The Ghion Journal
The story of how America became a global superpower is one in which a group of ambitious and egotistical men rationalized the implementation of a governing model that would lead to massive death and suffering. The main forerunner of this drive to superpower status was Theodore Roosevelt, a late-19th/early 20th-century narcissistic politician from an upper-class household who was determined to turn his childhood obsession with war into a foreign policy model which would make the United States into even more of a conquering nation than it already had been (with its near extermination of the native population of the North American continent) up to that point in its history.
He and the other political elites who supported the 1898 Spanish-American War—and the subsequent rush to empire through the seizing of Caribbean islands and the brutal takeover of the Philippines, which killed roughly 200,000 people (about 2.5% of the population at that time)—received support from business elites as well, such as William Randolph Hearst, who used his vast newspaper network to manufacture public opinion for war because war stories helped him sell papers better than the lurid gossip he otherwise used to gain the public’s attention.