The Other Paris Peace Treaty (And Why the Spanish-American War Still Matters)

In 2019, countries around the world will commemorate the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference that produced the Treaty of Versailles. That agreement ended World War One, a brutal, unnecessary, and immensely consequential war, but neither the treaty nor the war drastically altered American foreign policy. America continued to invade its neighbors, repeatedly deploy troops to China, and oversee Pacific colonies.

Twenty years before the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, signed 120 years ago this week, there was another peace negotiation in Paris that did markedly change American foreign policy: the 1898 Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War....