Imperialism is what happens when a strong state encounters a weak state, a soft frontier or a vacuum of power and uses its superior strength to dominate other people for its own purpose. Motives, rationales and mechanisms vary according to the culture (...)of the epoch,“[42]  defines historian and former adviser to President Kennedy Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

   In the decade before the Spanish-American War, new prophets arose in the United States that demanded that the nation - for various motives - imitate the policies of Britain or France and build an empire, enter upon the course of imperialism.

   The clergy connected traditional Christianity with the new revelations of the theory of evolution. The Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong concluded that evolution only proved the doctrine of predestination: „America had been hand- picked by the Lord to lead the Anglo-Saxons in transforming the world.“[43]  In his 1885 book ‘Our Country. Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis’ and a series of articles and sermons that followed he took up the old myth that the center of the world’s power has consistently shifted westward: from Babylon to Athens to Rome to London and is now about to cross the Atlantic where it will find its final resting place. Strong combines that argument with the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race and its power. With 120 million members it controls one third of the earth, and according to Strong, it will become as numerous as 1 billion people. Just as in evolution, he continues, history has only been a preparation for the great future that lies ahead, that opens up for the American people. For this people has perfected the Anglo-Saxon racial features: it is the creation of a new powerful man constituted of a melting of the Aryan races (and must thus preserve its integrity by limiting immi- gration), it controls the means of capitalism more successfully, it is the most ener- getic of all nations and enjoys the greatest degree of civil liberty and a permeable society that fosters ambition and finally the genius for colonizing that was inten- sified by the frontier experience.[44]  This last characteristic would mark out Ameri- cans’ future task :

            „It seems (..) that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-
            Saxon race for (...) the final competition of races.(...) [Then the United States] -
            the representative (..) of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest
            civilization - having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress
            its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. (..) And can
            any one doubt that the results of this competition of races will be the ‘survival
            of the fittest’?“[45]

   Strong’s teachings united Social Darwinism, Economic Competition and the Chris- tian Mission and became popular especially among the young generation. Others took up his message and brought it into universities and schools. The popular historian John Fiske interpreted this Anglo-Saxon mission as the global continuation of Manifest Destiny (=the expansion of the USA over the continent as sign of god’s will).[46]  John W. Burgess, founder of Columbia University, criticized that U.S. foreign policy had so far neglected its duty of racial superiority to recreate the world according to its own political principles and demanded that a new, more
assertive foreign policy be implemented.[47]

   The second great prophet of American greatness was the young captain of the Navy Alfred Thayer Mahan, who lectured at the recently established Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1890 he published his book ‘The Influence of Seapower Upon History’ in which he drew the conclusion from the past that a nation’s fate depended upon the power of its navy. The seas were no longer to be consi- dered as barriers but as bridges and roads. As international relations worked accor- ding to the principle of force the United States would have to expand its seapower; seapower being composed of modern, heavily armored battleships, mobile merchant ships, and the acquisition of naval bases world-wide and even colonies as coaling stations for this  navy with global reach. An isthmian canal through Central
America under American control was to further increase the mobility and efficiency of that global navy. By looking thus beyond the traditional horizon of its foreign policy, he predicted, America would conquer new markets for its ever-growing industrial and agricultural production, would compete with other powers, such as the rising German Empire, and achieve true world power status itself.[48]

   This power politics approach fascinated the elite in the State Department and had decisive influence on ambitious young politicians like Theodore Roosevelt or Henry Cabot Lodge.
The political establishment had also gotten the message and Congress passed a bill to build three modern battle ships in 1891.[49]

   In the minds of most Americans these two demands mixed with some ‘unspoken assumptions’. Imperialistic adventures were considered a possible outlet for interior social quarrels.
Resentment against the new tide of Italian, Eastern European and Jewish immi- grants rose and cries for limiting the numbers of these immigrants who seemed unfit for ‘Americanization’ were heard all over the continent.[50]  The frontlines between labor and capital that were appearing in the industrialized cities of the North were explained with the surplus-production of the U.S. industrial potential. Compensation could be found in opening up new markets where the highly
competitive American products would soon be dominant.[51]  And although there existed criticism that civilization does not allow the use of violence to force a people into a higher grade, "domestically there was renewed optimism that the nation was at last asserting its vital energies outward, instead of intensifying social strife at home.“[52]