By Gonzalo Santos | JUN. 4, 2023
This exhibition of the 1898 Spanish-American War at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., is worth a trip to go and see.
The U.S. wars of the nineteenth century were essentially fought for the U.S. continental expansion, fought against imperialist Great Britain (1812), the sister republic of Mexico (1846-48), against Southern secession (1861-65), and against all the North American Indigenous nations (from the 1830s up to the 1890s). By 1898 the U.S. had become a continental nation-state.
This quick and lop-sided imperialist war beyond North America, played out in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, marked the entry of the U.S. as a young imperialist world power, vying with Germany, Russia, Japan, and other major powers for succession of the British global hegemony, then entering it’s final, terminal crisis. World War I sixteen years later, would leave the issue of the next paramount global power unresolved; finally, by the end of World War II in 1945, the U.S. emerged as the unquestioned victor – the new supreme global hegemon, which would rule the world through the Cold War era, freezing out the Socialist Block (so-called “Second World”), and intervening at will in the Third World.
Back to the 1898 war, which led to the (peaceful) annexation of Puerto Rico and Guam as territories, the forceful takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii (made into a state since 1959), the violent occupation and forceful neocolonization of Cuba – which ended when the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959 -, and the twisted history of U.S.-Philippines relations (first made into a colony through a brutal, genocidal counterinsurgency war, then lost to Japan during WW II, then recovered, granted independence, and kept ever since as a neocolony, with major U.S. military bases ever since).
Clearly, the historical and contemporary experiences of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Filipinos, and others (Samoans, Guamoans, etc.) – both in their island homelands and in the large U.S. diasporas – were profoundly framed by this imperialist war 125 years ago, with vestiges and unfinished legacies visible today. The next chapter for Puerto Rico, especially, remains to be written.
And, although the war did not directly involve Mexico, its main regional effects – the advent of “Gunboat Diplomacy” and the extension and deepening of the Monroe Doctrine throughout the Americas – resonated through and marked U.S.-Latin American relations during the 20th century, marked by innumerable U.S. military interventions, destabilizing economic sanctions and blockades, and violent cover operations (death squads, assassinations, torture, disappearances, overthrowing democratically-elected regimes, narco-trafficking, etc.), all for geopolitical and economic imperialist goals.
Today, U.S. hegemony is in its terminal crisis, having gotten bogged down in unwinnable wars while East Asia has risen and Europe has unified. The Global South is now asserting its autonomy more than ever, as we have seen in Latin America since the advent of the 21st century. But the imperialist spirit that animated the US War of 1898 remains strong within the power elites of the United States. The same, BTW, can be said of the Other (now Ex-)Superpower, the USSR, much diminished as the Russian Federation but armed with a nuclear arsenal and revanchist ambitions – it’s military invasion of Ukraine is a major disaster in the making.
We are back to the era of intense geopolitical rivalry among the world’s powers, just as the world began to experience at the end of the nineteenth century. Combined with many unresolved global problems regarding global climate and environmental crisis, and galloping global inequality, the future is uncertain. It is probable that we shall witness – and participate – in an era of international conflict among the major powers and social revolution among the world’s peoples. It will depend on both whether we survive as a species and as a living planet.
Imperialism is not the answer – not Russian, not American, not anyone’s. After a run of five centuries, world capitalism is clearly destroying the planet and needs systemwide replacement. What will replace it and who – what combination of social forces – will replace it?
The answer is blowing in the wind. Ponder that as you visit the exhibition of the way we were 125 years ago and compare it with the way we are today. Has much changed?
