Response： Should America Embrace Empire？ ｜ 3⧸5⧸26
Episode Stats
Words per minute
170.44199
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Toxicity
1
sentences flagged
Hate speech
11
sentences flagged
Summary
In the wake of Iran and Venezuela, conservative commentators are now asking the question: Is it good to be an empire? Should we be defending the idea of America as an empire, and why? In this episode, I talk about why I don't think so.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
When you let aero truffle bubbles melt, everything takes on a creamy, delicious, chocolatey glow.
00:00:06.320
Like that pile of laundry. You didn't forget to fold it.
00:00:12.100
Feel the aero bubbles melt. It's mind-bubbling.
00:00:22.420
Hey guys, I want to do something a little different today with the war in Iran
00:00:27.240
and Donald Trump's successful military actions in places like Venezuela,
00:00:32.240
discussions on acquiring places like Greenland.
00:00:35.700
There are now conservative commentators coming out and asking the question,
00:00:39.800
should America be an empire? Is it good to be an empire?
00:00:43.760
Should we be defending the idea of America as an empire?
00:00:47.660
And I find that very interesting because that's something I've discussed many times on this channel.
00:00:52.460
These are conversations that we've had in depth from different angles.
00:00:55.960
The fact that this is now something that people are not just acknowledging,
00:00:59.440
but actually advocating for is very interesting.
00:01:02.520
We've been very hesitant to recognize America as an empire up to this point.
00:01:07.980
People tend to think of empires as places that restrict freedom,
00:01:11.340
that control other areas, that force themselves onto other civilizations or peoples.
00:01:17.120
And seeing as the United States is founded on this idea of breaking away from another empire,
00:01:22.260
we've kind of told ourselves that our military actions are about liberating people,
00:01:27.640
So it's kind of hard to balance this idea of empire.
00:01:30.700
But more and more conservative commentators, I think largely in efforts to kind of support
00:01:37.820
OK, well, maybe it's OK that we acknowledge that America is an empire now,
00:01:43.240
And I want to make it clear that I'm responding to people like John Doyle,
00:01:50.240
And I'm responding because I want to have this conversation.
00:01:54.260
This is not me dunking on any of those people making these points.
00:01:59.120
He brought up many good points in his recent episode on this question.
00:02:05.680
since this is something that I have engaged with regularly.
00:02:10.560
and we should be able to have these conversations in good faith,
00:02:13.920
because I think that ultimately both John and I want what is best for the United States.
00:02:18.540
I don't think any of his arguments in this area are in bad faith,
00:02:25.440
and this is not just a response to his episode or his video.
00:02:28.240
I'm not going to be going blow by blow or playing parts of his video here.
00:02:32.520
I'm just going to give my collective understanding
00:02:34.920
of kind of where I think this argument's going,
00:02:39.040
So I think it's a really important thing that we address this.
00:02:43.680
John said in his video that America has always been an empire.
00:02:55.280
it's very clear that we were always moving towards this.
00:02:58.560
Maybe we were less of an empire at the beginning,
00:03:01.080
but we were still to some degree, most certainly an empire.
00:03:04.880
Basically, after the Articles of Confederation,
00:03:07.900
once we had the constitution that has become our permanent ruling document,
00:03:12.480
we forged at least 13 peoples together at the time,
00:03:16.820
and we were going to continue to expand westward,
00:03:19.600
which means we're going to bring other peoples into our nation.
00:03:23.260
We were going to become something more than just a nation state.
00:03:30.400
I think it's accurate to say that America is an empire.
00:03:35.480
America has always been at some level an empire.
00:03:39.280
So does that kind of just open and close that case?
00:03:50.460
Empire is a natural formation politically throughout history.
00:03:54.940
In fact, it's probably the most dominant political form throughout history.
00:04:00.040
Whenever you see geopolitics rearranging itself, it's usually over empires.
00:04:07.540
You know, city-states would often have to operate at very low scales,
00:04:10.700
back when we simply did not have the logistics, the technology,
00:04:16.200
But even then, those city-states would often fuse together.
00:04:19.660
Of course, we have the entire, you know, history of the Greeks to talk about this,
00:04:23.600
Rome and Sparta, and their competing empires that they kind of forged together
00:04:29.160
before, and Greece forged together and fought against other empires.
00:04:33.240
This is just kind of a classic way that politics tends to organize itself.
00:04:40.120
This is the longest, probably, historical trend, you know,
00:04:46.700
So there's nothing inherently wrong with the United States being an empire.
00:04:50.320
But as John acknowledges, and very wisely, there are upsides and downsides to this formation,
00:05:00.360
You get to wield things at a much grander scale, which means you get to dictate terms.
00:05:05.520
You need to, you get to control larger amounts of territory.
00:05:11.120
You can wield more manpower, military might, economic might.
00:05:16.140
You can dictate things like currency exchange and all kinds of other important aspects of
00:05:25.860
You have more power, more money, more wealth, more influence, more likely to become a center
00:05:32.680
of culture in some way and produce great works.
00:05:36.160
Many of the great works of culture are produced inside of empires.
00:05:39.420
We can think of many, many from, you know, the Romans to the Greeks to the Egyptians, Persians,
00:05:48.560
These are all critical moments at which you kind of saw this.
00:05:52.960
So I think it's very obvious that these powerful cultural centers tend to move history, which
00:05:59.260
is, again, something John said in his video, and I think is very accurate.
00:06:09.680
You're far more likely to invite foreigners inside your borders.
00:06:14.640
You're far more likely to have them influence the direction.
00:06:18.360
I mean, empires famously get chipped away from the inside, often by other cultures that move
1.00
00:06:24.440
in, other peoples that move in because you're bringing them in.
00:06:28.860
And this is what George Washington warned us about.
00:06:31.500
Again, that's what the farewell address is all about, that if you have these long-term
00:06:36.460
alliances, you have this global empire, foreign nations are going to want to influence you.
00:06:44.680
It increases the incentive structure for foreigners to come in and make their interests known.
00:06:50.160
Obviously, this is something that the United States and many other large nations are currently
00:07:00.800
Empires tend to have this kind of self-perpetuating mantra where they constantly need to expand.
00:07:07.400
You've got to keep moving or you're going to die.
00:07:09.480
In fact, James Burnham, a political theorist that, of course, I am a huge fan of, wrote an
00:07:15.760
The death of the West or suicide of the West is largely about the idea that you have to continue
00:07:23.280
If it continues to expand, you know it's alive.
00:07:26.160
This is why some people will call James Burnham, and I think relatively accurately, one of the
00:07:32.500
He was an extraziate who believed that the United States more or less had to continually
1.00
00:07:36.980
expand or otherwise it was going to get consumed by the other expansive powers like the USSR at the time.
0.51
00:07:43.220
And we can kind of see in that battle between the United States and the USSR, the wider communist
00:07:50.580
It was the American empire's ability to continue to expand in a way that the Soviets could not
0.94
00:07:56.340
that kind of brought about its victory in many ways.
00:08:05.660
You have to constantly be looking for more resources because of the vast amounts of power
00:08:11.420
and machinery and people and everything else that you need to wield.
00:08:16.140
And so this means that there's never a break for the empire.
00:08:21.120
There are not these moments to heal, to reflect, to shore up your identity, your culture, your
00:08:30.280
And there are, of course, the constant conflicts, the need for manpower, the fact that this tends
00:08:41.180
You know, they tend to get left behind as the empire, the wealth and the focus tends to
00:08:50.220
And these are all serious downsides that you have to consider.
00:08:53.260
So the decision over empire is not an easy one.
00:08:57.740
It's not like, oh, well, obviously, you should just be an empire.
00:09:04.720
But most importantly, and I think this is something that we shouldn't miss, it's often
00:09:09.880
Like, usually, you don't have people sitting down at a table and saying, well, now we'll
00:09:14.300
be an empire or now we'll stop being an empire or we'll just never enter into the imperial
00:09:19.200
There is a basic truth about statecraft, about the and just really the morphological life
00:09:25.700
cycles of civilizations that ultimately it is the.
00:09:32.940
Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.
00:09:43.600
Will of most strong nations, strong peoples that they exert their power over the world
00:09:56.560
This is why kind of men need to feel like they're conquering and controlling areas.
0.97
00:10:01.600
They're exerting influence, even if it's just over a lawn.
00:10:04.840
Like you need to have something that you own, a control, a zone, an area.
00:10:09.040
And if you're a vital civilization, just if you're a vital man, you kind of want to expand
00:10:17.760
And so we don't always make the choice to say, oh, well, this is an imperial action.
00:10:26.820
We're usually just naturally trying to exert and understand ourselves in this way.
00:10:33.500
This is why it was kind of inherent that the Americans start pushing west almost immediately.
0.88
00:10:38.960
The story of America is the story of struggling with western expansion from our very founding
00:10:44.600
to obviously the closing of the frontier and connecting of the entire continent.
00:10:51.440
These are really stories and traits that are embedded into the United States in a very real
00:10:56.740
And so there's no surprise that Manifest Destiny manifests itself in global politics once
00:11:05.500
However, there is a question of scale when it comes to empires, and that's what I want
00:11:11.240
people who are currently advocating for American empire to think about.
00:11:19.480
It always will be an empire at some level.
0.99
00:11:21.760
And I'm with you that just giving up your empire entirely is pretty foolish.
00:11:26.200
It hasn't gone well for almost any nation that's tried it.
00:11:32.320
I've done an episode on this before with a historian if you want to get a deeper dive
00:11:37.360
But we do have the tension between Trajan and Hadrian.
00:11:42.960
And these are two Roman emperors who presided over some interesting times in the life of their
00:11:51.640
You had Trajan who expanded the empire to its widest extent, captured the most land.
0.93
00:12:01.360
This is when Rome was territorially at its height.
00:12:06.380
And Hadrian is famous for kind of pulling the empire back.
00:12:15.700
Many people say he extended the life of the empire by having some humility about how far
00:12:24.880
You can still go to Britain and see where that line was drawn.
00:12:27.720
And basically, these were, you know, the idea is like, I want a more defensible empire.
00:12:33.360
I understand that theoretically we can just expand, expand, expand, expand.
00:12:37.180
But the problem for pretty much every conquering nation is ultimately how to hold it.
00:12:42.100
It's one thing to simply move across the territory.
00:12:45.000
But truly controlling it, truly mastering it is very different.
00:12:49.440
And there have been countless examples of a empire that have gone in and captured vast
00:12:54.960
amounts of land and then almost immediately lost large shares of that land because they
00:13:04.440
Everything else that's involved with the maintenance of that control.
00:13:07.840
So while Trajan is well celebrated for his conquest and expansion of the empire, if Hadrian
00:13:14.900
had not pinned the empire back in, if he had not decided this is a healthy, natural border
00:13:20.260
for the empire, without that, the Roman empire might have fallen much earlier.
00:13:24.560
Now, this is, of course, at some level speculation.
00:13:28.400
If Rome had just continued to expand forever, maybe they would have been fine.
00:13:32.000
But I think Hadrian's wisdom is one that we should probably take on board with us.
00:13:40.480
It's that perhaps there is a wisdom in controlling ourselves.
00:13:45.680
So, for instance, the actions of Trump in, I think, Venezuela and perhaps even the acquisition
00:13:51.360
of Greenland would be far more justifiable than, say, extended ground wars in the Middle
00:13:57.820
And the reason is, you know, the Monroe Doctrine is thrown around a lot, but there's a real
00:14:04.160
There is a kind of natural dominion that exists for the United States, as there are for other
00:14:09.640
And this is recognized geopolitically by books like Clash of Civilizations, which I think
00:14:15.960
are really important for us to help, like, understand what we mean when we're talking
00:14:21.980
about empires and civilizational blocks and all of this stuff.
00:14:26.000
Because when we are trying to understand how far we should go, what our place should be
00:14:33.120
in all of this, maybe it helps us to understand how other civilizations have done this.
00:14:39.960
So in the Clash of Civilizations thesis, you have the understanding that individual countries
00:14:45.540
are indeed, like, too small to really have that global impact to rule the world.
00:14:50.000
We're never just going to have, like, everyone neatly broken up into unaligned nation states
00:14:59.020
However, we also should understand that there's a difference between kind of a regional empire
00:15:05.180
and a global empire, a global world order, right?
00:15:09.020
We've talked very much about how we're against the globalists, right?
00:15:12.700
But that doesn't mean that we just don't like the WEF globalists, but we do want American
00:15:20.000
It means that we understand there's something inherently wrong, inherently difficult, and
00:15:25.640
inherently actually deleterious to us operating as a global empire.
00:15:34.820
The larger that the empire gets, the more difficult it is to manage.
00:15:42.220
Francis Fukuyama has been more or less roundly mocked for the fact that he has this end of
00:15:49.060
history thesis, this idea that kind of the global American empire, this fusion of capitalism
00:15:56.220
and democracy and Western liberalism is just going to kind of dominate everything.
00:16:01.660
We're at the end of history, we've gotten to kind of the final form of government, we've
00:16:06.020
perfected it, there's no reason for anyone else to have any other type of government.
00:16:09.780
It's really just all about fiddling with the dials until we get that all figured out.
00:16:14.160
But kind of the problem we've run into, the reason that Fukuyama, you know, kind of failed
00:16:18.180
horribly and is now laughed at, and he's had to even...
00:16:21.660
Every family tree holds extraordinary stories, especially those of the women who shaped who
00:16:28.340
In honor of International Women's Month, Ancestry invites you to shine a light on their legacy.
00:16:33.520
Until March 10th, enjoy free access to over 4 billion family history records and discover
00:16:39.140
where they lived, the journeys they took, and the legacy they left behind.
00:16:43.560
Start with just a name or place and let our intuitive tools guide you.
00:16:53.820
He has to adjust the thesis now so that it fits more reasonably.
00:17:01.700
That we didn't just achieve kind of the victory.
00:17:06.980
America just runs the world now and it's all fine.
0.69
00:17:12.020
What happened is that different countries tried to find other ways to modernize without
00:17:23.280
People don't all want to be ruled the same way.
00:17:26.120
They don't all want to be subject to the same set of laws, the same norms, the same
00:17:31.120
traditions, the same customs, and the same political systems.
00:17:34.100
There's not one universal best size to fit everybody.
00:17:37.380
And that's kind of what a global empire implies.
00:17:41.180
So you can do that with a regional empire to some extent.
00:17:44.660
And the reason is more what Samuel Huntington points out in Clash of Civilizations.
00:17:50.040
These civilizational blocks, as he calls them, or we could call them regional empires.
00:17:56.980
They're more cohesive because they tend to share a lot of traits.
00:18:00.140
They often share similar languages or religions or political traditions.
00:18:05.000
They're peoples who may not be exactly the same, but they've interacted with each other
00:18:11.980
And so you have a more cohesive understanding of how the world should operate in that area.
00:18:19.580
It doesn't mean everyone inside a civilizational block is the same in any way, shape, or form,
00:18:26.960
When people talk about European civilization or East Asian civilization or American civilization,
00:18:37.340
It's this idea that the peoples might not be exactly the same, but they're kind of close enough.
00:18:42.820
And those empires are usually run by a regional hegemon, a core state, as Huntington calls it.
00:18:52.000
America, the United States, is obviously the core state of our power block.
00:18:56.600
And you might have a core state like Russia for their empire or China, these kind of things.
00:19:02.420
India, these civilizational blocks are kind of formed around these major powers.
00:19:07.920
And usually there are minor powers in their orbit that kind of get themselves dictated to
00:19:12.560
because of their proximity and the fact that they're more or less aligned with kind of what's
00:19:21.400
We don't like to use the term anymore, but that's basically what they are.
00:19:25.520
And it's strange because we don't have the same, we're so skittish about political reality
00:19:30.780
at this point, that we don't put these things under kind of like their formal auspices.
00:19:38.160
It's just, you know, a civilizational block tied together by, you know, these different
00:19:43.040
international organizations that keep everyone in line and basically form a super government
00:19:50.540
Again, it's a lot of hiding the ball for what the obvious thing is.
00:19:53.800
Now, I think this is good, actually, that we're now having the conversation and just saying,
00:19:58.820
I actually am very glad that we've gotten to the point where we can just be honest about
00:20:03.020
what America is, because that is very important for us to then decide what we want to be and
00:20:09.400
When we're pretending that we're just kind of this nation state, then it makes it very
00:20:13.840
difficult to address the problems of empire that keep popping up, but we keep having to
00:20:21.860
And then we can just have more adult conversations like the one we're now having over what kind of
00:20:31.540
And I would just submit that it's probably wise to, yes, maintain our empire.
00:20:38.220
Maybe even embrace our imperial nature, but understand what kind of empire we want to be,
00:20:46.920
Do we want to maintain ourselves as a healthy regional empire that has peoples that are more
0.95
00:20:55.140
or less make sense inside, that are functionally part of our civilization in some way or another?
00:21:00.880
Or do we want to make sure that we are trying to control the political system of Iran or Afghanistan
00:21:08.740
Do we feel like we understand those countries in the way we understand maybe our near peers?
00:21:15.400
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?
00:21:31.680
Because if not, then we should probably have a better idea of how to conduct our foreign policy closer to home.
00:21:39.000
Again, this doesn't mean shutting down the empire, but it means caring more about maybe Central America and Canada than it does the Middle East.
00:21:48.080
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.
0.53
00:21:57.720
If we didn't have to care about whether or not Iran was hitting Israel, we could just focus on oil reserves in someplace closer to our own home.
00:22:07.460
We could focus on geopolitics and the stability of countries like Mexico, where we actually should be exerting far more influence.
00:22:18.000
I would be way more in favor of 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.
0.99
00:22:31.300
I can understand that, yeah, even if it's an imperial move, technically we're going into another country, I can understand that country's on our border.
00:22:38.920
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.
00:22:48.720
And the answer is because we've got this global empire instead of understanding ourselves as a regional or civilizational empire, a civilizational block.
00:22:56.980
The other problem we have is that classically, the imperial mode is to operate in the benefit of the United States.
00:23:07.200
There's a reason that people listen to us when we say jump, right?
00:23:10.160
There's a reason that we can dictate the global reserve currency and trade policies and everything else.
00:23:20.940
However, we do not have the legal and moral framework to operate as an empire when it comes to citizenship.
00:23:37.500
Because of kind of our story of, you know, everyone gets a vote and everyone is equal,
00:23:42.620
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.
00:23:51.160
And that's a genuine problem when it comes to empire, because if you are not willing to kind of impose that will,
00:23:58.540
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,
00:24:03.900
kind of coming in and control what you're doing.
00:24:05.360
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.
00:24:12.380
Instead, we end up in the scenario we're in now, where we're really operating the empire mainly for the advantage of others.
00:24:19.000
And the argument from John and many others is to say, well, then we just start running it for us, and we start doing that.
00:24:26.060
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.
00:24:38.420
But when we go to Iran, you'll notice that the story is freedom for Iranians, democracy for the Iranians.
00:24:46.600
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,
00:24:54.280
a civilizational bloc, to this global hegemon, to this global imperial mindset.
00:24:59.460
And like I said, we just don't know how to do this.
00:25:03.000
We don't know how to go into a place and say, you're ours, and you don't have any of the rights that Americans have,
0.59
00:25:08.000
and we're going to be extracting benefits from you.
00:25:11.560
Like, we don't have the structure for that, and that's why mass immigration has worked the way it has,
00:25:15.880
because we just don't know how to tell these people no.
00:25:18.120
Like, once we've kind of come in and taken over their countries, we kind of just see them as, like, we owe that to them.
00:25:24.260
Like, they're now under the auspices of America, and therefore, they kind of get everything that Americans get.
00:25:32.000
Again, I will fully acknowledge America is an empire, and it should, at some level, remain an empire.
00:25:39.080
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.
00:25:54.700
I don't want the United States to be operated for the benefit of its empire.
00:25:59.300
I want the empire to be beneficial to the United States.
00:26:03.280
I think that only happens when we have a realistic understanding of our expansion and reach.
00:26:08.140
But like I said, this is not a slam on anybody.
00:26:10.560
This is not me, like, challenging anyone to a duel.
00:26:12.740
This is an open conversation that I want to keep having.
00:26:17.780
I'm very glad that, if nothing else, the experiences we're having now are opening people up to this discussion.
00:26:23.780
And I hope that I'm going to hear back from people.