Some reflections on a `splendid little war'

It seems a good moment, before we leave this year of revolutions, to reflect on another '98 anniversary - a "splendid little war" as John Hay, then American ambassador to Britain, said of the Spanish-American War.

This war in 1898 changed the world. Spain - which still recalls the event as el desastre - lost most of what remained of a once vast empire to victors slow to take the name of Empire. Thus was the agenda set for a century of US foreign policy.

The war also changed the world's political language. Phrases such as "spheres of influence" evolved to replace the simpler concept of empire.

Proxy imperialism, economic or "neo-colonialism" would become the more complex and ambiguous concepts for the new century as Americans tried to resolve the conflict between their new status as an instant world power and a sense of Jeffersonian idealism enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

"Deniability", brought to us during the Vietnam War, and other gems of doublethink were down the line.

A new world order flowed from the Treaty of Paris, signed 100 years ago next Thursday. It ended the 1898 war, rendering a string of Pacific islands including Guam and the Philippines (The White Man's Burden, as Kipling warned) part of a US domain, with Puerto Rico. (The independent Polynesian monarchy of Hawaii was also annexed, but that's another story.)

Cuba came under US military government. It had too many blacks to be made a state of the union. The US had taken up arms using the rhetoric of anti-colonialism in support of separatist Cuban freedom fighters, under an admittedly hawk-pecked President William McKinley. (After the war, the Cubans were duly cheated in true frontier fashion).

It was the first time the US had waged war outside the western hemisphere. Commodore George Dewey's limited mission in the Philippines had been to prevent the Spaniards reinforcing their countrymen in Cuba. What if McKinley had simply ordered Dewey home after he had successfully attacked an antiquated Spanish fleet (and a predatory German one) in Manila Bay? What if McKinley's weeks of dithering over claiming the Philippines had gone the other way? Just more of the "ifs" of history.

Would the US have later taken on something called communism in faraway Vietnam? Would Third World puppets or dictators - such as Marcos or Suharto - have emerged in quite the way they did, as client champions of "anti-communism"? Would there have been President Teddy Roosevelt (whose dashing reputation was made at the head of his horseless cavalry Rough Riders in '98) or the Panama Canal?

Enough of idle speculation and to war, as the yellow press hawks crowed in '98: "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain," William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal screamed after the battleship USS Maine was sunk on February 15th in Havana harbour with the loss of 266 American sailors. The Maine, the jewel of the fleet, exploded on the eve of St Valentine's Day in still disputed circumstances. My Sweetheart Went Down With the Maine was a music hall favourite.

In a charged atmosphere, in which Spanish aid to the American sailors went unacknowledged, there were as many theories as there have been about the JFK assassination. Was it a mine planted by Spain, or by Spain's local anti-US extremists, the peninsurales; or by Cuban freedom fighters; the US itself; or an accident caused by a design fault in the Maine, as Spain said (correctly) at the time?

Military historians see the war in terms of the decisive role played by new technology, pointing the way to the 20th century: in Cuba the Gatling machine gun, and in the Pacific, the novelty of sophisticated US naval power. The war also heralded the "special relationship" between Britain and the US, due to Britain's support for the challenge to a rival empire.

Strange to relate now, a wave of sympathy at the Spanish defeat went through Latin America's elites. This class had about 80 years previously fought the mother country for its independence - i.e., freedom to continue lording it over the indigenous peoples and extracting the New World's natural wealth. (Their ancestors had believed Indians deserved no rights, as they had no souls.)

This anti-American chord was struck in 1900 by a Uruguayan writer, Jose Enrique Rodo. Latin America was, he said, deeply inspired by Hispanic Christianity and classical antiquity. He saw the flip side of admirable US prosperity as a "vulgar utilitarianism" which he feared Americans wanted to impose on the world, and 100 years later, critics of globalisation and even governments opposed to US trade policies - whether it's the Helms Burton Act on Cuba, policy on intellectual property rights, or bananas - seem to hum a similar tune.

Why has the century been so marked by "anti-Americanism"? Yes, the 30 years that followed the '98 war saw as many US military interventions in foreign lands. That set a pattern.

But another real source of objection, it seems to me, has been a disingenuous use of language to disguise a pursuit of power without responsibility. This pattern - a grievous perversion of the righteous "no taxation without representation" rhetoric of American revolutionaries - was firmly set after the '98 war.

Washington debated what to call its new "possessions". Puerto Rico was to be an "unincorporated territory". Its people would not have the benefits of US citizenship but its sugar economy would be fully integrated into the American system. This "banana republic"-style model became familiar in our century. The US rejected even the European imperialists' concept of "trusteeship". McKinley wanted the Philippines because he saw Manila as a stepping stone to China, whose "open door" to trade was under threat from Russia, Japan and Germany. But he didn't particularly want the bother of ruling it, especially as rebels fought on for independence.

In the end, McKinley paid Spain $20 million for it, as missionaries thought to "civilise" and "christianise" its small brown people. But the US agenda there was strategic from the start as its tenure in Clark and Subic Bay military bases until as recently as 1992 showed.

A hundred years on, Prof Walter LeFeber of Cornell University says: "Washington officials have not been able to devise a workable policy for development." The Clinton administration's foreign policy is seen as being in crisis - irresolute about facing down tyrants - but its trade imperatives have changed little as can be seen from a brewing banana war between the US and the EU.