Ross Douthat gets the ball rolling:
These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs.
I do think that history has justified the Korean War, to a degree that was probably not predictable in 1950. It’s the Philippines example, however, that gets Ackerman and Yglesias started. Matt:
There is a certain vague similarity in that while I would say counterinsurgency in the Philippines “worked” it’s hard for me to see that it actually achieved anything. I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?
Spencer:
But the hinge point in U.S.-Philippine history — what yielded the friendship and closeness that the two nations presently enjoy — was the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. What the Japanese inflicted upon the Philippines and its people was by orders of magnitude far worse than anything the U.S. ever dared. You probably know the rest: MacArthur declares he Shall Return; he does; the battle of Leyte Gulf is one of the largest in the history of naval warfare; we drive the Japanese from the Philippines; the amount of gratitude is overwhelming; a partnership has been our inheritance ever since.
It’s really unclear what value Ross believes that the Philippines held for the United States. He could believe that they were a strategic asset for the US, or that the post-1946 relationship was an asset, or that the conquest and occupation was justified by the current Philippine democratic regime. All of these arguments are pretty unconvincing. On the strategic question, independence of the Philippines was threatened by actors other than the United States. Both Japan and Germany (yes, German Pacific imperialism [no pun intended] was to be taken seriously at the turn of the century) had an interest in the Philippines while it was held by Spain, and it’s not at all unlikely that either or both would have attempted to subjugate and independent Filipino state, or taken the Philippines away from Spain. This threat was understood to be serious by US policymakers. However, the conquest and occupation didn’t particularly help the US in World War II, as the archipelago was conquered in short order and at great cost to the US. David Silbey makes this point at greater length at Edge of the West; the islands ended up have virtually no strategic value to the United States. In this sense, Yglesias is quite correct; the brutal conquest of the Philippines earned the United States almost nothing in the long run.
It’s worth mentioning that US conquest and colonization was probably preferable from a Filipino point of view to either that of Japan or Germany, although this argument doesn’t take you very far. I don’t say this in order to justify US imperialism, or to suggest that the US was an altruistic, gentle conqueror. Germany and Japan were among the most brutal conquerors of the colonial period, and it does not justify US conduct to say that the Philippines probably fared better under US occupation than it would have under German or Japanese. This was not lost on the Filipinos; contra Ackerman, while there were some collaborators after the Japanese conquest of 1941-1942, resistance was more widespread in the Philippines (and better organized) than anywhere else in colonial Asia. The Filipino elite believed in US guarantees of independence, and behaved accordingly. However, and this needs to be made clear, ensuring the independence for the Philippines did not require its subjugation by the United States. There was considerable Filipino goodwill towards the United States in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and there’s no question in my mind that some kind of defensive security arrangement between the United States and the First Philippine Republic would have been possible. Such an agreement could have secured some US economic and strategic interest while maintaining Philippine independence. I’m not convinced that the First Philippine Republic would have become a stable democracy, but then it’s not as if the regime created by the United States after 1946 stayed democratic.
On this last point, the idea that it was necessary for the United State to “tutor” the Filipinos in democracy for 46 years is insulting. First, any such argument runs aground on the name “Ferdinand Marcos.” US influence was hardly incidental to Marcos’ success. Second, as noted above, whatever positive effect the US wished to have over Filipino political institutions could have been achieved without the conquest and occupation. Taiwan and South Korea achieved relatively healthy, democratic political systems without suffering from US control over their domestic institutions.
So again, I’m mildly curious about just what Douthat seems to believe was the long term benefit of US brutality in the Philippines. If his point is the extremely modest “US imperialism was better than Japanese or German,” then fine, but that amounts to arguing that our torturers are more gentle than their torturers, so Go American!!! The US conquest of the Philippines was not, in my view, necessary to the accomplishment of any goal that reasonable people think nations should have.
