The United States, however, could not simply accept in toto the language of the old empires. Its own anticolonial history meant that there were voices in the political sphere that resisted the mantle of imperialism. Even though it entered the imperial arena with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the “issue of self-rule was so deeply emplaced in the national psyche,” Sidney Lens writes, that “an anti-imperialist opposition . . . began to form.” The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in November of 1898, included not only figures like Mark Twain but also prominent mainstream politicians. This trend of opposition in the mainstream was mitigated over the course of the twentieth century; nevertheless, it gave rise to an image of the United States as being a different kind of world power—different, that is, from the “old-style imperialism” of Europe.

XREF: Connects to Cold War framing where the US positioned itself against European colonialism even while exercising global power.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 142