Andrew A. Szarejko's "American Conquest"

Andrew A. Szarejko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wartburg College. His work has been published in journals such as PS: Political Science and Politics, Millennium, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and The Journal of Global Security Studies. He is also the editor of Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19.

Szarejko applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy, and shared the following:

Page 99 of American Conquest is near the end of Chapter 4. After examining the origins of the Northwest Indian War (1790-1795) in Chapter 2 and the process by which military basing decisions helped U.S. forces defeat the countervailing Native American coalition in Chapter 3, I turn in Chapter 4 to the ways U.S. forces brought the perceived lessons of the “Indian Wars” abroad. More specifically, Chapter 4 is about how the U.S. military brought a sort of nascent counterinsurgency doctrine learned (and continually re-learned) on the American frontier into the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Page 99 speaks to “lessons learned” processes that the U.S. military has since established to try to more systematically codify the lessons of recent experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I caution against trying to make law-like generalizations on the basis of such experiences.

This gives readers a good sense of what I am doing in this book. I am not just interested in the origins of the Northwest Indian War; I am also interested in the ways its influence lingers in U.S. foreign policy and American politics. Readers who continue a few more pages into Chapter 5 will find the most recent events I discuss—debates in Fort Wayne, Indiana, concerning whether to celebrate the city’s namesake and the victorious general in the Northwest Indian War, Anthony Wayne.

Page 99 also speaks to my interest in how foreign policy professionals continue to use the Indian Wars as an analogy. There I begin a final section in Chapter 4—a coda in which I discuss how a U.S. military official, Colonel Elbridge Colby, justified indiscriminate violence in the Philippines with reference to the purportedly “savage,” “uncivilized” nature of the Filipino insurgents. I then turn to a description of how Colby’s great-grandson and President Trump’s current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge A. Colby, has used the “Indian Wars” as an analogy in some of his own work on military strategy. In short, American Conquest is about the origins and legacies of the Northwest Indian War, and page 99 underscores those central concerns.

Visit Andrew A. Szarejko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue