The birth of the imperial presidency: how America's late-nineteenth-century conquest of Cuba and the Philippines still haunts our foreign policy.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire - Book review

The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

by Stephen Kinzer

Henry Holt, 320 pp.

Here we go again. As Donald Trump prepares to assume the presidency, the stage is set for a new and impassioned debate about America's purpose abroad. Should it retreat from Asia and Europe, leaving other powers to settle their own scores? Or should it seek to remain Mr. Big abroad, setting the rules of the game for everyone else?

For the most part, this debate has been presented as one taking place on the right, where neoconservatives are facing off against opponents of intervention. But there is a long-standing and somewhat overlooked tradition on the left that similarly views American incursions abroad with apprehension. In the 1990s, when, in the name of liberal humanitarian intervention, Bill Clinton's administration declared war on the marauding Serbs in Yugoslavia, the Democrats' long-held unease about involvement in foreign wars began to dissipate. Even the lessons of the Iraq War weren't enough to stop President Barack Obama from going to war in Libya in 2011 on humanitarian grounds, at the urging of Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Samantha Power. Today, it might only take a Sherrod Brown or Elizabeth Warren reviving anti-imperial traditions, especially if the Trump administration, as part of its crusade against Islam, were to enmesh the U.S. in a new war against Iran.

Stephen Kinzer's newest book, The True Flag, thus arrives at an opportune moment. Kinzer, a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times and now senior fellow of international and public affairs at Brown University and a columnist for the Boston Globe, has written several books in recent years about American foreign policy during the past century, notably a study of the conservative brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who dominated foreign affairs in the 1950s and early '60s.

In The True Flag, Kinzer examines the impassioned debates about America's rise to global power during the Gilded Age, devoting as much attention to the doughty opponents of the move from republic to empire--Mark Twain, Carl Schurz, William Jennings Bryan, and Andrew Carnegie--as he does to its proponents. He vividly conveys the sense of high drama that ensued, as America debated the prospect of conquering foreign territories. Many of the ills that have afflicted our foreign policy can be detected in that initial push for empire that took place in the late...