The New Apologists for American Empire

 

 Defying longstanding norms, the Trump administration is openly bragging about empire.

by Edward Hunt | Aug 12, 2026 | 1 Comment

The Trump administration marked the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of U.S. independence with a series of statements in support of American empire.

Despite the fact that Trump campaigned against endless war and the White House issued a National Security Strategy that rejected “global domination,” the Trump administration celebrated the nation’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary by glorifying empire as one of the country’s highest achievements. Administration officials praised moments in U.S. history when U.S. leaders embraced empire, such as when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams spoke in favor of an “empire of liberty” and Theodore Roosevelt acted to take Panama.

At a time when many people in the country were reflecting on the ideals of liberty and equality that Jefferson had emphasized in the Declaration of Independence, the Trump administration glorified the country’s imperial history, creating a rationale for Empire First.

“We just tamed the wilderness and conquered the frontier and built the empire,” Trump said in an address from the National Mall on the Fourth of July. “It’s called the empire of liberty.”

Imperial Apologia

In recent decades, several thought leaders have been making the case for American empire. Bucking the norm of empire denial, which holds that the United States is not an empire, they have characterized the United States as an empire and called on the United States to play an imperial role in the world.

Advocates of empire gained ground during the years before and after 9/11, when they produced an outpouring of work that brought discussion of empire into the mainstream of U.S. political discourse. Max Boot built momentum in articles such as “The Case for American Empire” and “American imperialism? No need to run away from label.” In a major feat of imperial apologia, Niall Ferguson constructed a lengthy defense of American empire in his book Colossus.

“Let me offer you the following straightforward conclusion,” Ferguson said in 2003. “The United States is an empire. It has long been an empire. It should be an empire.”

Strategists and diplomats also spoke in favor of empire, although they did so largely in unofficial roles. Before joining the Bush administration as its first director of policy planning, Richard Haass advocated for Imperial America. Prior to becoming ambassador to NATO in the Obama administration, Ivo Daalder insisted that the United States is an empire.

Perhaps the closest a high-level official came to calling the United States an empire occurred in 2004, when a senior adviser to Bush told The New York Times that “we’re an empire now.” Various observers have speculated that the adviser was Karl Rove, one of the president’s closest aides, but Rove was careful not to openly advocate for empire.

In public, the Bush administration accepted the norm of empire denial. Again and again, Bush denied that the United States is an empire.

“We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire,” Bush said in his State of the Union address in 2004. “Our aim is a democratic peace, a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”

The Latest Imperial Turn

Although the country’s imperial apologists grew quiet as the Bush administration’s military operations turned into unpopular forever wars, the Trump administration is now bringing imperial rhetoric back into the mainstream of U.S. political discourse. Having spent much of its initial time in office calling for the annexation of other lands and countries, it is now openly talking about empire, something previous administrations avoided.

A major turning point came during the country’s celebrations of its two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Rather than simply delivering platitudes in praise of freedom and democracy, as many U.S. leaders did, the Trump administration added an extra dimension by openly glorifying empire.

During his visit to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in early July, Trump repeatedly commended the country’s imperial history. He praised Roosevelt for his role in seizing colonies from Spain during the War of 1898.

“We got them all,” Trump said, citing Guam and Puerto Rico, both of which remain U.S. colonies today. He also cited Cuba, a country which he wants to take for the United States. “After many, many decades, it’s coming our way,” he said.

In addition, Trump hailed Roosevelt for taking action to seize Panama, which had been part of Colombia. The acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, Trump indicated, may have been the former president’s greatest achievement.

Roosevelt made the United States into “one of the greatest empires,” Trump said, making the point in both a speech and statement posted on the White House’s website.

After returning to Washington, Trump then gave a major speech in which he openly celebrated American empire. Speaking from the National Mall on the Fourth of July, Trump praised the conquest of the continent and declared that the United States is “the empire of liberty.”

Although many commentators dismissed the president’s remarks, with Rolling Stone calling them “bizarre,” he was not alone in bragging about empire. War Department official Elbridge Colby also delivered remarks in which he boasted that the United States is an empire.

“We are already, as our Founders put it, an empire of liberty unto ourselves,” Colby told a conference of defense ministers on July 8th. “I say this with pride, of course, not arrogance.”

With his remarks, Colby made an effort to reframe some of the president’s commentary. Providing context for the concept of an empire of liberty, Colby connected it to the country’s origins, when founders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had used the phrase.

In addition, Colby attempted to disassociate American empire from imperialism. Whereas Trump had glorified American conquest and expansion, Colby insisted that “we do not need imperial possessions or dependencies.”

The American empire has nearly always featured imperial possession and territories, however, from its earliest history to the present day. By invoking the concept of an empire of liberty, both Trump and Colby appealed to an imperial idea that featured conquest and expansion at its very core.

When the country’s founders envisioned the United States as an empire of liberty, they were thinking of white U.S. settlers moving into new territories, displacing indigenous people, taking over their lands, and creating new states for entry into the United States. The founders may have claimed that expansion would provide liberty for white U.S. settlers, but they also knew that it would mean dispossession and extirpation for indigenous people.

“If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,” Jefferson wrote. “In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”

A Basis for Empire First

Apologia for American empire may not have been a main theme of most people’s celebrations on the Fourth of July, but the Trump administration presented its own vision. Rather than sticking to the liberal ideals of the Declaration of Independence, including its powerful symbolism of opposition to empire, the Trump administration lauded the United States for being an imperial power.

The Trump administration’s actions marked a significant shift in modern U.S. politics. Whereas previous administrations let pundits and strategists do the dirty work of advocating for empire, the Trump administration is presenting its own arguments.

The administration’s empire talk is also promoting imperial values. With the president flouting international law and threatening countries with war crimes, the administration is cultivating an imperial culture. U.S. military forces are taking pride in conducting extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

“The United States military is killing people and bragging about it,” Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) observed last month.

Congressional leaders have refrained from condemning American empire, but they may not be able to ignore the issue much longer now that the Trump administration is glorifying empire as an ideal to be praised and celebrated rather than avoided and condemned.

Indeed, the Trump administration is providing its own apologia for American empire, creating a basis for Empire First, with the president playing the leading role.

Reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.  Edward Hunt is a senior fellow at Foreign Policy in Focus.

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Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary. Reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy In Fo

https://original.antiwar.com/edward_hunt/2026/08/11/the-new-apologists-for-american-empire/

A dying West is eating its children. Yet we still can't imagine life without capitalism

Our unwillingness to think about how to change our reality may simply be the noise of capitalism speaking through us. It's time to find value in something more than a new iPhone or pair of jeans

Jonathan Cook

Aug 11, 2026

We are on the brink of a series of catastrophes of our own making that humankind will be exceptionally lucky to survive. There is a path ahead, but being able to see it and where it leads will require – at least from most westerners – a difficult feat of imagination. It will need us to cast aside many of the things we have been taught to most closely identify with. It will demand of us a realisation that our most cherished values are actually harmful.

That is a tall order, indeed.

I am reminded of a question posed in 2014 to critics of the status quo by Sunny Hundal, once the poster-boy of centrist liberalism. Hundal asked readers of his then-influential Liberal Conspiracy blog:

If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?

Notably, Hundal soon mothballed his blog and became a spokesperson for the corporate energy sector.

Nonetheless, it is revealing in itself quite how quaint liberal arguments from only 12 years ago sound now. It’s like taking a peek back into the Victorian mindset.

Today, Twitter is called X and run not by some nice bloke named “Jack” but by a sometime trillionaire named Elon Musk. That is the man who expects one day to use his personal rocket programme to colonise space. In the meantime, he believes Muslims and their “liberal” allies need to be driven from the West to avoid a civil war he seems intent on inciting.

Similarly, liberals are no longer as excited by mobile phones as they were back in 2014, when the iPhone was widely viewed as the ultimate proof of humanity’s progress through technological innovation. Now liberals want young people protected from their screens – possibly because those screens often show all too graphically how our leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, have been actively assisting a genocide and are hellbent on destroying the planet.

Jeans … well, liberals presumably still find it impossible to imagine a good life without a pair of 501s.

The western liberal, of course, cannot grapple with the idea that jeans or iPhones could be made independently of capitalism, let alone the suggestion that owning six pairs of jeans and disposing of your iPhone every other year may not be the best use of the planet’s limited resources.

Crumbs from the table

The truth is that democracy – of the liberal variety – is not an inherent feature of political life in what we like to call “the West”. There is nothing inevitable, or irreversible, about liberal democracy.

Indeed, the West has only been superficially democratic – in the sense that everyone gets a vote – for the last century or so. Even then, democracy has been highly restricted and controlled: the public usually gets a choice between two capitalist parties, one more extreme than the other, following a lifetime of exposure to opinions crafted for them by the ultimate beneficiaries of capitalism – the billionaires who own the mass media.

And, of course, “democracy” on these terms has operated only at home. The West’s colonial “adventures” – subduing and asset-stripping the Global South – never really ceased.

For a few decades of the so-called “post-colonial” era, we installed compliant local dictators to do our dirty work. For the past quarter century, our default behaviours have returned: we openly threaten, invade and plunder states that do not submit quickly to our diktats.

In a world of rapidly decreasing resources, our rulers have decided that they need to tear up the very rules of war they themselves formulated after the Second World War. The law of the jungle is back.

In fact, western “democracy” is not an artefact of our culture. It is an artefact of time and circumstance. With kings and princes giving way to a new breed of merchant and entrepreneur, the early capitalists showed they were even more proficient at theft.

An enlarged middle class, feeding off crumbs from the table, were trained to espouse liberal values justifying large disparities of wealth as the corollary of a supposed meritocracy.

Inherent contradictions in the theory and practice of liberalism culminated in a brief experiment last century: the working class and women were given a symbolic vote – to elect one of the ruling class’ loyal representatives – in return for becoming devotees of free-market consumption.

But in an era of decline, those contradictions have become harder and harder to contain. As surpluses disappear, so have the liberal values to which our “democratic elites” once paid lip service.

Craving power

The ruling class understand the tide is turning. The world’s resources are finite and running out. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption can only hasten the end. Consumption pollutes the planet. It fuels climate chaos. It decimates other species that sustain a living planet.

But, like a crack addict, the billionaire class cannot renounce the very thing that gives them what they crave: wealth and power. Their excuse is that, were they ever to stop, others – led by China – would take their place. Their one consolation is that, cocooned by their wealth, they expect to survive a little longer than the rest of us.

Our consolation, on the other hand, is to imagine that we can win because we are the many.

History suggests it may not be that simple. Saddam Hussein, for example, enforced a brutal system of rule over Iraqis – propped up by the West – for many decades, until we changed our minds and toppled him. So did Muammar Gaddafi. So did innumerable despots.

Understanding you are being oppressed is not the same as liberation. That requires much more: leadership, organisation, collective will, a sense of a better alternative.

The billionaire class, therefore, make it as difficult as they can for leaders to emerge, for the public to imagine an alternative and to organise. Any Jeremy Corbyns will be vilified. Any student campus protests, Extinction Rebellions or Palestine Actions will be criminalised.

The role of the media, from the Guardian and BBC to the Mail and Telegraph, from the New York Times to Fox News, is to so clog up our minds with propaganda extolling jeans and iPhones that we choose to continue worshipping at the altar of capitalism, even as the walls of the temple visibly crack and crumble.

Victims of abuse

Nearly 20 years ago, eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen memorably explained how this sense of identification with our oppressors works. He compared us to victims of serial domestic abuse.

If your experience is that food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it.

If on the other hand, your experience is that the water comes from a stream … and that your food comes from a land base, you will defend to the death that stream and that land base because your life depends on it.

We’ve got messed up and mixed up in this system, where our lives actually depend on the system that is exploiting us.

And, we should add, a system that is evidently now killing us.

The danger for the billionaires, now that North America and Europe are burning both figuratively and literally, is that we – the many – are starting to wake up. We see the images of genocide and of forest fires on the very iPhones the billionaires made us so addicted to.

Might we soon start to understand that our survival depends on identifying more with streams, trees and soil than with factories, superstores and Elon Musk?

Like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the billionaires have the means of coercion. They still have the media pumping out “entertainment” to make us identify with factories and superstores (even if Musk himself is now a harder sell).

And if that fails, they have the police and the army.

Technology – from weaponry to surveillance and AI – is being purposed further to the ruling class’ advantage. Those killer robot dogs of dystopian movies are already here. Hollywood isn’t just making up fanciful, entertaining stories; it is imagining imminent futures.

Time of monsters

If the ideology of greedy individualism is exposed as utterly hollow (and suicidal), where might disillusioned iPhone and Twitter/X fans choose to head next?

In the opposite direction.

If individualism is shown to bring only ruin, we are likely to prefer collective ideologies. If greed brings only death, we are likely to prefer cooperation and solidarity. Hope of salvation resides not in iPhones and jeans but in the resurrection of the commons – of public good, of shared wealth.

The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci famously wrote in 1930 of the moment we are currently in: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek popularised these “morbid symptoms” as a “time of monsters”. But our monsters aren’t a Cyclops, a Hannibal Lecter or even an Adolf Hitler. Our morbid symptoms are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the exemplars of a dying western capitalism, the men who can tap directly into our minds and those of our children.

The greatest danger is that, with climate chaos accelerating, Gramsci’s new world will not be born at all. It will be stillborn. It may turn out that the proof needed to incentivise change comes too late to affect the outcome.

But if some of us do make it through the next decades, if survival is possible, one thing is certain: the society that emerges will look nothing like the one that worshipped jeans and iPhones.

It will draw on other, older trends in our history. It will prioritise community over the individual, cooperation over competition, mutuality over ownership – the very principles capitalism seeks to eradicate.

Nation-states, the incubators of capitalism, will have to be dissolved. Organised religions, competing over whose God is supreme, will need to be replaced by more ancient, spiritual ideas rooted in living with nature, not seeking to conquer or subdue it.

If all that sounds implausible or impossible, remember this. Your disbelief may only be the noise of capitalism speaking through you. It may be that the problem is yours, for being unable to imagine more than a new iPhone or pair of jeans.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/a-dying-west-is-eating-its-children?utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv4_a1demonixepo9i&fbclid=IwY2xjawTn2HBwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7LhktCM3uo0BO3vmlkIvUn4Os2o3ngRaj0txE_SvgJLh3MdKnKBmD3a7WN-g_aem_w7fzd09SnBPOgZ6JZPKu7g