While most Americans saw that intervention as being for the sake of humanity, a handful of reform-minded north-easterners-southerners are almost completely absent from Kinzer's account-worried that the humanitarian intervention in Cuba could lead the United States down the wrong path. The United States went to war in 1898 nominally to help Cubans gain independence from the tyrannical Spanish Empire. 2).Īfter making such a bold claim in the book's introduction, what follows is mostly a well-worn tale. imperial expansion following the Spanish-American War in 1898 "was the farthest reaching debate in our history" (p. According to Kinzer, however, the "great debate" over U.S. global involvement, for better or worse, since its "rise to world power" at the end of the nineteenth century. interventions abroad, including the well-known examples of CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Kinzer is well-versed in the long history of U.S. Should the young republic keep to itself and serve as a model for other nations to follow or should it actively seek to influence events in other countries in the name of transforming the globe in its image? In his new book, The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer examines how Americans debated this central question at the dawn of the twentieth century. Since at least the early nineteenth century, Americans have debated what the role of the United States should be in the world.
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