A Tale of Two Wars: The Other Story of America's Role in the Philippines

Abstract

As the impact of September u continues to ripple through American society, its after shocks are not only determining the future but also reshaping the past. Not since the Vietnam War have external affairs so influenced the direction of U.S. historiog raphy. Whereas that debacle generated crit ical introspection, however, the operations in Afghanistan appear to have restored confidence in the efficacy of foreign mili tary intervention. This is the backdrop for the recent rediscovery of the Philippine American War, a trend represented well by Max Boot's book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars andAmerican Power and Thomas Donnelly's review of it in these pages (The Past as Prologue, July/August 2002). Reappraising the past to shed light on the present is generally to be welcomed. But seen from abroad, this particular discussion seems marked by a disturbingly narrow and America-centric perspective. Boot's broad study, written largely before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon but completed after ward, charts the rise of the United States from commercial power to superpower. What intrigue him are the low-intensity military engagements-what he calls small wars-waged to establish and then police America's growing global interests. Ranging from the Barbary Coast in 1804 to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the l990s, Boot spins a narra tive of no mean interest and considerable literary skill. He reminds the reader that the projection of U.S. power overseas has a long pedigree and that America's much-vaunted isolationism prior to World War II extended only to Europe. There is a moral, at times almost religious tone to Boot's prose when he concludes that the United States has a mission to place its awesome military machine at