Response: Should America Embrace Empire? | 3/5/26

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Hey guys, I want to do something a little different today with the Warren I ran and Donald Trump's successful military actions in places like Venezuela, discussions on acquiring places like Greenland, there are now conservative commentators coming out and asking the question, should America be an empire?

Is it good to be an empire? Should we be defending the idea of America as an empire? And I find that very interesting because that's something I've discussed many times on this channel. These are conversations that we've had in depth from different angles. The fact that this is now something that people are not just acknowledging but actually advocating for is very interesting. We've been very hesitant to recognize America as an empire up to this point. People tend to think of empires as places that restrict freedom that control

other areas that force themselves on to other civilizations or peoples and seeing as the United States is founded on this idea of breaking away from another empire. We've kind of told ourselves that our military actions are about liberating people, bringing freedom to them. So it's kind of hard to balance this idea of empire but more and more conservative commentators. I think largely in efforts to kind of support where Trump is going are saying, okay, well maybe it's okay that we acknowledge that America is an empire now.

And here's why that's good. And I want to make it clear that I'm responding to people like John Doyle, who's a great guy, a colleague of mine. And I'm responding because I want to have this conversation. This is not me dunking on any of those people making these points. Certainly not John, he brought up many good points in his recent episode on this question. And so I just wanted to give my thoughts since this is something that I have engaged with regularly. We should be having these conversations.

And we should be able to have these conversations in good faith because I think that ultimately both John and I want what is best for the United States. I don't think any of his arguments in this area are in bad faith. And I hope none of mine will be either. But I want to address some of the things. And this is not just a response to his episode or his video. I'm not going to be going blow by blow or playing parts of his video here. I'm just going to give my collective understanding of kind of where I think this argument's going because it's not just him making it now.

So I think it's a really important thing that we address this. So first things first, John said in his video that America has always been an empire.

And that's absolutely true. That's correct. If you look at kind of the American timeline, it's very clear that we were always moving towards this. Maybe we were less of an empire at the beginning, but we were still to some degree most certainly an empire.

Basically, after the articles of Confederation, once we had the Constitution that has become our permanent ruling document, we forged at least 13 peoples together at the time.

And we were going to continue to expand westward, which means we're going to bring other peoples into our nation. We were going to become something more than just a nation state.

And that was always the case. So I think it's fair to say, I think it's accurate to say that America is an empire. America was an empire. America has always been at some level an empire.

So does that kind of just open and close that case? We're done. It's an empire. The end. Well, no, I don't think so. And here's the reason why there's nothing wrong inherently with empire.

Empire is a natural formation politically throughout history. In fact, it's probably the most dominant political form throughout history.

Whenever you see geopolitics rearranging itself, it's usually over empires. There wasn't always the case, you know, city states would often have to operate at very low scales back when we simply did not have the logistics, the technology, that kind of thing to marshal full empires.

But even then, those city states would often fuse together. Of course, we have the entire history of the Greeks to talk about this Rome and Sparta and their competing empires that they kind of forged together before then Greece forged together and fought against other empires.

This is just kind of a classic way that politics tends to organize itself. So there's nothing weird about this. This is the largest, probably historical trend, you know, that we have in political organization.

So there's nothing inherently wrong with the United States being an empire. But as John acknowledges and very wisely, there are upsides and downsides to this formation, right.

Empires have pretty obvious upsides. You get to wield things at a much grander scale, which means you get to dictate terms. You need to control large amounts of territory. You get to move large amounts of resources.

You can wield more manpower, military might, economic might, you can dictate things like currency exchange and all kinds of other important aspects of geopolitics when you're an empire.

The benefits are pretty obvious. You have more power, more money, more wealth, more influence, more likely to become a center of culture in some way and produce great works.

Many of the great works of culture are produced inside of empires. We can think of many, many from the Romans to the Greeks to the Egyptians, Persians, all kinds of the Chinese.

These are all critical moments at which you kind of saw this. So I think it's very obvious that these powerful cultural centers tend to move history, which is again something John said in this video and I think is very accurate.

So these are all very big upsides to empire, but it does also come with very big downsides, your far more likely to invite foreigners inside your borders, your far more likely to have them influence the direction.

Empires famously get chipped away from the inside, often by other cultures that move in other peoples that move in because you're bringing them in that's kind of what an empire does.

And this is what George Washington warned us about. Again, that's what the farewell dresses all about that if you have these long term alliances, you have this global empire.

Many nations are going to want to influence you there. This increases the likelihood. It increases the incentive structure, performers to come in and make their interests known.

Obviously, this is something that the United States and many other large nations are currently struggling with.

A serious problem of restraint. Empires tend to have this kind of self perpetuating mantra where they constantly need to expand. It's like a shark. You got to keep moving or you're going to die. In fact, James Burnham, a political theorist that, of course, I am a huge fan of wrote an entire book on this.

The death of the West or suicide of the West is largely about the idea that you have to continue to expand. If the West shrinks, it's going to die.

If it continues to expand, you know, it's alive. This is why some people will call James Burnham. And I think relatively accurately, one of the first neo conservatives.

He was an extrots guy who believe that the United States more or less had to continually expand or otherwise it was going to get consumed by the other expansive powers like the USSR at the time.

And we can kind of see in that battle between the United States and the USSR, the wider communist project. It was American empire's ability to continue to expand in a way that the Soviets could not that kind of brought about its victory in many ways.

However, again, it comes with that cost. You have to constantly be moving. You have to constantly expanding. You have to constantly be looking for more resources because of the vast amounts of power and machinery and people and everything else that you need to wield.

And so this means that there's never a break for the empire. There's never a moment of rest. There are not these moments to heal, to reflect, to shore up your identity, your culture, your traditions.

You're almost always malleable in this way. And there are, of course, the constant conflicts, the need for manpower, the fact that this tends to disenfranchise your core citizens.

They tend to get left behind as the empire, the wealth and the focus tends to shift to the provinces. This is a common feature of empires. And these are all serious downsides that you have to consider.

So the decision over empire is not an easy one. It's not like, oh, well, obviously you should just be an empire. Obviously you shouldn't. There are big up and downsides to both.

But most importantly, and I think this is something that we shouldn't miss, it's often not a decision. Like usually you don't have people sitting down at a table and saying, well, now will be an empire or now we'll stop being an empire. We'll just never enter into the imperial phase.

There is a basic truth about a state craft about the and just really the morphological life cycles of civilizations that ultimately it is the

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Will of most strong nation strong peoples that they exert their power over the world around them.

This is just a you can hate that you can love that it doesn't really matter that's just human nature.

This is why kind of men need to feel like they're conquering and controlling areas they're exerting influence even if it's just over a lawn.

Like you need to have something that you own a control is zone and area and you and if you're a vital civilization just if you're a vital man you kind of want to expand that constantly that's that's a very natural desire.

And so we don't always make the choice to say oh well this is an imperial action we will do that or won't do that we're usually just naturally trying to exert and understand ourselves in this way.

This is why it was kind of inherent that the American start pushing west almost immediately the story of America is the story of struggling with Western expansion from our very founding to to the you know obviously the closing of the frontier and connecting of the entire continent.

These are really stories and traits that are embedded into the United States in a very real way and so there's no surprise that manifests destiny manifests itself in global politics one should reaches the edge of our current shores.

However, there is a question of scale when it comes to empires and that's what I want people who are currently advocating for American empire to think about.

I'm with you that America is an empire it always was an empire and always will be an empire at some level and I'm with you that just giving up your empire entirely is pretty foolish it has a gone well for almost any nation that's tried it however we do have a model to think about I've done an episode on this before with a historian if you want to get deeper dive into this.

But we do have the tension between Trajan and Hadrian and these are two Roman emperors who presided over some interesting times in the life of their empire.

You had Trajan who expanded the empire to its widest extent captured the most land is the most land ever under an emperor.

This is when Rome was territorially at its height and then you have Hadrian and Hadrian is famous for kind of pulling the empire back.

He reformed the empire in a lot of ways he helped many people say he extended the life of the empire by having some humility about how far the empire could go his walls are famous Hadrian's wall you can still go to Britain and see where that line was drawn.

And basically these were you know the idea is like I want a more defensible empire I understand that theoretically we can just expand expand expand expand but the problem for pretty much every conquering nation is ultimately how to hold it.

It's one thing to simply move across the territory but truly controlling it, controlling mastering it is very different and there have been countless examples of a empire that have gone in and captured vast amounts of land.

And then almost immediately lost large shares of that land because they simply didn't have the people to populate it they overextended themselves they didn't have the supply lines everything else that's involved with the maintenance of that control.

So while Trajan is well celebrated for his conquest and expansion of the empire if Hadrian had not hidden the empire back in if he had not decided this is a healthy natural border for the empire.

Without that the Roman Empire might have fell much earlier now this is of course at some level speculation we can't do the counterfactual of Rome had just continued to expand forever maybe they would have been fine.

But I think Hadrian's wisdom is one that we should probably take on board with us it's not that we can't have empire it's not that we shouldn't have empire it's that perhaps there is a wisdom in controlling ourselves.

So for instance the actions of Trump in I think Venezuela and perhaps even the acquisition of Greenland would be far more justifiable than say extended ground wars in the Middle East.

And the reason is you know the Monroe doctrine is thrown around a lot but there's a real point to that there is a kind of natural dominion that exists for the United States as there are for other nations.

And this is recognized geopolitically by books like clash of civilizations which I think are really important for us to help like understand what we mean when we're talking about empires and civilizational blocks and all of this stuff because when we are trying to understand how far we should go what our place should be in all of this.

Maybe it helps us to understand how other civilizations have done this so in the clash of civilizations pieces you have the understanding that individual countries are indeed like too small to really have that global impact to rule the world whenever just going to have like all everyone neatly broken up into unaligned nation states doing their own thing like that's just simply not going to happen.

However, we also should understand that there's a difference between kind of a regional empire and a global empire global world order right we've talked very much about how we're against the globalist right but that doesn't mean that we just don't like the W E F globalist but we do want American globalism.

It means that we understand there's something inherently wrong and fairly difficult and inherently actually deleterious to us operating as a global empire it has cost that are even more magnified the larger that the empire gets the more difficult it is to manage.

For instance, Fukuyama has been more or less roundly mocked for the fact that he has this end of history thesis this idea that kind of the global American empire this fusion of capitalism and democracy and Western liberalism is just going to kind of dominate everything we're at the end of history we've gotten to kind of the final form of government we've perfected it there's no reason for anyone else to have any other type of government.

It's really just all about fiddling with the dials until we get that all figured out what kind of the problem we've run into the reason that Fukuyama kind of failed horribly and is now laughed at and he's had to even.

Changes own thesis he has to adjust the thesis now so that it fits more more reasonably is that ultimately that's not what happened that we didn't just achieve the kind of victory so union fell America just runs the world now and it's all fine that's not really what happened what happened is that different countries tried to find other ways to modernize without buying into the American system and that's for a very simple reason one.

They want sovereignty people don't all want to be ruled the same way they don't all want to be subject to the same set of laws the same norms the same traditions the same customs and same political systems there's not one universal best size to fit everybody and that's kind of what a global empire.

implies that you can do that with a regional empire to some extent and the reason is more what semi hunting points out in clash of civilizations these civilizational blocks as he calls them or we could call them regional empires really depends on how you want to dice it.

They're more cohesive because they tend to share a lot of traits they often share similar languages or religions or political traditions there are people who may not be exactly the same but they've interacted with each other significantly over the years and so you have a more cohesive understanding of you know how the world should operate in that area it doesn't mean everything's copacetic it doesn't mean everyone inside a civilizational block is the same in any way shape form.

But they make more sense together when people talk about European civilization or East Asian civilization or American civilization that's kind of what they're talking about it's this idea that the peoples might not be exactly the same but they're kind of close enough and those.

Empires are usually run by a regional headgemon a core state as Huntington calls it America the United States is obviously the core state of our power block and you might have a core state like Russia for their empire or China these kind of things India.

The civilizational blocks are kind of formed around these major powers and usually there are minor powers in their orbit that kind of get themselves dictated to because of their proximity and the fact that they're more or less aligned with kind of what's going on there already and so these are kind of natural empires we don't like to use the term anymore but that's basically what they are and it's strange because we don't have the same we're so skittish about political reality at this point that we.

Don't put these things under kind of like their formal auspices we give them these weird names it's not an empire just you know a civilizational block tied together by you know these different international organizations that keep everyone online and basically form a super government that kind of forces everyone to cooperate that again it's a lot of hiding the ball for what the obvious thing is now I think this is good actually that we're not having the conversation and just saying yeah these are just empires actually I'm very glad that we've gotten to the point where we can just be on.

It's honest about what America is because that is very important for us to then decide what we want to be and how we're going to do things when we're pretending that we're just kind of this nation state.

Then it makes it very difficult to address the problems of empire that keep popping up but we keep having no more because we're not an empire we're not an empire we're not an empire and then we can just have more adult conversations like the one we're now having over what kind of empire should we be how should we be conducting ourselves.

And I would just submit that it's probably wise to yes maintain our empire I would agree maybe even embrace our imperial nature but understand what kind of empire we want to be how we want to act do we do we want to maintain ourselves as a healthy regional.

Empire that has peoples that are more or less make sense inside that are functionally part of our civilization in somewhere or another or do we want to make sure that we are trying to control the political system of Iran or Afghanistan or Iraq.

Do we feel like we understand those countries in the way we understand maybe our near peers.

Do we really think that we are going to expend all the necessity of the logistics the people the money the spirit everything required to control and kind of force those nations to be what we want them to be.

Because if not then we should probably have a better idea of how to conduct our foreign policy closer to home again this doesn't mean shutting down the empire but it means carrying more about maybe central America and Canada than it does the Middle East and we can kind of easily do that if we just start untangling ourselves especially from alliances like Israel that kind of drive us into conflict in that area on a regular basis if we didn't have to care about whether or not Iran was hitting Israel.

We could just focus on oil reserves in some place closer to our own home we could focus on geo politics and the stability of things of you know countries like Mexico where we actually should be exerting far more influence I would be way more in favor of like military strikes on Mexican cartels and boots on the ground there than I would in Iran because at least I can directly understand how that benefits the United States.

I can understand that yeah even if it's an imperial move technically we're going into another country I can understand that countries on our border it's got so much more importance to me personally and I think largely to people in the United States than any given place in the Middle East and yet we keep going there and the answer is because we've got this global empire instead of understanding ourselves as a regional or civilizational empire civilizational block.

The other problem we have is that classically the imperial mode is to operate in the benefit of the United States now to some extent it does like there's a reason that people listen to us when we say jump right like there's a reason that we can dictate the global reserve currency and trade policies and everything else and that has a massive upside for us like it really does.

However we do not have the we do not have the legal and moral framework to operate as a empire when it comes to citizenship this is our greatest weakness because of kind of our story of you know everyone gets a vote and everyone is equal and these are like God given rights to everybody in the world we have a hard time just going into a place and ruling it for our advantage.

And that's a genuine problem when it comes to empire because if you are not willing to kind of impose that will then it will be imposed back on you and you're just kind of giving people the roads and the money and everything else they need kind of come in and control what you're doing and that's more or less what we're seeing because America has not had the will to rule its empire as an imperial leader instead we end up in the scenario where now where we're really operating the empire.

There mainly for the advantage of others and the argument for John and many others is to say well then we just start running it for us and we start doing that and fair enough I mean I'm glad that at least when Trump says we go to Venezuela he says yeah we're going for us because we want the oil there okay that's refreshing it's not about freedom or democracy it's about what we need for to benefit Americans but when we go to Iran you'll notice that the story is freedom for Iran's democracy for the Iran's.

This is liberator all of a sudden we fall into that neocon pattern and it's because that's what happens when you shift from a beneficial regional empire a civilizational block to this global headgemon to this global imperial mindset and we and like I said we just don't know how to do this we don't know how to go into a place and say your ours and you don't have any of the rights that Americans have and we're going to be extracting benefits from you the end like we we don't have the structure for that and that's why mass immigration has worked the way it has.

Because we just don't know how to tell these people know like once we've kind of come in and taken over their countries we kind of just see them as we're like we owe that to them like they're now under the auspices of America and therefore they kind of get everything that Americans get and I just think this is a mistake again I will fully acknowledge America's empire and it should at some level remain an empire I think we just need to consider if we might be in a Hadrian phase.

If perhaps this is a good time to scale our ambitions in a way that will allow our people to flourish and our people to benefit from the empire I don't want the United States to be operated for the benefit of its empire I want the empire to be beneficial to the United States I think that only happens when we have a realistic understanding of our expansion and reach but like I said this is not a slam on anybody this is not me like challenging anyone to a duel this is an open conversation.

That I want to keep having I think it's critical time to have it I'm very glad that if nothing else the experiences we're having now are opening people up to this discussion and I hope that I'm going to hear back from people I want to hear their thoughts thank you so much for watching guys and as always I'll talk to you next time.