Imperialism and empire
On the cover of Puck published on April 6, 1901, in the wake of gainful victory in the Spanish–American War, Columbia – the National personification of the U.S. – preens herself with an Easter bonnet in the form of a warship bearing the words “World Power” and the word “Expansion” on the smoke coming out of its stack.
Thomas Jefferson, in the 1780s, awaited the fall of the Spanish empire until “our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.” In turn, historian Sidney Lens notes that “the urge for expansion – at the expense of other peoples – goes back to the beginnings of the United States itself.”
Effects labelled “cultural imperialism” occur without overt government policy. Stuart Creighton Miller says that the public’s sense of innocence about Realpolitik impairs popular recognition of U.S. imperial conduct.
The resistance to actively occupying foreign territory has led to policies of exerting influence via other means, including governing other countries via surrogates, where domestically unpopular governments survive only through U.S. support.
The maximum geographical extension of American direct political and military control happened in the aftermath of World War II, in the period after the surrender and occupations of Germany and Austria in May and later Japan and Korea in September 1945 and before the independence of the Philippines in July 1946.