How to Hide an Empire

The occupation lasted six years and eight months. Yet even after it ended, in 1952, nearly two hundred thousand troops remained on more than two thousand base facilities on the Japanese main islands. This kept Japan “bound hand and foot” to the United States, a leading politician charged. Only 18 percent of those polled after the occupation’s end f

Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them.

Oddly, though the United States is frequently accused of imperialism, its territorial dimensions go largely unnoticed. So much energy has gone into presenting the United States via the logo map that even its critics, the ones most eager to cry empire, have little to say about overseas territory. Still, if there is one thing the history of the Great

Indeed, there they were. The war with Spain gave rise to the only moment in U.S. history when cartographers aggressively rejected the logo map. In its place they offered maps of the empire. Publishers, cashing in on empire fever, rushed to put out atlases showcasing the country’s new dimensions. “It does look a little bit odd to see Porto Rico, Haw

In 1938 he launched the Partido Popular Democrático, the party he would lead until the end of his career. It campaigned on a slogan of “Bread, Land, and Liberty,” though that last term, liberty, was kept ambiguous. It resonated with the widespread resentment of colonial rule in Puerto Rico, yet it was vague enough to encompass many possibilities. M

So does all this mean the United States can be classified as an empire? That term is most often used as a pejorative, as an unfavorable character assessment. Empires are the bullies that bat weaker nations around. It’s not hard to argue that the United States is imperialist in that sense. Certainly its corporations and armed forces have spread them

Martial law in Hawai‘i lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands. Yet Hawai‘i’s military commanders repeatedly refused to relinquish control. The secretary of the interior started calling it the “American ‘conquered territory’ of Hawaii.”

The fantasy of conquest is always the same: defeat the leader and the country is yours. The United States had learned the folly of this when it won the Philippines from Spain, only to find itself fighting the Philippine Army. It was about to learn the lesson again.

Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the…

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