Historian David Silbey, author of A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 has a very enlightening post bolstering the argument I made yesterday that “victory” in the Philippines wasn’t really worth anything. He observes that “the Philippines, in addition to being seen as a new frontier for Americans, was also to be the first great acquisition for an American Empire” but nothing really ever came of it. As early as 1915, observers like Robert Johnson could see that the Philippines was not actually useful as a military asset:

The taking of the Philippines may be ranked among the worst military blunders committed by any American government—it is difficult to put the matter more strongly. It is a weak, ex-centric military position, fundamentally indefensible against any strong transpacific power, but inevitably a magnet to draw troops and ships away from our shores.

And of course this proved to be the case when the United States went to war with Japan. Far from providing a U.S. military asset in the region, it was simply a hard-to-defend position that got overrun. Silbey argues, however, that U.S. occupation of the Philippines did contribute to the deterioration in U.S.-Japanese relations and thus ultimately to our need to fight a costly war in the Pacific.

The specifics of the Philippines aside, I would just emphasize that it’s usually the case that these imperial adventures don’t wind up paying the freight. Nationalists and militarists are perpetually imagining that control of some patch of foreign land (and perhaps the natural resources beneath it) will pay some vast dividends but there’s little practical or theoretical reason to think this will be the case.

Manila skyline (wikimedia)

Ross Douthat offers a pregnant historical analogy:

These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.

I think the Iraq-Philippines analogy is an interesting one, because it’s something that both proponents and detractors of American imperialism can embrace as illustrative. I recall that George W. Bush himself analogized his imperial adventure in Iraq to McKinley’s in the Pacific. And while the situations don’t bear any resemblance in detail, there is a certain vague similarity in that while I would say counterinsurgency in the Philippines “worked” it’s hard for me to see that it actually achieved anything. I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?

It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.