Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., wasn’t so good at being speaker of the House. It turns out his grasp of American history is equally unimpressive.
On Sunday McCarthy posted a video of his recent remarks at the Oxford Union defending the position that American intervention has been a force for good in the world. It turns out that a key premise for his case is completely false.
“In every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterwards,” McCarthy boldly belts in the video. “Except for enough to bury the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice for that freedom we went in for.”
McCarthy received raucous applause from his supporters in the audience. But he should’ve gotten a Bronx cheer.
McCarthy hails from a state that was a spoil of war.
The U.S. came into being through wars of invasion and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. And the U.S. government pursued policies of militant ethnic cleansing of Native Americans to expand its borders through the 19th century.
McCarthy hails from a state that was a spoil of war. The Mexican-American War, which was fought from 1846 to 1848, resulted in the U.S.’ claiming over half of Mexico’s territory, territory that makes up all or part of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming — more than half a million square miles of land. That war was set in motion by a territorial dispute over Texas, which Mexico also relinquished claim to after losing the war.
The U.S.’ victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 resulted in its acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. (During this conflict the U.S. also claimed the independent state of Hawaii as a territory.)
The U.S. has also used the threat of war to acquire territory, such as when it used Gen. Andrew Jackson’s successful military operations seizing Spanish forts as a threat to compel Spain to surrender Florida to the U.S.
Karl Jacoby, a professor of American history at Columbia…
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