harbor, an obscure incident that occurred in the midst of a Cuban revolt and a massive press campaign in the United States against Spanish domination of Cuba. Did U.S. intervention in Cuba constitute a break with the anti-imperialist tradition? Or was it just a further stage in Yankee expansionism at the expense of the Spanish Empire and the Spanish-speaking peoples? Both interpretations have been put forward. Each seems to me to contain part of the truth. The Anglo-Americans’ feeling of superiority over the Spaniards and over Spanish-speaking peoples did not begin in 1898. Between the war against Mexico in the middle of the nineteenth century and the war against Spain at the end of the century, the continuity is not hard to trace. The line runs through a pacifist president (William McKinley); a proclamation of neutrality; a war party linked to economic interests (the planters in Cuba), and even more to groups motivated by ideology; and mobilization of public opinion by a press loudly denouncing Spanish oppression; and then an accident acts as the last straw and the president is obliged to act.

Once war had broken out, the imperialists, led by Theodore Roosevelt and Admiral George Dewey, fought it with a view to winning total victory. They extended the field of operations to include Spain’s possessions in the Pacific. The peace treaty, which stripped Spain of the last tatters of its empire and granted the United States sovereignty over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the island of Guam, ran into opposition from part of the Senate and was ratified by only a narrow margin.

The annexation of the Philippines, a distant group of islands whose people could hardly be seen as constituting a future state in the Union, does not fit into the main outline of U.S. development. The islands, once rid of Spanish occupation, proclaimed their independence, and American troops put down their “rebellion” in a pacification campaign that lasted some ten years and included many acts of cruelty. Theodore Roosevelt himself, in tune with predominant public opinion, regretted the annexation, and despite his own part in it, admitted it had been a mistake.

In contrast, the behavior of the United States in the Caribbean and Central America constitutes a kind of compromise between its rejection of European-style imperialism and its adoption of a broad interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts a sense of special U.S. rights and responsibilities. Theodore Roosevelt formulated the latter explicitly:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, 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.*

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