From: Cub Driver

Americans are
certainly economic colonialists, even today.

I don't understand what that means. Could you explain?

And we were certainly geographical colonialists, as Spain discovered
on several occasions. Texas, California, the states between;

I discount that because it was in the time frame when we were creating our
country. Once we settled on our borders in the mid-19th century, we have
stayed in them with only two exceptions--Alaska and Hawaii. Neither Mexico nor
Canada need fear US territorial aggression. And, of course, you intended to
say "Mexico" rather than "Spain," as Mexican independence long preceded
the_Mexican_-American War.

Cuba and
Puerto Rico;

I was lumping them in with the whole Spanish-American War, which was what i was
referring to when I said "one brief infection." I should have made that clear.

Hawaii, for crying out loud, which we
liked so much that we incorporated it,

Mr. Alcala had already mentioned Hawaii in his post, and as I agreed with his
comments I didn't bring it up again.
The Hawaii annexation is also a part of the S-A War "infection," because Hawaii
was a fine staging base for operations in the Philippines, although probably
even without that war, annexation was inevitable sometime during the McKinley
administration. Had Bryan been elected in 1896 it would not have been annexed
and it is highly unlikely that there would have been a Spanish-American War.
Grover Cleveland, who refused to consider annexing Hawaii during his
administration, wrote at the time, "Hawaii is ours. As I look back upon the
first steps in this miserable business, and as I contemplate the means used to
complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair."

o much that we incorporated it, as to a lesser extent we have
done with Puerto Rico.

yep. But it is a legacy of that one infection.
It was only in the 1930s that we developed an
aversion to colonialism,

You have to throw huge qualifications on that. There was major domestic
opposition to US colonialist or colonialist-like actions from the get-go. Just
as there has been opposition to the current US adventure in Iraq.
Again, I quote Grover Cleveland: "I mistake the American people if they favor
the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality...and
that even by indirection a strong power may with impunity despoil a weaker one
of its territory." This is quite an amazing thing for an American president to
say in a era that was the height of European Imperial land-grabbing. Cleveland
was emphasizing that America was _not_ like Europe and we would not stoop to do
the dirty things the Europeans did.
The McKinley administration, under the influence of the Boston imperialists
(Henry Cabot Lodge and his crowd), turned away from that view, and their first
target was Hawaii, despite the many difficulties acquisition would cause. As
Alfred Mahan wrote to Theodore Roosevelt: "Take the islands first and solve
the problems afterward." Gee, that sounds like advice somebody must have given
Bush about Iraq. Like they say, history doesn't repeat itself--but it rhymes.

perhaps mostly in the person of Franklin
Roosevelt (he particularly disliked French and British colonialism .

True, indeed.

And we're fighting two colonial wars at the moment.

I'm not sure about that. I suppose it depends on how you define "colonial."
They could be described as wars of self-defense. But then, broadly, that was
how the Boston imperialists described their expansionist policies: acquire a
defensive cordon of outlying territories to fend off the expanding imperialist
powers; if we don't take Hawaii, Britain will; if we don't take the PI, Germany
will; etc.
We certainly don't intend to annex Afghanistan and Iraq after the fashion of
Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

One could even argue that we colonized German and Japan, not to
mention Korea, Britain, and numerous other nations in the ten years
following World War Two, and are only now withdrawing.

But that, again, was a defensive action. We certainly had no plans to do that
before the Soviet threat became clear. In fact, at Yalta, when Stalin
specifically asked Roosevelt how long the US would maintain troops in Europe
after the fighting ended, FDR responded two years at most. This fact was one
of the reasons that it was agreed to rehabilitate France as a "great" power and
give it a zone of occupation in Germany.

People look at the events of history from different perspectives. I do believe
the words "colonialism" and "imperialism" are bandied about too freely these
days, now that most have forgotten what _real_ imperialism and colonialism
were. US goals since Wilson have been aimed at establishing a peaceful,
prosperous, democratic world, not at conquest and domination. Since we have de
facto been in charge of the planet post 1945 we have bungled badly at times,
but compared to how the world was managed in the half century before we took
over, we've done very well, indeed, for ourselves--and for the world.




Chris Mark