America was founded on independence from tyranny and arbitrary laws that our governors had imposed on us. The Founding Fathers saw America as an exceptional nation, evidenced by the way it had broken away from Great Britain. What made the American Revolution revolutionary was not the fact that power changed hands, but that it created an entire new nation and how it led to the adoption of democracy, a framework that was unprecedented for the time. We separated ourselves from European nations by creating a self-ruling, democratic government under the ideals of (limited) representation, liberty, opportunity and equality. As a young nation, leaders were meant to show that the country could conduct itself the same way it was founded, and demonstrate …show more content…
Still, we stay contained to our own country and solidified the Monroe Doctrine, which said the US would stay removed from European affairs if they stayed out of the New World (Kaufman 38). However, when there was no more land to claim, we turned our attention to Cuba and the Philippines, Spain’s footholds in the Atlantic and North Pacific. Unlike Spain, we were doing a favor for these helpless, indigenous people. We used the justification of saving people from the treachery of colonization as a mask for our own desire to get power overseas and neutralize Spain. The Spanish-American War is the defining example of why America cannot remain true to its founding ideals and still have an empire. American imperialism was not more moral than the actions of other European colonial powers, as our desire to grow militarily and economically was masked by altruistic motives that turned out to be thinly veiled racism. In this paper, I will argue that America cannot have an empire because the main goal is to serve our economic and military interests; we trample on the will of the locals, and threaten them if they don’t