The American "Large Policy" more than a century later

The tie that connects US support for Israel to the earliest days of US expansionism

It’s always there: the racism that underpins US foreign intervention and policy. Canada too, though I’m going to focus on the US. Trying to make sense of how the US can fund Israel’s dirty war against the Palestinians is impossible, unless you start from this basic fact; it’s always there.

I was reminded of that as I devoured The War Lovers by Evan Thomas. Thomas reconstructs the events leading up to and of 1898 — the year where the US had its first real entry into imperialism and expansionism — as told through letters, articles and diary entries. The men who were the architects of this were Henry Cabot Lodge, a senator, and Theodore Roosevelt while he was with the US Navy. They pushed for something they called the Large Policy that would put the US on the same footing as other global powers. Perhaps they had a sense of how significant what they were doing would become, but maybe not. Regardless, their Large Policy set the country up to become globally hegemonic in the aftermath of World War Two. Of course, as a country that was relatively untouched by the ravages of either of the world wars, the US was perfectly placed to rule the world for the next eight decades.

Lodge and Roosevelt wanted war and they didn’t care too much where that war would be. Venezuela looked promising but fizzled out. The two mused about invading Canada (actually). But when Cuban rebels looked for help from the US aristocracy in their guerilla war against Spain, Lodge and Roosevelt found their path: they would pick off Spanish colonies one by one and absorb them into the United States’ realm.

The late 1800s were the heyday of scientific racism. Manliness had to be tested and white Americans needed to show that they were biologically superior to everyone else. The Large Policy fit well into this: the Americans could dominate global people to demonstrate their superiority.

Cuba was an easy sell to politicians who didn’t yet embrace the idea that war could be good for business (lol imagine a time…). It was close to the US and Lodge and Roosevelt managed to persuade their fellow politicians to agree to it, despite fierce opposition from Thomas Reed, the speaker of the House of Representatives. They also had to convince the business class. Consider this, from an academic article from 1932, quoting Lodge:

“Free Cuba would mean a great market to the United States-; it would mean an opportunity for American capital, invited thereby signal exemptions;it would mean an opportunity for the development of that splendid island … Cuba in our hands or in friendly hands, in the hands of its own people, attached to us by ties of interesta nd gratitude, is a bulwark to the commerce, to the safety, and to the peace of the United States."

Before the US invasion, many politicians, like Cabot and Roosevelt, claimed that they could support Cuban self-government, an idea that evaporated once they kicked Spain off the island.

Roosevelt commanded a volunteer unit called The Rough Riders that was comprised of a wild mix of elites, including athletes from Yale and Harvard, Buffalo Soldiers (Black soldiers who had fought on the frontier) and white soldiers who had just come east after years of genocidal campaigns in the west. The first to die were two Buffalo Soldiers who drowned as the US fleet docked. Indeed, the racism was so deep that the racial equality that the Americans witnessed among the Cuban rebels disgusted many of the white soldiers — believing that a society that could be post-racial segregation was less advanced than one that was deeply racially segregated.

By the time the Americans landed in Cuba, Spain had murdered some 225,000 Cubans in the previous 18 months. C.W. Russel visited Cuba on behalf of the US Department of Justice in 1897 and reported this, “As the country was stripped of its population by the order of concentration, it is easy to believe that 400,000 persons were gathered behind the forts without being givn food, medicine, or means of any kind to earn a living, except where in the larger cities some few could find employment in menial offices. Judging by the orphans I was shown at Jacoba, Aidecoa and elsewhere, and from all I saw and heard, I believe that half of the 400,000 have died as the result of starvation.” Spain pushed Cubans into what would today be known as concentration camps — called the Reconcentrado policy — another reminder that every imperial horror of the 20th century finds its birth in the horrors of the 19th century.

The US attacked other Spanish holdings too — Puerto Rico, Guam, the Phillipines — and as the sun was setting on the Spanish empire, it rose over Washington. The Large Policy had won and set into motion the global US hegemony for much of the past 100 years.

Curiously though, in his academic article on the Large Policy, J.W. Pratt sets out to challenge the notion that the US went to war against Spain with no clear purpose or plan — curious in that this was ever a dominant notion. Perhaps Americans needed to be mislead that the expansionism was just a happy accident. Pratt calls this thinking dogma: “It has for a long time been a generally accepted dogma among students of American history that the United States entered upon the war with Spain in 1898 without foresight of the profound results of that struggle upon her policy and her position in the world.” Pratt disabuses of the notion that embarking on expansionism happened haphazardly and references the work that Lodge, Roosevelt and a host of magazine editors did to prime the American people to accept these wars. Writing nearly a century later, Thomas makes it clear that there was a plan and it was driven by racism, American exceptionalism, manliness and — critically — the need to replace the wars waged in the west against Indigenous people with something else. Indeed, global imperialism was a natural outgrowth of domestic genocide. Americans needed war and Lodge and Roosevelt saw to it that they’d have as much war as they could handle.

To think of these origins in the present day brings into perfect clarity why the US is hellbent on helping Israel in a war that makes absolutely no objective, including strategic sense. The war machine needs war. Racism needs a violent expression. The US needs to feel like it is still a global power. Of course, it is still a global power, but as US hegemony slips away, it will be fascinating to see what happens to these global outposts that have underpinned their domination for so long. Does the empire continue to live, kicking and screaming against its own dying body, fed by a steady stream of military spending and poor soldiers? Or does the US abandon its empire to save what it can of itself?