How did the United States establish a military presence in the Philippines?

Whether the Spanish-American War of 1898 had to be fought will be debated probably forever. The precipitating event, the sinking of the American battleship Maine in a Cuban harbor, has never really been fully explained, and conspiracy theorists have suggested that the United States sabotaged its own warship as a pretext to eliminating the final vestiges of Spanish colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Whether that is true or not, however, is immaterial for the moment. As the 19th century drew to a close, the lingering presence of Spanish colonies off the coast of the United States, as well as across the Pacific Ocean, in a region of growing economic and military importance to the United States—was considered an affront to American prestige and to American economic interests. Ongoing guerrilla warfare waged by the Cubans against their Spanish occupiers inspired support for that anti-imperialist effort in the United States, and heavy-handed Spanish tactics targeting those Cuban insurrectionists made the eviction of the Spanish from Cuba a moral mandate. The sinking of the Maine, as noted, provided the pretext for the United States’ military intervention in Cuba, and for the U.S. seizure from the Spanish of the Philippine Islands.

Once the Spanish were defeated, the United States established military bases in the Philippines, as well as at the now-infamous site of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the position of which enabled the U.S. Navy to protect the “Winward Passage” between Cuba and the island of Hispaniola, which is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. While the military requirement for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps installations at Guantanamo Bay has been called into question over the years—even preceding the use of that location to house prisoners from al Qaeda following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—the very large Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines were considered among the most important U.S. military installations in the world. The eruption of the volcano on Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 devastated the air force base, which gave the increasingly independence-minded Philippine people the pretext to permanently close that installation, and the closure of Subic Bay Naval Base followed the following year. Domestic politics in the Philippines made the continued presence of large-scale U.S. troop concentrations unpalatable, and the U.S. withdrew from those bases.

Interestingly, with the growing military power of China, the Philippines has reconsidered its earlier decision, and is negotiating with the United States the return of American forces, especially to Subic Bay. In any event, the military bases in the Philippines came about as a result of the U.S. defeat of Spain and the end of Spanish colonization of that island chain.