America and the Myth of Empire
Every few months, some event is declared proof that the “American empire” is finished. A chaotic exit from Kabul. A failed adventure in Iraq. The rise of China. BRICS summits with tired leaders promising a “post-American world.” January 6. On cue, one camp cheers the supposed decline. Another mourns it, warning of a world unmoored without a hegemon.
Both sides, I think, are arguing over the wrong corpse.
I believe that the American experiment was meant to be antithetical to the very notion of empire. What made it novel, and at its best worth celebrating, was that it was conceived as a deliberate break with the old world order that was built and rebuilt upon itself for thousands of years based on the same primitive idea: the Empire. America’s was a rebellion not only against a particular king, but against the very organizing principle of human civilization.
To the extent that America has behaved as an empire since, it has done so in direct contradiction to its founding story, not as its fulfillment. The danger is not that an empire is falling. The danger is that a nation founded on the rejection of empire has spent a century acting like one, all the while forgetting which part of the story was the point. The sooner that empire falls, the sooner America and the world can step over the threshold of its imperial past and move toward a future whose promise was already inscribed in those simple, self-evident truths.
The radical promise
Empires, Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, British, pursued expansion as an organizing principle. Territory, tribute, and the right to reorder other people’s lives were not byproducts; they were the point. They imposed their systems on those they conquered and justified it with divine right, civilizing missions, or brute force.
By “empire” here I do not mean only legions, colonies, and governors ruling distant provinces. In its modern form, power travels through bases, banks, and bandwidth: a global web of military installations, dollar dependence, IMF and World Bank conditionality, sanctions, and the quiet leverage that comes from writing the rules of trade, finance, and even the internet. In that wider frame, this is what empire looks like now, projected through systems rather than viceroys, so the charge of “American empire” is not a category error but a description of how power has actually worked, flags or no flags, for those on the receiving end.
The American experiment did not begin as an attempt to build yet another empire. It began as a revolt against one, and against the logic that sustained it. The founding documents spoke of “self-evident” truths: life, liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness. Whatever their limitations, those words were not drafted as a charter for global domination or divine supremacy. They were a provocation to a world organized for centuries around kings, dynasties, and imperial subjects, a sketch of a different kind of order.
The Founders were not emperors in waiting. They were, for the most part, provincial elites crafting a construct that would outlast them. They were well aware of the fact that power corrupted. They had seen what imperial overreach did to Britain. What they produced, Declaration, Constitution, Bill of Rights, was not a frozen monolithic monument but an evolving framework. Change was built into it. Amendments were not errors; they were the method, a self-correcting drive toward a “more perfect union.”
In that sense, America’s founding was a political technology: a set of rules, intended or not, designed to restrain the imperial impulse that had defined so much of human history. A paradigm shift in the history of human civilization.
The original sins baked into the promise
History is different. The truth is harsher. The same men who wrote about equality and unalienable rights owned other human beings. The same Republic that rejected empire on paper expanded relentlessly across a continent by dispossessing Native nations. Freedom for some was built on the backs of others, especially slaves. From the beginning, there was a gap between the “new world” ideas and the old world people entrusted with them.
Most settlers in North America were not philosophers of the Enlightenment. They were farmers, traders, opportunists, refugees from poverty or persecution, and, eventually, slaveholders on stolen land. “Taxation without representation” was easier to grasp than the universality of “all men are created equal.” And when most people heard “men,” they meant men like themselves: white, Christian, male.
It would take nearly a century and a Civil War to abolish slavery in law. Nearly 150 years for women to gain the right to vote. The wall between church and state that Jefferson imagined still cracks under pressure from those who see America as a Christian project rather than a civic one built to keep religion out of government.
So the story is not that pure ideals were betrayed by later generations. The story is that a radical anti-imperial blueprint was drafted inside a deeply imperial reality. The Founders were old-world men with new-world ideas. They knew, at least in theory, that all humans were equal even as they lived off a system that denied it. The experiment was always going to be haunted by that contradiction. The sum total of the idea was greater than its parts.
Defensive republic, expanding state
In foreign policy, the young United States mostly behaved like what it claimed to be: a vulnerable republic in a world of empires, trying not to be carved up or swallowed. The early conflicts, the Barbary Wars and other skirmishes to secure trade routes, were about protecting shipping lanes and independence, not planting overseas colonies. Even the Monroe Doctrine, often cited as the beginning of American imperial swagger, was framed as a warning to Europe: stay out of the Western Hemisphere. Its language was defensive, even if the logic beneath it, declaring an entire hemisphere a sphere of influence, is recognizably imperial.
At the same time, the country expanded across the continent with ruthless speed. The Mexican-American War delivered vast new territory. Native nations were pushed, starved, marched, and massacred out of the way. This was not empire in the classic sense of ruling distant provinces from a faraway capital. It was something more intimate and easier to romanticize: settler colonialism wrapped in the language of manifest destiny.
The Republic told itself it was still different. The old world had empires; the new world had a frontier.
The hinge: from reluctant power to system architect
The real hinge comes between 1898 and 1945.
With the Spanish–American War, the United States took its first clear steps into classic imperial territory: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam. It debated openly whether Filipinos were “ready” for self-rule, language straight out of the imperial playbook. The anti-imperial tradition fought back, Mark Twain, among others, saw the danger clearly, but the line had been crossed.
Then came the twentieth century’s twin catastrophes. In both World Wars, the United States hesitated, then entered late. In both, Europe tore itself apart. In both, American territory remained largely untouched while others’ cities burned. By 1945, half the planet lay in ruins with entire generations buried beneath them. American factories were running at full tilt. Its currency, its banks, its industrial base, and its military were unmatched.
The United States did not seize colonies in the old style. It did something more subtle and more durable, and, in a way, lazier. It underwrote the post-war financial order: the dollar as reserve currency, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. It built a global network of military bases. It negotiated security guarantees and trade deals on its own terms. It wrote rules for a system it effectively controlled. Ultimately, it still reached for imperial power even though it was already far beyond the empires it was imitating, equipped with ideas and principles that, if upheld, could have sustained a very different kind of order.
You can argue about whether this was benevolent, self-interested, or both. But it is hard to deny that by mid-century, America occupied the structural position that old empires once held: at the center of a web of dependency and power, contrary to the very foundation of its own existence.
This is why, for much of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, “American empire” is not a metaphor. It is lived experience: coups encouraged, dictators supported, rebels armed, markets opened at gunpoint or through debt. Even where no American flag ever flew over a governor’s mansion, the consequences felt imperial. In hindsight, it is not difficult to argue that Americans went out of their way to miss every opportunity available to them to make good on the promise made by their Founding Fathers.
Empire abroad, revolt at home
From the Cold War onward, the contradiction hardened.
Abroad, the United States behaved increasingly like an empire in practice. It overthrew or helped destabilize governments in places like Iran and Guatemala, backed coups and dirty wars in Latin America, turned Vietnam into a proving ground, and learned to wage proxy conflicts and covert operations in the name of containing the Soviet Union. The goal was not territorial expansion but strategic control: of sea lanes, resources, political outcomes, and ideological alignments, always under the guise of fighting an “evil empire” somewhere else.
At home, another America kept trying to remind the country of its own stated ideals. The civil-rights movement confronted the still unfinished business of slavery and segregation. Anti-war movements challenged the logic of projecting power into other people’s lives. Feminists, queer activists, and later movements for racial justice widened the circle of who “the people” were meant to be. Always taking it to extremes however. That is the American way.
The country oscillates through a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde struggle. One face speaks the language of liberty, equality, and the rule of law. The other uses those same words as cover for the pursuit of advantage and control. Both are real. Both seem American.
This is why the usual arguments about “hypocrisy” miss the point. Hypocrisy implies that the ideals are fake. I think the tragedy is sharper: the ideals are real and powerful, and the country has repeatedly chosen to act against them, as if America itself is struggling to climb to the summit of the mountain of modern civilization it has created.
The post-Cold War illusion
The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to confirm America’s story about itself. The “free world” had won. The last rival empire had fallen. The moment was ripe to do the most radical thing of all: use unrivaled power to shrink the role of power itself; to remember George Washington, who refused a crown and warned against imperial entanglements, and Abraham Lincoln, who spent unimaginable blood to preserve a republic rather than turn it into a conquering state. To reassert the anti-imperial logic buried in its founding. To let the blood of the American experiment flow through the veins of the entire world.
That is not what happened. Instead, the United States mistook an unearned advantage for a permanent right and wrapped it in a self-righteousness that made the slope even more slippery. NATO resisted changing times and expanded without adapting to post-Cold War realities. Markets were liberalized on Washington’s terms, not on those of the societies that would bear the costs. Meanwhile, China dangled an irresistible prospect before a new class of frenzied global industrialists: vast pools of cheap, disciplined labor, lax environmental rules, and authoritarian “stability” in exchange for capital, technology, and access to Western markets. Offshoring, just-in-time supply chains, and the worship of quarterly earnings did the rest, hollowing out the Western industrial model that purported to sustain both its middle classes and its claim to moral leadership. The financial crisis of 2008 revealed how much of the “order” rested on a pyramid of speculation and short-sighted regulation.
In truth, many of the seeds were planted even earlier. In the second half of the last century and into this one, America had the power and the opportunity to confront structural crises; instead, it chose to decouple and compartmentalize them for short-term, one-dimensional gain. Out of those failures, most of them American, if only because of the enormous advantage it held, grew problems whose “solutions” gave Mr. Hyde more room to maneuver. From that posture grew the Mujahedin, then Al-Qaeda and the Taliban; a China that now sits at the core of what Anne Applebaum aptly calls Authoritarianism, Inc.; and a Russia intent on reviving a long-forgotten empire.
After September 11, 2001, the imperial reflex became explicit. Two decades of war followed: Afghanistan, Iraq, drone campaigns, black sites, torture memos, a “war on terror” with no clear end. The language of freedom was deployed to justify actions that shredded it, nowhere more stark than in the images of America’s “exodus” from Afghanistan in 2021.
These choices have had consequences, pushing America further down the slope toward becoming the very idea of an empire it once opposed. The free society at the center of the original experiment has become a primary battlefield. Authoritarianism Inc. has opened branch offices inside the institutions of freedom, not through costly clandestine operations and spy networks, but as overt participants in the “free market of ideas” on social media and even what remains of the free press, in partisan outlets and across influence networks, distorting and degrading the very notion of fact. China, Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and others are not the only cause of this decay, but they are skilled players in a wider game of rot that threatens the foundations of democracy, with America at its crosshairs. Since the Second World War, the United States has fielded the most powerful military on earth yet has rarely translated that might into victories; it has dominated the global economy yet allowed a rival built on its antithesis, China’s authoritarian capitalism, to beat it at its own game.
In a world the Founders could not have imagined but unmistakably helped to inspire, military and economic supremacy are no longer sufficient. The real sources of prosperity are the democratic principles they installed at the core of the American experiment: equality, freedom, opportunity, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, checks and balances. Those are precisely the targets of America’s enemies, because the corporate syndicate of authoritarians, the last heirs of empire, has no real answer to them. The tragedy is that America itself is now helping to corrode the very ideas that once made it dangerous to every empire on earth, the very ideas that once made the experiment great, so much so that others wanted to join or emulate it.
Could it be that America is smaller than the ideas that created it?
The present mood: cheering, mourning, missing the point
Which brings us back to today’s habit of speaking about “the decline of American empire” as if it were simply another empire falling in line.
Those who celebrate that decline often do so out of understandable resentment. For people whose countries have been on the receiving end of American power, the idea that Washington’s reach might shrink is not an abstract debate. It is a wish for relief, one that China and its club members welcome with glee.
Those who mourn the decline tend to see only the mirage of American stabilizing power: the security guarantees, the shipping lanes kept open, the deterrent against worse predators. They worry that without a dominant American role, the world will slide into chaos or be carved up by more brutal powers.
Both camps are arguing within the imperial frame and missing a major point. Both have tragically misunderstood the American experiment. They take for granted that America is, was, and must be an empire. The only question, in that view, is whether it is a good one, a bad one, strong, weak, rising, or falling.
The more uncomfortable question is whether a nation founded on the explicit rejection of empire can survive while behaving like one, and what it would mean to stop which is perhaps the only means of survival left to them by their Founding Fathers.
The work America keeps postponing
Inside the United States, the same unresolved conflicts that produced the Civil War keep resurfacing in new forms: racial hierarchy, regional resentment, economic inequality, fights over who is “truly” American and whose history counts. The legacy of slavery and Native dispossession is not an old chapter. It has become the operating system. Religious fervor is the bug that keeps resurfacing in the code despite Thomas Jefferson’s best efforts.
Every attempt to extend the founding promise, to Black Americans, Indigenous nations, women, immigrants, queer people, has been met with a counter-movement insisting that the promise was never meant for them. That is the domestic face of the imperial impulse: the instinct to divide the world into those who rule and those who must accept being ruled. In reaction, parts of the culture now drift into their own distortions: a performative “woke” politics and a punitive cancel culture that confuse moral accounting with public shaming, turning the promise of inclusion, women’s rights, and individual freedoms into a caricature of itself.
Abroad, the habits of hegemony are proving hard to break. Military budgets grow. Sanctions, financial pressure, and war, often under a pretense of peace, are preferred over actually upholding human rights and democratic values. The language shifts; the basic posture does not.
Yet the anti-imperial thread has not vanished. This is where the self-correcting nature of the American experiment still demonstrates its longevity and its genius. It appears in movements that insist on seeing others not as “allies” or “adversaries” but as societies with their own histories and rights, capable of partnering in a larger project of human survival and prosperity sketched, however imperfectly, by the Founders of the American Experiment. It appears in domestic fights to make the “self-evident truths” real for those who were never meant to be part of the “we” in “We the People.” If that thread prevails, any notion of empire will finally be confined to museums and history books, not to the history still being written in America’s name.
What is really at stake
An empire was never what America was supposed to be, if we are to believe its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. To the extent that one existed, it has been a distortion, if not an outright abandonment, of the country’s own founding logic. More tragically, it has partly been the incompetence of its inheritors to uphold, nurture, and use that logic to their advantage. The novelty of being so far ahead of its time continues to add to the struggle. Cheering its decline or commiserating over it is playing into the hands of modern-day authoritarians; the rotting remnants of empire. Cheering its decline or mourning its loss also misses the deeper issue: whether the United States can finally live up to the radical claim it made at birth, that power is legitimate only when it rests on its founding principles. So far, democracy is the best tool humanity has found to survive its barbaric past, and America is the oldest state still running that experiment.
The real task is not to manage America’s empire more wisely. It is to dismantle the imperial reflex, in foreign policy and at home, without retreating into isolation or surrendering the possibility of collective security. In doing so, we let the true gem of the American experiment emerge from the palimpsest of history.
That will not happen through slogans or nostalgia, or the Jerry Springer–style reality show that is unfolding today. It will require the United States to look steadily at the gap between its story and its behavior; to acknowledge that enslaved people, dispossessed nations, and bombed foreigners were not collateral to the experiment but central to it. And then, from that unsentimental, honest accounting, to decide what it actually wants to be, could be, or should be. Perhaps a timely decision to make on this 250th anniversary of its founding. This time, it will have to be the people, not a select circle of elites, who drive the march forward: millions of ordinary Americans holding their ballot, choosing to reclaim the principles a handful of extraordinary men only sketched in outline; and, if they do, this time, much of the world will be ready to walk with them in finally abandoning empire as the default condition of human history.
The genuine celebration, if it comes, will not be about the fall of a hegemon. It will be about a society that finally chooses to unshackle itself from the idea of empire altogether, one that uses its influence not to dominate others or excuse itself, but to insist, consistently, that the rules apply to everyone, including itself. For better or worse, deserved or not, no other nation is better equipped to exercise this kind of power and lead the way.
If America can recover that original, dangerous idea and apply it without exception, it may yet justify and rekindle the hope it once inspired, to unearth and polish the precious inheritance left to it, and to the world, by enlightened people who rose from dark times. Not as an empire in decline or revival, but as a restless republic that finally chose which of its two faces it wanted to keep.
That, for me, is the very essence of the American experiment.