Stephen Kinzer on the U.S. shift to world power in 1898

Historic shifts in world politics often happen slowly and are hardly even noticeable until years later.  That was not the case with the emergence of the United States as a world power.  It happened quite suddenly in the spring and summer of 1898.

Until then, most Americans had seemed satisfied with a nation whose reach extended only across their own continent...

In 1898 the United States definitively embraced what Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called "the large policy."  Historians have given it various names: expansionism, imperialism, neocolonialism.  Whatever it is called, it represents the will of Americans to extend their global reach.

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Henry Cabot Lodge was among several members of Congress who urged the annexation of Canada.  [Teddy] Roosevelt mused about attacking Spain, and picked out Cádiz and Barcelona as possible targets.  Portuguese leaders feared that American troops might seize the Azores.

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Outsiders watched the emergence of this new America with a combination of awe and fear.  Among the most astonished were European newspaper correspondents who were posted in the United States during 1898.  One wrote in the London Times that he had witnessed nothing less than "a break in the history of the world."  Another, in the Manchester Guardian, reported that nearly every American had come to embrace the expansionist idea, while the few critics "are simply laughed at for their pains."

Some of these journalists were unsettled by what they saw...  Le Temps said the United States, formerly "as democratic as any society can be," had become "a state already closer to the other states of the old world, that arms itself like them and aggrandizes itself like them."  The Frankfurter Zeitung warned Americans against "the disastrous consequences of their exuberance" but realized that they would not listen.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006), pp. 80-81