The Great War’s Impact On American Foreign Policy And Civic Religion (Walter A. McDougall, FPRI)

Thirty-five years ago James Field wrote a provocative article titled “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book.” His point was that noneof the mighty forces that supposedly propelled the United States to world power can really be shown to have caused the Spanish American War of 1898 or U.S. annexation of an insular empire. Not Social Darwinism, the White Man’s Burden, or the closing of the frontier; not industrialization and the quest for foreign markets, or fears about urbanization, immigration, and labor unrest; not even Europe’s scramble for colonies and challenges to the Monroe Doctrine. At most those were ex post factojustifications for the leap into Progressive Imperialism, whereupon they took on a life of their own. Field concluded that imperialism was not the “American way of life” as historian William Appleman Williams claimed, or even the “aberration” Samuel Flagg Bemis claimed, but a sheer accident.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/03052016-the-great-wars-impact-on-american-foreign-policy-and-civic-religion-analysis/