The Birth Of The American Empire, With Special Guest Stephen Kinzer
How did the US empire begin? In his important new book, Stephen Kinzer tells the story of the nationwide debate in 1898 over whether the US should attempt to intervene in the affairs of the rest of the world. Is that debate over?
How did the US empire begin? In his important new book, Stephen Kinzer tells the story of the nationwide debate in 1898 over whether the US should attempt to intervene in the affairs of the rest of the world. Is that debate over?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is the director of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Well, good.
We have a special guest today, and I'm looking forward to this.
He's been on our program before because we have a lot of respect for his writings, especially because he's very much involved in foreign policy and empire building.
And we talked with him once not too long ago about his book, The Brothers.
And today we're going to talk about his newest book, The True Flag.
Stephen Kinzer.
Stephen, welcome to our program today.
We can talk a little bit about the book while we're adjusting the audio.
You know, The Brothers was a book that you brought to my attention very early on.
Yes, and I was very fascinated with that.
And we both found it very, very interesting.
And the brothers, of course, were John Foster and Alan Dallas.
And of course, we're very interested in the CIA.
So that was important.
But now Stephen has this new book out.
Matter of fact, it just came out this past week.
So we have a very early copy of this.
And his newest book is called The True Flag.
And this, of course, is fascinating because it goes over in detail the history and the debate that went on in the early part of the last century leading up to and during the Spanish-American War.
And there was a lot going on there.
We, you know, took over a lot of land.
But what fascinated Stephen in this book is how marvelous it was that there evolved from this a major national debate that went on for a good while.
But it was sort of the beginning, what he puts it, establishes in the book, that this was the beginning of the empire.
Something we talk about and something I detest is empires and imperialism.
And of course, there was a lot of enthusiasm for this back before.
And I guess the biggest cheerleader was Teddy Roosevelt for this.
I think Stephen is there with us right now.
Yes, I'm here.
Oh, very good.
We've done a little introduction to your book and showed the copy to the audience.
And I was just about ready to expand a little bit more on lining up the debate.
And I was going to mention how this debate so impressed you and impresses me that even after the Spanish-American War was over, all of a sudden we had some major names, important names, most of these names that people will remember.
And you might start off by just telling us a little bit about how the two sides lined up and who really won that debate.
This book is really part of a series in which I'm looking for untold stories.
I'm always looking for big historical episodes that helped shape our modern world, but that for one reason or another have been lost to history.
So we all know the story of how the U.S. expanded beyond North America in 1898 and 99 with the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico and Buan.
But what I had never realized is that the entire United States was focused in a huge national debate over whether this was a good idea.
It didn't come automatically.
Just about every major political and intellectual figure in the country took part in it.
The magazines and newspapers were full of this debate.
The United States Senate debated the treaty by which we took those islands for 32 days.
And the entire nation was riveted on this debate.
So in my book, I'm trying to bring back this debate.
First of all, with the purpose of showing that the debates we're having now about expansion and the debates we've had all along, whether it was Vietnam or Central America or Iraq, are all over the same issues.
We're always repeating the same arguments.
And those arguments were made for the first time in this Senate debate and the public debate that surrounded it in 1898, 1899, 1900.
The anti-imperialist league arose.
It became a huge force in American life.
So you asked who were the characters?
These are titanic figures that lined up.
On the side in favor of expansion, you had really a triumvirate.
The public figure was Theodore Roosevelt.
The person more or less manipulating the project from Washington was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
And then the mighty megaphone, the one who projected this imperialist fever to Americans was, of course, William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher.
Then on the other side, you have also a great array of figures.
So Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in America, was a fierce anti-imperialist, and so much so that he even offered to pay the U.S. Treasury $20 million to buy the Philippines so he could set the Philippines free.
And at the same time, you have this super plutocrat as a fierce anti-imperialist.
You also have the principal labor leader of the era, Samuel Gompers.
You have Booker T. Washington, the major African-American figure of the time.
Jane Adams, the great social reformer.
You had former President Grover Cleveland.
And then you had the emergence of Mark Twain.
And that's another great discovery of mine in this book.
If the first discovery is that this debate actually happened and was so all-encompassing, my second great discovery is Mark Twain was not just the gentle old grandfatherly wisecracker that everybody loved, as we have been taught.
His anti-imperialism was bitter.
He had lived around the world.
He had seen the oppression that American and European intervention caused.
He wanted to change the American flag, to take the stars out and replace them with skulls and crossbones.
And he and Teddy Roosevelt really detested each other.
So Mark Twain said that Theodore Roosevelt was clearly insane and by far the worst president we have ever had.
And Roosevelt returned the favor by saying he would like to skin Mark Twain alive.
So the intensity of this debate, it was something that I don't think is, I didn't know anything about it.
And that's the story I'm trying to bring back.
The second point is that those of us who are critiques of American expansionism and American interventionism, who don't like those policies, can now realize that we didn't just start this approach to foreign policy.
This protest is not new in our generations.
This has its roots in American history.
It's a very vivid part of our history, the fight against pushing American military power into other countries.
So, in this book, I'm trying to give inspiration to people today who are opposed to this policy of intervention and military coercion and make them realize that they're in a rich American tradition.
Right.
Yeah, I know.
On one hand, it's encouraging, as you point out, that this is something we have experienced in history.
But when I was reading about the book, I was also a little bit depressed because the situation that you outlined in 1898 to 1902 or three was the elites on either side, people that were great opinion makers who were world-renowned figures on each side, really having it out over this.
And it seems as if today, with some exceptions, among the elites, the whole thing has been settled.
You said once all foreign policy decisions boil down to one word, intervention, it seems like the elites now on both sides have agreed that that is the course to go.
I think you're right.
It's a very good point, actually, that the great figures in American public life were sharply divided over this question back in around 1900.
Whereas now there is so much more of a consensus.
In Washington, you can't really differentiate in a serious way between, for example, the foreign policy of John McCain and the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton.
If we say those are people from opposing parties, where do you get the opposition?
So it's the Democrats, Republicans, it's the liberals and conservatives, and most of the think tanks, and I'm ashamed to say most of the mainstream press buying into this narrative.
So it's true, in a way, we've gone down because at least at that time, although the anti-imperialists in the end lost the debate, it was by very narrow margins.
So the Senate vote to ratify the treaty by which we started becoming an imperial power was carried by one vote more than the required majority.
And the Supreme Court decision that ruled that this was constitutional was also five to four by one vote.
So the elites were sharply divided.
You're right.
Now the elites have more or less come together and agreed on the concept that America is the indispensable nation and there cannot be a conflict or a crisis or a confrontation anywhere in the world where we don't play a major role.
So in a sense, it's true.
The level of debate over this seems to have declined and it's left to a few of us out here to continue banging our spoons on the high chair.
You know, I think you mentioned that you see this as the birth, a birth of an era, a birth of interventionism and the birth of an empire.
And of course, I like to think about that in terms because I like to think about the end of an era with the Soviet empire.
That was rather precise.
I think of it in terms of economics, and that sometimes follows the military empire.
But right now, we had this birth of the empire, but the empire is still alive and well.
But if you look underneath, I think there are some weak spots.
So do you think much about and anticipate how will this end?
Because empires usually end, and it isn't always that bad.
But most of the time, the elite who endorse the idea of intervention, they're not ready to give up the empire.
And in a way, I think this is the debate of Trump because he's sort of mixed up in this debate because he wants to be an isolationist.
At the same time, he wants to be an interventionist.
So where do you see this going?
And when do you think our empire might end?
Well, I think you're right that Trump does see himself as an interventionist and an anti-interventionist.
That's like most Americans, though.
We have a very divided soul.
We can't decide.
We want to make sure every country does what we say, but we also want every country to make its own choices.
These are not compatible.
You have to choose one, but we can't.
We have a real conflicted approach to the world.
Your question about empire is really profound.
I think one thing that's clear if you look over history is that the countries or empires that have managed to survive over many centuries, like China, for example, or Iran, are the ones that have learned to ride the currents of history.
It means you can't insist on being on top all the time.
If you do, you're going to have an explosion and you won't be there anymore.
That's what happened to many empires in history.
But those empires have learned that sometimes you're on top and you're one of very many important powers.
Then you're not so important.
Then you go up again.
There's always another time.
If you can learn to ride those cycles of history, then you have a good future as a country.
But nothing in our history, the United States, teaches us to be prepared for that.
We always assume we're going to be on top.
So we're not politically or psychologically prepared to recognize the fact that countries and empires rise and fall over time.
And if you don't fight that, you can survive.
But it raises the spectrum of that syndrome first pointed out by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War more than 2,000 years ago.
So he wrote that the, and it's a principle I think that goes way beyond that war.
He wrote that, using that war as an example, major conflicts tend to break out when a smaller power or a power that has been lesser is rising to challenge the dominant power.
And he says the war is usually not triggered by the country that's rising.
It's usually triggered by the country that's been on top and gets into a panic about seeing a challenge to its leadership.
Kinds of Diplomacy Deals00:03:30
So if you believe in that theory of the Thucydides trap, as it is called, we might be in danger of that.
And I don't think we're really prepared, as I said, as a nation, to adapt to the currents of history to the degree that we need to if we want to maintain our security and our prosperity.
Very interesting.
Yeah, it sounds like what happens when you're intoxicated with the idea of exceptionalism.
So you have to look at the internal affairs as well as the external.
But you know, you mentioned something, Stephen, in an interview recently.
I think it was on NPR, which I thought was fascinating.
And I know that our audience would find it interesting.
You pointed out that Donald Trump was elected partly because he promised that as a businessman, he would make great deals for America.
But you made a very important distinction between the kinds of deals you make as a businessman and the kinds of deals you make in diplomacy.
If you could reiterate that here, I think it would be very interesting.
Diplomacy, in a sense, is also deal making.
So on a certain level, it seems reasonable that a person who has had a career of making deals would be a good person to participate in international diplomacy.
But these negotiations are actually quite different.
In a business or a legal negotiation, the goal is always to get as much as you can.
And it's a zero-sum game.
The more you get, the less the other person gets.
And that's what you want.
A real good lawyer will come away with 80% of what he wanted and the other guy only gets 20%.
A super lawyer gets a 90 or 95 and the other one gets nothing.
That's the lawyer who's really successful or the businessman who tears the opponent to shreds is rewarded by his stockholders and by all the people on whose behalf he works.
So that's one kind of negotiation.
It's a win versus lose.
But diplomacy is not like that.
Diplomacy only succeeds when everybody is able to go away from the table thinking that they got something.
It means that you've got to go into the negotiation realizing you're not going to get everything because otherwise other people won't go away happy and you won't have a long-term secure diplomatic solution.
So I hope that Trump would be able to make that transition into a very different kind of deal making because in diplomacy you want deals that are long-lasting and that means deals that everyone feels they have a stake in maintaining.
It also means that you have to invite all the players in.
One of the reasons that the Syria crisis has become so horrific is that the United States decided very early on that there were certain negotiating partners we would not talk to, including the government of Syria.
So since we wouldn't talk with them, we couldn't negotiate an end to the fighting, so the fighting just continues.
You have to be ready to accept partners that are not already your friends, and you have to accept that you won't get everything and that the agreement has to satisfy everyone around the table.
So that's not the kind of agreement that Donald Trump is used to negotiating.
Can he make that shift?
We haven't seen any signs of it yet.
Right.
Seema, I want you to touch a little bit on motivation for the support of the people for some of these interventions.
Oil and Middle Eastern Interventions00:02:18
And sometimes it's just military expansion.
We need markets.
We need oil and this sort of thing.
We need more land and we need more customers and we just believe in that.
And other times it's humanitarian.
We've got to go and save them and spread American exceptionalism because we're great and we will do good and take care of them and we'll be the humanitarians that will provide so much help to the world.
But recently I've heard some comments made that one of the things going on is that they claim their non-intervention is we don't want to be involved.
We're not going to start a war.
But because we went into the Middle East and because we did this mess and we really messed up things and we precipitated some violence and disrupted these countries, now it isn't so much intervention as we have this moral responsibility to clean up our masks.
We caused this problem, so we better send more troops in to take care of this.
Have you thought about that argument?
As a matter of fact, this argument came up exactly in the debate that I write about in The True Flag, the debate that shook the U.S. Senate in early 1899.
So one senator did get up and say, if we withdraw our troops from the Philippines now, the Filipinos will be killing each other.
Another senator got up and said, but isn't that better than us killing them?
That's it.
So I really feel this has a relevance to the modern Middle East exactly as you pointed out.
The Middle East approach that we take is so reflective of the inability of our foreign policy to change as the world changes.
So there was a great policy, a great rationale for entering that part of the world.
First of all, we wanted to keep the Soviet Union out.
Second, we needed to protect these sea lanes that were bringing us the oil that was vital to our economy.
So, those rationales are gone now.
There is no Soviet Union.
The oil out of the Persian Gulf is not vital to our economy.
We are now the policemen of the Persian Gulf at great cost and also exposing ourselves to much danger and provocation.
Blowback And Independent Journalists00:06:49
And really, we are protecting the sea lanes by which oil is being shipped to India and China and Japan who are paying zero while Uncle Sucker is still patrolling the Persian Gulf day and night.
So, here's an example of a foreign policy that might have made sense in another era, but we still cling to it.
That's one of the real pernicious aspects of intervention.
It's like a tar baby.
Once you're in, you can't get out.
Exactly for the argument that you point out.
People say, oh, well, now that we're in, it's too late to get out.
If you use that argument, you are there forever.
That's right, Daniel.
You know, you've talked a little bit about journalists and the danger to journalists in this kind of populist era that we have, and you've made some really interesting points.
But reading an interview where you discussed that, I was struck by the danger to independent journalists, which I think might even be greater.
You know, there was this famous article in the Washington Post where they referenced a site that named 200 fake news sites, including our Institute, but also Drudge Report, Counterpunch, and a lot of other big sites.
I was wondering what you felt about the danger to journalists, particularly independent journalists, and also, what about someone like Julian Assange?
Would you consider him a publisher, a journalist, and as such, should he have protection as a journalist and publisher?
Well, I do feel that journalism now is under threat.
The obvious threat is that there's so much what they now call fake news or alternative facts out there, as if science and fact don't count.
I believe that the loyalty to truth is the number one responsibility of all journalists.
You must believe in the right of your viewers, your listeners, or your readers to have the truth.
So, you're on the one hand competing against outlets that don't believe that, that just promote things that aren't true.
And then, there's another layer to which you allude, and that is that those who question established paradigms, particularly in foreign policy, but maybe also in other areas, automatically, for ideological or political reasons, get relegated into the category of fake news.
So, that then becomes another way to discredit independent journalism.
So, in that sense, independent journalists are in trouble from both sides, those that are lying and those that want to group us in with the group that are lying.
So, we're in an odd era in which there doesn't seem to be a clear recognition on the part of many Americans that there's a certain number of things that happen that are factual.
They're not subject to interpretation.
And some of what we're getting out of Washington these days definitely feeds that disquiet.
Right.
Stephen, I want to ask a question about a subject that I have encountered in the debates now, and I'm sure you'll recall that when I used the word blowback, people didn't like that.
The establishment didn't like that.
But I wanted to get your opinion about blowback.
Is this true of something that it truly happens?
Is it a consequence of our foreign policy?
And also, does our foreign policy contribute to the radicalization of certain groups?
Because I think there are radicals in all groups.
I believe that.
But do you believe that our interventions over there actually incites it and makes that problem worse for us?
Blowback is a very real phenomenon.
And I understand why Americans don't grasp it.
We forget these interventions as soon as the front page news is over.
After a few days or weeks, we don't remember that they even happened.
How many people know that we fought a war for years in the Philippines or even what we did in Central America during the 1980s?
These fade from memory very quickly.
But the people in the target countries do not forget.
These memories fester and burn in their hearts and souls, and they do create radicalization.
They make people militant.
You know, for many people, that's the only face of the United States they ever see.
And this is one of the most depressing aspects of our foreign policy.
Our country, the United States, has a fantastic story to tell.
And for all our sins, huge numbers of people will admire us around the world because of all we've achieved at home.
But we don't tell that story in the world.
We've closed down so many of our libraries and U.S. information agencies, and we're only promoting the military side of what the United States is.
So you can forgive people in the world who, when hearing that the United States is coming to save them, will wonder if they're going to be saved the way we saved Iraq and saved Nicaragua and Iran and Guatemala and Vietnam and on and on.
So I give you one example of blowback that should have been on every front page.
And I couldn't believe how little attention this got.
So you remember there was a blow-up a couple of months ago when the president of the Philippines said that he no longer wanted to be partners with the United States and he was going to go to China.
And there was a lot of outrage in Washington over this.
But what was not reported was that at the press conference, when he made that shattering announcement, he held up a photograph of U.S. Marines standing over a pit full of dead Filipino civilians more than 100 years ago.
And he said, the U.S. did this to us.
They have never apologized.
They're trying to pretend this never happened.
So what it means is that this episode that happened in the Philippines more than a century ago has just led the Philippines, through its president, to decide to make a dramatic shift in its geopolitical orientation.
You talk about blowback.
That's 100 years.
That guy was not even born then.
That memory of what happened is a collective national memory.
Otherwise, why would the president of the Philippines be waving around a photograph from 1908 to justify a political decision he's making now to break up the United States?
If you want to see an example of blowback, it couldn't get clearer than that.
Why We Remember Past Mistakes00:01:21
You know, that is a great point.
And a more modern example of blowback would be, of course, our participation in getting rid of Mossadegh in Iran, and then all of a sudden leading to a tragic relationship with Iran, which continues.
But anyway, Stephen, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
This is a great review of your book and your philosophy.
And I appreciate very much you coming on.
Well, it's an honor to be on with you, sir, and I'll look forward to next time.
Wonderful.
And I want to thank the viewing audience for tuning in today.
I consider this a very important interview.
And of course, Stephen Kinzer makes some very important points.
Now, you ought to pay attention to what he's written just recently.
It just came out.
It's a fantastic book, and you can get the details of when the empire really started and the great debate that occurred.
And we need the debate to continue, and that is our effort.
Daniel and I, Daniel was in the office when we worked real hard to get a debate going before the war and going into Iraq.
And even unfortunately, we didn't get that debate going, but we didn't have as much debate as here.
But the problem is, the imperialists won the debate, and we've had an imperialistic foreign policy ever since.
And this book will help explain that.
But I want to thank all the viewers for tuning in today to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.