tyvar said: there were anti colonial sentiments in the US political arena from the get go. TR himself realized that the US population wasn't into the colonial thing. In 1916 even watered down a law was rammed through which set out that the US was going to eventually leave the Philipines. By the 1930s anti colonial sentiment was the norm in US politics. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

And by the end of WW2 we had enough clout on our own simply by virtue of having our core territories protected by huge ocean moats that we were basically the only ones of those involved in the war to be left standing. Anti-colonialism translated nicely into the system we're living with today, and the other great powers had gotten gutted to the point that they couldn't really contest it, aside from the one last gasp of the old world re: the Suez crisis.Anyway, as an American with Filipino roots, I'm looking at this, nodding and shrugging, not really bothered with either the backstory nor the final outcome. Pre-WW2 America was pretty short-sighted to want to get into the whole colonial thing so late to the game when it wasn't even necessary, and then the Filipino-US relationship did a complete 180 after Japan invaded and we drove them out.late edit: This article from the same source goes into why the US agreed to return the bells, tl;dr: it was largely held up by the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization, and once they approved it, no US politician was going to stand in the way like they had with prior administrations.