American Canary Islands

IDK TR was a monster that would have made Echidna proud to call her own he might have done it but that requires a whole other kettle of fish as it wouldn't be happening during any recognizable Spanish American war. In any real sense it seems ASB to me for the US to get the Canaries and hold them. The only way this might even seem possible is if one or more other European powers were backing them and they expelled most of the population off the island.

I mean if the US wanted territory so bad it tried to keep the Canaries that it wouldn't have listened to Spain on conditions for Cuban independence.
 
Nelson lost his arm in an abortive effort to capture Santa Cruz in Tenerife in 1797. If the first attempt had been successful (adverse currents cost them the element of surprise I believe) then the rest of the Canaries might have fallen.
But then they'd probably have been returned to Spain at some point after it changed sides, at the Congress of Vienna if not earlier... although maybe we'd get somewhere else in exchange? Cuba, perhaps?
 

katchen

Banned
The Spanish were certainly worried that the US would seize the Canaries during the Spanish-American War. And it was an obvious set of islands for the US to seize --and keep. After all, unlike the Cubans and Filipinos, the Canary Islanders were White. US seizure of the Canaries would simply have amounted to a redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine Line from Mid Atlantic to somewhere 100 miles or so west of Ireland. Which the US basically enforced when it occupied Iceland and Greenland during WWII and prepared to occupy the Azores.
I can say that had the US taken and kept the Canaries, the US would have been asserting an interest in Morocco retaining it's independence. The chances are that the US would also have seized Ceuta from Spain as basically a naval base and perhaps even Mellila. So Morocco would NOT have been partitioned between France and Spain and might well have retained a sizeable chunk of the Sahara including Tindouf and what is now Mauretania and perhaps Southern Algeria. Perhaps the US might also have become involved in protecting the Ottoman Empire against Itailain encroachment too.
 
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