According to the author, what was one reason Alfred Thayer Mahan thought control of the Pacific Islands was important to the development of the United States?
. . . Mahan was not in the vanguard [forefront] of those imperialists in 1898 who, like Roosevelt, Lodge, Senator Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana, and others, saw in a victorious war with Spain for Cuba Libre [independence] an opportunity also to annex the distant Philippines. Mahan had seen since 1896 both the need and the opportunity for American commercial expansion in the Pacific and into the markets of China. But there is no persuasive evidence that he linked the annexation of the entire Philippine archipelago with that particular goal. The acquisition of naval coaling stations at Manila, in Guam, and at the mouth of the Yangtze he deemed entirely adequate to sustain future American commercial ambitions in China.
To be sure, he had long advocated the annexation of Hawaii, his arguments invariably [always] centering on defense of the Pacific coast, control of Oriental immigration, and the strategic implications of Japanese expansion into the Central Pacific. He had again demanded Hawaiian annexation as recently as February 1898 when Senator James H. Kyle, of South Dakota, asked him for a statement on the strategic virtues and values of the islands. He cheered in July 1898 when the United States, almost as a national-defense reflex, blinked twice, gulped, and finally swallowed whole the Hawaiian group. As he wrote in mid-August, “In the opinion of the Board, possession of these islands, which happily we now own, is militarily essential, both to our transit to Asia, and to the defense of our Pacific coast.” . . .
Source: Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters, Naval Institute Press, 1977
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