General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I have to say... [View all]starroute
(12,977 posts)We took them over from Spain in 1898 and found ourselves putting down a guerrilla war there for the next five or ten years. It was one of the things that temporarily cooled our enthusiasm for empire.
And yeah, there was also the Open Door Policy with China -- but that was in 1899, the same time as we were mired in the Philippines.
Most of what it amounts to is that the US was attempting to increase its naval power, which is what leading nations were doing at that time, and use it to promote US trade. But there was little to no interest in acquiring a land-based empire. And then World War I put an end to that first wave of economic globalization, and the US became strongly isolationist for a generation.
US empire really is a product of World War II, and can't readily be seen as an outgrowth of earlier events.