In 1901, Mark Twain published a satirical indictment of America’s war in the Philippines. His title told the whole story: “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”

That’s the way many Americans imagined Filipinos. And it supposedly gave us the right to rule them, until they were sufficiently enlightened to govern themselves.

We also claimed to have liberated them from Spain, which had colonized the Philippines for hundreds of years. But as Twain argued, our real motive was much more selfish: “to take their land away from them and keep it.” 

More than a century later, the Trump administration has revived that quest. Sometimes, as in the case of Greenland and Panama, it has demanded the actual ceding of territory to the United States. In Venezuela and Iran, by contrast, the White House seems more interested in what lies underneath the land: oil.

So we need another Twain, to mock our imperial........

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