Episode Details

In this episode, we explore the loophole that annexed hawaii. You know, usually when you're... Well, they're the rules of the game. You play out the clock, and if you're losing at the final buzzer, you don't get to just turn to the referee and say, actually, let's make this a sudden death overtime where my team only needs half a point to win. I mean, that would cause an absolute... riot in the stands. Right. You can't just rewrite the fundamental mechanics of how a winner is decided purely because, you know, you didn't get the score you needed. But then you look at the mechanics of late 19th century geopolitics and suddenly that is exactly what happens. It really is. We are looking at a historical landscape where the rules of how a nation expands its borders were just entirely rewritten mid game. So welcome to today's deep dive. Our mission for this one is to pull apart Suddenly, the abstract concept of Hawaii became very real and very helpful to the American public. Here's where it gets really interesting, though, by being hospitable, by opening their ports and being overwhelmingly helpful to the American war effort. Did Hawaii's actions actually doom their own independence? Oh, that's a great question. Because all they really did was prove undeniably exactly how valuable they were as a mid -ocean naval base. They showed the US military that they were an indispensable asset. If we connect this to the bigger picture, you see the exact logic that President McKinley and highly influential naval strategists like Alfred T. Mahan were actively pushing at the time. Right. The Spanish -American war proved to the expansionists that if the United States was going to evolve into a global empire with reach across the oceans, it absolutely needed permanent Pacific bases. Because of the coal.