“Remember the Maine!”
That was the slogan that served as the drumbeat for war – against the Spanish Empire’s rule over Cuba – after an explosion sunk the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898.
It is worth remembering this week, as President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, escalate their attacks on small boats allegedly operated by “narco-traffickers” and amass an increasingly powerful naval force near Venezuela.
Why We Wrote This
Is President Trump’s nostalgia for America’s 1890s “Gilded Age,” and its victory in the Spanish-American War, feeding his ambitions in Venezuela today?
Mr. Trump has modeled his “new golden age” on the 1890s presidency of William McKinley, who favored slapping protectionist tariffs on U.S. trading partners and acted as commander in chief when the United States went to war two months after the sinking of the Maine.
There have indeed been echoes of 1898 in the second Trump administration. The president wants to “make America great again.” The Spanish-American War – giving the U.S. control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and emboldening it to annex Hawaii – marked America’s emergence as a great power.
There are also similarities between Mr. Trump and leading U.S. politicians in Mr. McKinley’s time.
Yet there are differences as well.
They underscore the ways in which Mr. Trump’s first months back in the White House have been distinctly his own. They also signal the difficulty of applying the template of the 1890s to a radically altered America in a radically altered world.
President Trump’s real kindred spirit from the 1890s is not Mr. McKinley.
It is Theodore Roosevelt, the swashbuckling fellow New Yorker who was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time of the sinking of the Maine. He promptly left Washington to lead a makeshift cavalry regiment in the Cuban war.
President McKinley was more soft-spoken – led into, rather than barreling into, the war. Even on tariffs, he ultimately changed his mind, concluding that they had harmed America’s growth and inhibited trade.
He said this publicly on the day before his assassination in 1901, which vaulted Mr. Roosevelt, by then vice president, into the presidency.
In some ways, Mr. Roosevelt would have felt at home in Mr. Trump’s White House.
He had a fondness for bellicose rhetoric, at times suggesting that any war, anywhere, would do. He was a virtuoso at self-promotion, leveraging his command of the “Rough Riders” in Cuba to a post of national prominence.
He viewed U.S. strength and international power as imperative – the logical next chapter in America’s story after its expansion westward, using a mix of force and diplomacy, all the way to California.
His goal in 1898 was to defeat a fading Spanish Empire and thus assert U.S. power not just in the Caribbean, but in the Pacific Ocean. Work began on a critical missing piece – a canal joining the two, through Panama – during his presidency.
Yet he also worried about imposing U.S. rule overseas without public benefit and consent.
He saw advantages in balancing rival powers rather than challenging them head-on. His proudest diplomatic achievement was to mediate the agreement that ended the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War – an achievement for which he won an accolade that Mr. Trump openly covets, the Nobel Peace Prize.
And he argued that there was a moral mission in America’s exercise of power. Indeed, one of the main drivers of popular enthusiasm for the Spanish-American War was the Spanish military’s brutal suppression of pro-independence forces on the island.
Still, there are unmistakable echoes of the preparations for the 1898 war in Mr. Trump’s buildup of forces near Venezuela, now being bolstered by America’s newest aircraft carrier.
With an attack on four more small boats earlier this week, U.S. strikes against such vessels in the Caribbean and off the Pacific Coast of South America have taken nearly 60 lives.
While there has not been a “Remember the Maine” moment, the White House has spoken of an “armed conflict” against what it says are narcotics-smuggling craft, although so far, at least, Washington has offered no evidence of their alleged purpose.
The president has authorized CIA action against Venezuela and raised the possibility of land operations, fueling speculation his aim may be to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Trump is not the only U.S. president in the decades following the 1898 war to have used America’s might in its neighborhood: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Cuba all felt its impact.
All of those ventures – in contrast to more limited attacks on Grenada and Panama in the 1980s – ended messily, stoking hostility toward U.S. interests.
If Mr. Trump escalates the current military buildup in the Caribbean, he will presumably be hoping that this latest intervention will avoid that outcome.
Yet the world has changed beyond recognition since Mr. Roosevelt’s era, when a rising America took its place among competing imperial powers.
One of Mr. Roosevelt’s key goals in making America a Pacific power was to position the country to compete with those empires for the untapped riches of a vast, politically frail entity on the other side of the globe: China.
China, however, is no longer frail.
It has been expanding its economic and political sway in many distant regions. Not the least of them, incidentally, is Latin America – long seen in Washington as America’s “backyard.”
