How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

How to Hide an Empire covers a long period—from colonial America to the present—from the standpoint of the establishment and development of the American Empire. For this reason, it is important to briefly examine key aspects of US history and foreign policy.

Rebelling against Britain in 1776, the Americans living in the original Thirteen Colonies perceived themselves as a republic. The Founding Fathers in the New World sought to avoid the imperial pursuits and entanglements of the Old World. This image of the US as a republic was formative to the self-perception of Americans and persists even today. However, it was already in the 19th century that the United States began its transformation into an empire.

The Monroe Doctrine (1823) sought to prevent further European colonization of the Americas. It had a defensive purpose but, at the same time, delineated North and South America as the sphere of influence of the United States. On the mainland, Americans, inspired by the frontier drive, explored and settled farther west toward the Pacific coast. They were also inspired by “Manifest Destiny”—a 19th-century belief in America’s destiny to settle the entire continent. The population explosion among white settlers pushing out the Indigenous people of North America and government policies such as the Indian Removal Act (1830) led to the forced relocation of Indigenous Americans from their ancestral lands. This gradual take-over by white squatters led to the Trail of Tears, by which Indigenous Americans were forcibly resettled in Oklahoma.

The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) allowed the US to annex more than half of Mexico’s territory, including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada along with parts of Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, and Kansas. The US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 and annexed Hawaii in 1898, Wake Island in 1899, American Samoa in 1900, and the Virgin Islands in 1917. It was also in the 19th century that the US began to collect small, uninhabited guano islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean to extract naturally-occurring fertilizer to support the population growth on the continent through agriculture.

A major turning point for American imperialism was the Spanish-American War (1898). Spain was exhausted from imperial overextension and unrest in the colonies, which made the US victory easy. As a result, the US annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba remained nominally independent but was subject to the Platt Amendment (1901) which justified US interventions to protect its business interests. The Greater United States existed in this form until World War II—the first stage of the formal American Empire and Part 1 of the book. It was also at this time that the US engaged in “gunboat diplomacy”: To ensure political and financial “stability,” US troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934, replacing “undesirable” governments when needed (114). This aggressive behavior was linked to the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), which justified such interventions.

The second stage, Part 2 of this book, took place after World War II, in which this global conflict acted as a watershed moment. The US arose as a superpower but shed its biggest colony, the Philippines, in 1946. This transformation occurred against the backdrop of global decolonization which included the independence of India (1947) from Britain, Vietnam (1954) from France, and Angola (1975) from Portugal, among many others. Meanwhile, Hawaii and Alaska became states in 1959. The second reason the US no longer needed the formal control of large overseas territories is its move away from colonization toward globalization. By repurposing its guano islands as airfields and radio transmission points and establishing hundreds of military bases in foreign countries, the US learned to project its power in other ways.

In addition to neocolonialist, economic methods to attain desirable results, the US relied on advanced technologies, logistics and standardization, popular culture, and the English language to attain its goals. The US also engaged the CIA in the case of “non-compliant” governments, such as the successful regime change in Iran in 1953 or the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to remove Fidel Castro in 1961. The US also funded insurgencies, including the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua against the country’s legitimate government and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Afghan insurgency transformed into Al Qaeda that, in turn, turned against the United States in the 1998 embassy bombings and 2001 attacks on American soil.

In the framework of the Cold War (1945-1991), US engagement in wars also increased significantly, including the Korean War (1950-1953) and Vietnam War (1955-1975). At this time, the US followed the “containment policy” which saw it necessary to challenge America’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, all around the world. Since the containment policy was global, so was American engagement. In other words, despite its transformation after World War II, the United States continued to operate as an empire that participated in many wars to attain its economic and geopolitical goals.