The American Empire at its greatest extent (1898-1902) in terms of directly controlled territory by Red4tribe for Wikipedia “American Imperialism” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(3) AMERICAN EMPIRE

“Pick a spot…Any spot. I guarantee you we will have American troops there within thirty years. The Empire that you dreamed of while reading Tacitus” – The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Pax Americana – you’re living in it.

Perhaps the most paradoxical empire – or least the subject of the most vexed debate as to what extent it is an empire at all or whether it is imperialism without an empire, arising from the pervasive sense of its own exceptionalism.

A large part of that is that the United States has traditionally styled itself as anti-imperialist, or in the phrase of Thomas Jefferson, “an empire of liberty”, from its very founding in revolution against the British Empire through its traditional foreign policy encapsulated in the Monroe Doctrine of opposing European imperialism in the Americas – or American intervention beyond the Americas.

However, the United States would hardly be alone in pursuing imperialism while styling itself as anti-imperialist or even doing so in the name of anti-imperialism, as ironically two of its most formidable opponents did the same – Japan and the Soviet Union.

So the very idea of American imperialism or empire, let alone their nature, is one that meets substantial resistance.

However, there was at least the territorial expansion of the United States, as it manifested its destiny westwards across the continent from the very outset, ultimately to the Pacific – to the cost or destruction of all native American peoples in its path, and about half of Mexico.

Again ironically, that was parallel to the eastwards territorial expansion of the Russian empire across Siberia to the Pacific – as Alexis de Tocqueville observed as the basis for his prediction of them as opposing world powers.

Unlike the predominantly maritime empires of other European powers, the Russian empire was predominantly a territorial empire – and so , it is argued, was the United States, particularly as similarly to the Russian Empire and unlike European maritime empires, it absorbed and retained its territorial conquests or expansion into itself as a nation.

Whether one accepts the territorial expansion of the United States as imperialism or an empire, there can be no argument that the United States indeed was or had a formal empire for at least part of its history, as in the map in my feature image, albeit as a latecomer to the Age of Imperialism (or New Imperialism) in the late 19th century.

And it went about being a latecomer in the smartest possible way – it simply picked up someone else’s empire at a bargain bin sale of its own creation, the best pickings of the remaining Spanish empire in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

In that war, the United States acquired the Philippines (while also crushing the Philippines independence movement in the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902) as well as Puerto Rico and Guam – both of which it retains as territories today (while the Philippines became independent in 1946).

It also effectively acquired Cuba as a de facto colony even when it did not formally occupy Cuba. Even before that, it had extended its manifest destiny beyond the continent into the Pacific, as it annexed Hawaii (and afterwards to other Pacific islands, such as American Samoa).

However, when people refer to American imperialism, they tend not to be referring to its limited formal empire – or at least not just referring to it – but its informal empire, “the expansion of American political, economic, cultural, and media influence beyond the boundaries of the United States”.

That is, hegemony or sphere of influence in more positive terms, neo-imperialism or neo-colonialism in more negative terms, “which leverages economic power rather than military force in an informal empire” or means of control other than formal annexation or rule. Of course, that may still involve military force when it needs to, but generally neo-imperialism by definition proposes more subtle or indirect means of coercion or influence.

My own view tends towards that of imperialism without an empire – whether or not the United States has comprised a formal or informal empire, its foreign and military policy has unquestionably been imperialistic, at least at certain times and places.

Foremost among those times and places would be its southern neighbors at, well most times actually, because the United States has been at its shabbiest dealing with Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine may have been anti-imperialist towards European powers in the Americas, but not so much for the United States – indeed, it implies the Americas to be their exclusive sphere.

The influence of the United States extended well beyond the Americas with its rise to world power in the world wars, not least in its system of alliances, in what was (or is) dubbed the American Century – indeed, to a world-encircling extent exceeding even that of the British Empire, which it is frequently portrayed as inheriting or succeeding.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)