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As Spain, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines approach the centenary of the 1898 war, scholars n all of these countries are revisiting the event that drew the United States into the Caribbean and Pacific as never before, elevating it to global-power status in an imperialist age (1). The war raises questions of U.S. power, intentions, core motives, ideology (including gender-based, age-based, and race-based thinking), decision making and leadership, politics, and public opinion (2). By emphasizing recent interpretations, this article suggests ways to tackle the key questions and contexts of the U.S. role in the multinational 1898 war. The long title-Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War-is used here in order to represent all of the major participants and to identify where the war was fought and whose interests were most at stake.
Historians have studied the 1898 war in four contexts, or what might be called levels of analysis: international, regional, national, and individual. A comprehensive understanding of U.S. foreign relations requires an analysis of all four parts and of their interrelationships.
International Context
First, the international level of analysis allows us to explore the characteristics of the international system, the distribution of power within it, and structural shifts over time. The central question is: which states possess the major instruments of power in the world system (3)? The answer helps to explain why the United States went to war in 1898. Most historians agree that the international system underwent a significant transformation in the late nineteenth century.
Paul Kennedy demonstrates in his influential book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), that as power shifted in the international system, the United States claimed an increasingly higher station, its international interests growing at the expense of others. A certain momentum set in: impressive industrial growth at home begot expansion abroad which, in turn, produced foreign interests, which then had to be protected by containing, coopting, or removing threats. On the other side of the expansion coin, then, was defense or containment, and hence war and intervention. As scholars have shown, the very anarchy of the international system created insecurity for the great powers and compelled interventionist policies (4).
The rise of the United States as a world power derived from its gains in the...