American Empire: How The U.S. Wields Power Around the World

The American election season is, once again, approaching its zenith, but it won’t be long before another four years have passed and a new contest has rolled in. It is a relentless cycle, a shameless burlesque of democracy, in which Republican and Democrat alike periodically degrade themselves under the hot-white glow of a not-very-flattering spotlight, playing to their respective factions and to the much-mythologized swing voter who bears the fate of the nation in their shaky, unsure hands. 

I write this, not as an American, but as an Irishman, who has visited the United States only twice in his life — once as a giddy eight-year-old, soaking up the overly colorful, plastic weirdness of Walt Disney World Resort, and again as a giddy but desperate-to-be-cool 21-year-old, soaking up the overly hip, sexy weirdness of Brooklyn. America is not my country, but I will, all the same, dutifully watch this obscene election run to its conclusion, and I won’t be alone. People all across the world, fascinated and appalled, will keep an eye on this ever-developing real-world fever dream, because, whether they like it or not, what happens in the United States of America is likely to profoundly affect their lives, too.

That America is the most powerful country on Earth is largely taken as a given today. It is even fairly common to hear people declare that America is an empire, but what that actually means can be difficult to pin down.

How does America exert its power around the world, and what does that mean for the people it touches? This new series of articles, which we will call American Empire, seeks to answer these questions.

To read of the state of America’s global power in recent years has, very often, meant being subjected to the anxious laments of hand-wringing liberal commentators mourning the deterioration of their “remarkably benign empire.” The election of Trump, the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, most pertinently, the rise of China: all have been cited as evidence of the American empire beginning to fall apart.

Every empire, over a long enough period of time, collapses, and things are indeed beginning to look ominous for America. The world is changing, and the hegemonic order that the U.S. established in the wake of World War II is being challenged like never before. But a relative decline from a position of such staggering strength is easy to overstate. Focusing too much on American decline, as real of a phenomenon as it may be, can nonetheless obfuscate the overwhelming power the U.S. continues to wield. In an emerging multipolar world, America still reigns supreme.

The U.S. economy remains the largest on Earth and the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, a situation which brings immense benefits. The country is today an effective neocolonial power, meaning it controls, through a variety of indirect means, the economic and political policies of ostensibly “independent” states around the globe, from countries in Latin America to Africa and even Europe. American corporations are immensely powerful entities that bend nations to their will.

The American surveillance state continues to administer an incomprehensibly extensive global spying network. American culture is exported everywhere, with people in every corner of the globe drinking Coke, eating McDonald’s, watching Marvel movies, and listening to Taylor Swift. And, at the heart of it all, lies the U.S. military, which is unmatched in its might, budget, and the sheer number of bases it has implanted in foreign lands.

The U.S. unquestionably still wields awesome global power, but very few of the places under its influence are considered to be true colonies. America does hold literal colonies, of course — it’s just opted not to call them that. Too nasty a term to deploy, especially for a country that thinks of itself as a republic born of anti-imperialist struggle. The U.S. uses a softer, more euphemistic word to refer to its colonial possessions: territories.

The United States, after it had defeated the Spanish empire in the Spanish–American War of 1898, became an empire in the classic mold, taking over from its vanquished European enemy to run Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as unambiguous colonies. The Philippines later gained independence, though it is still exploited by American neocolonialism today, while Puerto Rico, Guam and several other faraway islands came to be conceptualized as overseas territories, neither full members of the United States nor entirely separate from it. The ambiguity may seem like a quirk, but the consequences for the people who live there are real and, at times, brutal.

The contemporary American empire, then, is vast, shady, and difficult to define. This series aims to offer some clarity about how it works, with each entry focusing on a specific country or region and exploring the ways in which American elites coerce and exploit it for their own benefit. As we add more and more essays, the intention is, ultimately, to paint a wider picture of what American global power looks like and what it means for the people who are subjected to it.

I would, as an Irish person, prefer to ignore this American election. I would prefer it if the media of my home country, or that of my adopted country of the U.K., wouldn’t fixate so fervently upon the strange goings-on across the Atlantic. But there is a reason we’re all watching: we are, whether we like it or not, subjects of the empire, too. What happens in the metropole affects us, as it does so many others around the world, some of whom feel American imperialism much more sharply than we do.

So, as Kamala seeks to prove her “brat” credentials, and as The Donald rambles wildly about his desire to become a dictator and repeatedly manages to avoid assassination, the world wearily watches the farce unfold, hoping to gain some vague sense of the direction America is headed in and what that might mean for the rest of us. Because, as life on this Earth becomes increasingly uncertain, one thing remains true: whether it’s Kamala or Trump in the White House, Democrat or Republican, the American global empire, for the time being, endures.