Congressional declaration and presidential war-making
The Spanish-American War enters these excerpts as one item in a list. Harlow Giles Unger, discussing George Washington’s unilateral use of military force, says that in the centuries after Washington, the United States has been officially at war more than a dozen times but that Congress has declared war only five times: in the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the War of 1812, and the two World Wars How Washington Invented the Presidency (2013). The Spanish-American War is thus placed among the formally declared wars, in contrast to the undeclared conflicts Unger says presidents initiated on their own authority.
Unger’s larger claim is that Washington established what Unger calls seven pillars of executive power not granted to him by the Constitution, including borrowing money without congressional consent and sending troops to war. Unger states that the Constitution clearly gives the power to appropriate and spend money to Congress, not the president, and that it clearly states Congress shall declare war and does not give the executive that power. He describes Washington’s borrowing of funds as a blatant violation of the Constitution and the sending of troops against Indian nations as another blatant violation, while saying Washington acted to protect the lives of American citizens. In this framing, the declared wars — the Spanish-American War among them — mark the constitutional norm against which later presidential wars are measured.
Bob Zadek’s question in the same episode supplies the episode’s own framing of Washington’s start: he notes that there were not even any laws to enforce because Congress had not yet passed even one law, and that the first act of Congress was the Oath Act, which created the oath of office for other governmental officials How Washington Invented the Presidency (2013). Unger answers that Washington acted consistent with his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and that his view of the document evolved; Unger says Washington called the Constitution a compromise and, citing Article 5, urged that it be amended if it did not work.
”Remember the Maine” as fabricated pretext
The war’s origins are treated more directly in a later episode. Bob Zadek, questioning Ivan Eland about the reasons for American military involvement in Iraq, lists wars he says were imposed on Americans by a government that fabricated the reason: the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, and the Spanish-American War, which he calls a phony war and associates with the phrase “Remember the Maine” United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014). Eland responds by adding the Mexican War, which he describes as a deliberate provocation by the United States to get the Mexicans to attack so that the country could grab Mexican territory, and says the latest war with Iraq also had fabricated reasons. Zadek then characterizes this as a shameful manipulation of the public by the political class to get the country into war.
The exchange occurs inside a longer argument about oil and intervention. Eland says that under the first Bush, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and that claims of Iraqi forces massing on the Saudi border turned out to be false because French and Russian satellites picked up no border moves. He cites a study by David Henderson, an economist under Ronald Reagan, showing that even if Saddam Hussein had taken over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, US GDP would have been cut by less than half of a percent, because Saddam would have had to sell the oil. Zadek asks how much the politics of oil mattered and recalls the bumper sticker “No blood for oil”; Eland answers that the elder Bush and his advisors were more honest about doing it for oil, while the younger Bush denied it and used weapons of mass destruction as a pretext. Zadek states the libertarian position that war is only to be done in national defense, and that economic inconvenience is not a reason to go to war.
The press and foreign-policy narratives
The Spanish-American War recurs a third time, in an episode on press coverage of foreign policy. Bob Zadek, asking Ted Galen Carpenter whether there was ever a golden age of press objectivity, says that going back from the founding to the present — the Civil War, World War I, Vietnam War, Spanish-American War — and picking foreign-policy events because that is where Carpenter has expertise, he could not find any good old days Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023). Carpenter answers that he does not subscribe to an idealistic notion of a totally objective press and does not think it ever existed, but that as America began to emerge as a global empire, the press became ever more subservient to government agencies and leaders pushing that agenda.
Carpenter identifies the 1970s and 1980s as an interlude in which journalists, disillusioned after being lied to about the Vietnam War, carried skepticism onto other issues, with Democrats and liberals more likely to criticize the Reagan administration and Republicans more inclined to defend it. He says that with the advent of the Persian Gulf War that process came to an end, and that journalists reverted to regarding themselves as part of the government apparatus, treating patriotic policies as beyond question. Earlier in the exchange, Zadek had noted that in the founding era the press was understood to have taken sides, with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams each having his own newspapers, and Carpenter agrees that the expectations were partisan in nature. The Spanish-American War functions in this episode only as one of the foreign-policy episodes Zadek names when searching for a baseline of press independence.
Across episodes: no development
Three episodes touch the topic, and the excerpts show no development: Unger uses the Spanish-American War as one of five congressionally declared wars in an argument about Washington’s precedents, Zadek and Eland cite “Remember the Maine” as a fabricated pretext alongside the Gulf of Tonkin and the Mexican War, and Zadek names the war in a list of foreign-policy events while questioning whether the press ever met an objective standard.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about the conduct of the Spanish-American War, its battles, its duration, or its territorial results. They do not name the Maine, its sinking, or any investigation into it, and they identify no statute, treaty, or case connected with the war. No speaker gives a date for the war beyond placing it among the five declared wars, and no speaker describes the role of any president, officer, or journalist in it. The excerpts also do not state what “Remember the Maine” referred to beyond Zadek’s use of the phrase as an example of a fabricated reason for war.