The Spanish-American War of 1898 - Research Paper Example

The Spanish-American War of 1898 proved to be the turning point in changing America’s global role and marked America’s irrevocable start upon the path to becoming a world power. American public sympathy for the revolutionaries was exacerbated by the yellow press, reporting atrocities committed by the Spanish General, Valeriano Weyler.

American investments in Cuba and the perception of the strategic importance of the island in Central America led President McKinley to dispatch the battleship, USS Maine, to Havana, to pressurize Spain. The mysterious explosion of Maine in February 1898 was attributed to Spain, and public outrage enabled McKinley to enter the Spanish-American War in April 1898. American victory was declared in August. Under the Treaty of Paris, in December 1898, Cuba became an American Protectorate under the Platt Amendment of 1902, Puerto Rico and Guam were received from Spain as indemnity and the Philippines was ceded to America after the Battle of Manila Bay, for $ twenty million.

3 The repercussions of the Spanish-American War led to the annexation of the Philippines, which was made an American colony, after the suppression of the Filipino Insurrection, led by Emilio Aguinaldo. Intellectuals, like Senator Albert Beveridge, used the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ to justify overseas expansion. Josiah Strong’s Our Country (1885), and Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899), based on ‘Social Darwinian,’ considered it the ‘duty of the ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxon race to spread Christian and Democratic values to ‘backward’ people.

Economic factors, including the importance of overseas markets, were cited. The popular press – particularly William R. Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzers New York World - fanned a new ‘nationalism.’ The influential foreign policy elite, epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt, were moved by visions of American power and glory. They were impressed by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), which called for a strong navy to protect global commercial interests.

American Imperialism was born.4 In the final analysis, the Spanish-American War may be considered the point of no return, which gave birth to a foreign policy that conclusively committed America to expansionism, and global intervention, under several justifications. American foreign policy was consolidated towards being a world power, and non-intervention was buried in the annals of US history. This new direction continued with the Boxer Rebellion and the Panama Canal, followed by the World Wars, and led slowly but surely to the present-day scenario of Iraq and Afghanistan.

America has continued to play this role of a dominant global presence up to the present. While American prestige and influence in global affairs have undoubtedly grown, it is worthwhile to ponder the economic and human costs of playing the role of the international policeman. From non-intervention to active intervention, and finally, to the present doctrine of ‘preventive war,’ American foreign policy has been irrevocably altered by the Spanish-American War.