Mark Twain on American Imperialism

With the long U.S. involvement in the Philippines about to end. The Atlantic, through the eyes of Mark Twain, looks bark at the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, a war that many Americans saw as not only a calamity for the Filipinos but also a betrayal of our anti-imperial past. Twain’s angry essay serves to remind us that some of the assumptions that drove U. S. foreign policy in the Cold War—foremost among them that we should spread our way of life to the world—go back to a time before communism, and might therefore live on into a world without communism