Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 12 From the series Political battles and political cultures in the United States In 1898, the United States went to war with the Spanish Empire over the question of Cuba, but soon found itself ruling the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico. A reluctant entry into the war against Spain led American imperialism, emerging from a century of vast, heterogeneous, and turbulent capitalist development, to the naval “baptism of fire” of its first war in Asia. Some representatives of “expansionism” espoused the new tendency, and their critics nicknamed them jingoes , after the term used for English nationalists. Ambassador Warren Zimmermann in First Great Triumph [2002] portrays expansionists as those whose writing or action, and often both, “made their country a world power”. Admiral A. T. Mahan considered himself a “thinker”; his books set the framework for the debate between the military and publicis...