¶ … Image chronicles the history of the United States and the Philippines over several hundred years of modern history. Karnow's main argument about the relationship between the new nation is that the United States had an empire over this far-off but ostensibly independent country that "dare not speak its name." Over the course of the book, Karnow paints a convincing portrait of a nation colonized. Karnow suggests that what was particularly damaging about the de facto (if not de jure) American empire in the Philippines was that America's self-image is that it is a democratic, non-empirical country. By engaging in the sort of relationship America had with the Philippines, America betrayed its most fundamental principles as a nation as well as engaged in exploitation. Because America did not perceive itself as a nation capable of exploiting other nations like its parent country England, it could not even acknowledge the abuses it perpetuated after the fact in the Philippines Karnow is fairly explicit in the vehemence of his thesis from the onset of the book. Even the subtitle of the book "American's Empire in the Philippines" reinforces the idea that America attempted to make over the Philippines into a nation into our image, in political, economic, and religious terms. America used the Philippines as a colonial bastion against political ideologies it disliked, such as communism. Furthermore, because this remanufacture of imaging was done on an unequal basis, with the Philippines assumed to be inferior child to the parental and patriarchal re-manufacturing nature of America, the relationship between the two nations, in Karnow's envisioning was almost doomed...

"Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.... Few countries... have been more heavily shackled by the past than the Philippines." In other words, the Philippines exists in the European and then the American imagination first as a place to carry 'the white man's burden' of exporting Christianity, then as a beautiful and exotic island paradise.
Karnow is not a Philippine himself, he is a foreign correspondent from America, but he without a doubt takes the Philippine nation's 'side' in this book, or at least that of the Aquinos. Karnow begins his book, not chronologically with the origins of the United States engagement in the Philippines, but with the image of Cory Aquino speaking to a joint session of Congress, asking for aid and greater foreign investment in the Philippine nation. Karnow uses this as a touchstone to explore the reasons for Aquino's need to ask for aid and for the shadowy circumstances behind the death of her husband Nicky Aquino.

Karnow then begins with a far-reaching history that stretches almost as long back as the 'discovery' of the current nation of America itself. From Cory Aquino, he then turns to Ferdinand Magellan's accidental arrival in the Philippines in 1521, through the creation of the American nation. Magellan's installation of Spanish corruption paralleled and created a tradition of…