The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 05, 2026


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

Topics
should america be an empire empire downsides empire expansion downsides empire control and wisdom
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Mentioned
James Burnham Donald Trump Trajan George Washington Samuel Huntington Francis Fukuyama John Doyle
Lindsey Graham Calls to Expand War to Lebanon ｜ 3⧸4⧸26 'A Knight of the 7 Kingdoms' Is Different ｜ Guest： Jack Posobiec ｜ 3⧸6⧸26

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

170.44

Word count

4,625

Sentence count

304

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 When you let aero truffle bubbles melt, everything takes on a creamy, delicious, chocolatey glow.
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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,
00:01:26.580 bringing freedom to them.
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
00:01:35.620 where Trump is going, are saying,
00:01:37.820 OK, well, maybe it's OK that we acknowledge that America is an empire now,
00:01:41.800 and here's why that's good.
00:01:43.240 And I want to make it clear that I'm responding to people like John Doyle,
00:01:47.700 who's a great guy, a colleague of mine.
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.
00:01:57.580 Certainly not John.
00:01:59.120 He brought up many good points in his recent episode on this question.
00:02:03.380 And so I just wanted to give my thoughts,
00:02:05.680 since this is something that I have engaged with regularly.
00:02:08.460 We should be having these conversations,
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,
00:02:21.700 and I hope none of mine will be either.
00:02:23.820 But I want to address some of the things,
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,
00:02:36.980 because it's not just him making it now.
00:02:39.040 So I think it's a really important thing that we address this.
00:02:42.300 So first things first,
00:02:43.680 John said in his video that America has always been an empire.
00:02:48.480 And that's absolutely true.
00:02:50.400 That's correct.
00:02:51.580 If you look at kind of the American timeline,
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.
00:03:26.760 And that was always the case.
00:03:28.780 So I think it's fair to say,
00:03:30.400 I think it's accurate to say that America is an empire.
00:03:33.840 America was 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?
00:03:42.480 We're done.
00:03:43.220 It's an empire.
00:03:44.360 The end.
00:03:45.160 Well, no, I don't think so.
00:03:46.340 And here's the reason why.
00:03:48.000 There's nothing wrong inherently with empire.
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.
00:04:05.640 That wasn't always the case.
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,
00:04:13.860 that kind of thing, to marshal full empires.
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.
00:04:38.340 So there's nothing weird about this.
00:04:40.120 This is the longest, probably, historical trend, you know,
00:04:43.980 that we have in political organization.
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,
00:04:57.040 right?
00:04:57.500 Empires have pretty obvious upsides.
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.
00:05:08.280 You get to move larger amounts of resources.
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
00:05:21.200 geopolitics when you're an empire.
00:05:23.480 The benefits are pretty obvious.
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,
00:05:46.300 all kinds of the Chinese.
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.
00:06:02.540 So these are all very big upsides to empire.
00:06:05.960 But it does also come with very big downsides.
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.
00:06:27.420 That's kind of what an empire does.
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.
00:06:42.180 This increases the likelihood.
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
00:06:55.620 struggling with.
00:06:56.580 You have a serious problem of restraint.
00:07:00.800 Empires tend to have this kind of self-perpetuating mantra where they constantly need to expand.
00:07:06.820 It's like a shark.
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
00:07:14.800 entire book on this.
00:07:15.760 The death of the West or suicide of the West is largely about the idea that you have to continue
00:07:21.220 to expand.
00:07:21.960 If the West shrinks, it's going to die.
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
00:07:30.720 first neoconservatives.
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
00:07:49.540 project.
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.
00:08:00.000 However, again, it comes with that cost.
00:08:03.340 You have to constantly be moving.
00:08:04.680 You have to constantly be expanding.
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.
00:08:19.480 There's never a moment of rest.
00:08:21.120 There are not these moments to heal, to reflect, to shore up your identity, your culture, your
00:08:26.780 traditions.
00:08:27.880 You're almost always malleable in this way.
00:08:30.280 And there are, of course, the constant conflicts, the need for manpower, the fact that this tends
00:08:36.360 to disenfranchise your core citizens.
00:08:41.180 You know, they tend to get left behind as the empire, the wealth and the focus tends to
00:08:45.300 shift to the provinces.
00:08:47.160 This is a common feature of empires.
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.
00:09:01.100 Obviously, you shouldn't.
00:09:02.180 There are big up and downsides to both.
00:09:04.720 But most importantly, and I think this is something that we shouldn't miss, it's often
00:09:08.620 not a decision.
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
00:09:18.520 phase.
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.
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00:09:36.780 Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 11th.
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00:09:43.600 Will of most strong nations, strong peoples that they exert their power over the world
00:09:49.920 around them.
00:09:50.660 This is just a you can hate that.
00:09:52.700 You can love that.
00:09:53.660 It doesn't really matter.
00:09:54.620 That's just human nature.
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
00:10:14.840 that constantly.
00:10:15.840 That's a very natural desire.
00:10:17.760 And so we don't always make the choice to say, oh, well, this is an imperial action.
00:10:24.580 We will do that or won't do that.
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
00:10:56.360 way.
00:10:56.740 And so there's no surprise that Manifest Destiny manifests itself in global politics once
00:11:02.600 it reaches the edge of our current shores.
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.
00:11:15.840 I'm with you that America is an empire.
00:11:18.240 It always was an empire.
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.
00:11:29.560 However, we do have a model to think about.
00:11:32.320 I've done an episode on this before with a historian if you want to get a deeper dive
00:11:36.260 into this.
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
00:11:50.900 empire.
00:11:51.640 You had Trajan who expanded the empire to its widest extent, captured the most land. 0.93
00:11:58.760 There's the most land ever under an emperor.
00:12:01.360 This is when Rome was territorially at its height.
00:12:05.420 And then you have Hadrian.
00:12:06.380 And Hadrian is famous for kind of pulling the empire back.
00:12:12.060 He reformed the empire in a lot of ways.
00:12:14.480 He helped.
00:12:15.700 Many people say he extended the life of the empire by having some humility about how far
00:12:21.620 the empire could go.
00:12:23.000 His walls are famous.
00:12:24.100 Hadrian's wall.
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
00:12:59.900 simply didn't have the people to populate it.
00:13:01.560 They overextended themselves.
00:13:02.780 They didn't have the supply lines.
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.
00:13:27.040 We can't do the counterfactual.
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.
00:13:36.460 It's not that we can't have empire.
00:13:38.820 It's not that we shouldn't have empire.
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
00:13:56.960 East.
00:13:57.820 And the reason is, you know, the Monroe Doctrine is thrown around a lot, but there's a real
00:14:03.420 point to that.
00:14:04.160 There is a kind of natural dominion that exists for the United States, as there are for other
00:14:09.220 nations.
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
00:14:55.460 doing their own thing.
00:14:56.620 Like, that's just simply not going to happen.
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
00:15:18.720 globalism.
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.
00:15:32.120 It has costs that are even more magnified.
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
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00:16:51.660 Change his own thesis.
00:16:53.820 He has to adjust the thesis now so that it fits more reasonably.
00:16:58.800 Is that ultimately, that's not what happened.
00:17:01.700 That we didn't just achieve kind of the victory.
00:17:05.180 Soviet Union fell.
00:17:06.980 America just runs the world now and it's all fine. 0.69
00:17:10.080 That's not really what happened.
00:17:12.020 What happened is that different countries tried to find other ways to modernize without
00:17:17.420 buying into the American system.
00:17:19.680 And that's for a very simple reason.
00:17:21.060 One, they want sovereignty.
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.
00:17:54.700 It really depends on how you want to dice it.
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
00:18:09.700 significantly over the years.
00:18:11.980 And so you have a more cohesive understanding of how the world should operate in that area.
00:18:17.680 It doesn't mean everything's copacetic.
00:18:19.580 It doesn't mean everyone inside a civilizational block is the same in any way, shape, or form,
00:18:24.680 but they make more sense together.
00:18:26.960 When people talk about European civilization or East Asian civilization or American civilization,
00:18:35.200 that's kind of what they're talking about.
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
00:19:17.140 going on there already.
00:19:19.300 And so these are kind of natural empires.
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.
00:19:35.480 We give them these weird names.
00:19:37.260 Oh, it's not an empire.
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
00:19:47.300 that kind of forces everyone to cooperate.
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,
00:19:57.860 yeah, these are just empires.
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
00:20:08.280 how we're going to do things.
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
00:20:18.280 ignore because we're not an empire.
00:20:19.660 We're not an empire.
00:20:20.460 We're not an empire.
00:20:21.860 And then we can just have more adult conversations like the one we're now having over what kind of
00:20:26.960 empire should we be?
00:20:28.220 How should we be conducting ourselves?
00:20:31.540 And I would just submit that it's probably wise to, yes, maintain our empire.
00:20:37.380 I would agree.
00:20:38.220 Maybe even embrace our imperial nature, but understand what kind of empire we want to be,
00:20:46.080 how we want to act.
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
00:21:07.740 or Iraq?
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.
00:22:47.540 And yet we keep going there.
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.
00:23:05.840 Now, to some extent, it does.
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.
00:23:17.720 And that has a massive upside for us.
00:23:20.040 It really does.
00:23:20.940 However, we do not have the legal and moral framework to operate as an empire when it comes to citizenship.
00:23:35.040 This is our greatest weakness.
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.
00:24:25.340 And fair enough.
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.
00:24:31.160 Okay, that's refreshing.
00:24:31.920 It's not about freedom or democracy.
00:24:34.780 It's about what we need to benefit Americans.
00:24:38.420 But when we go to Iran, you'll notice that the story is freedom for Iranians, democracy for the Iranians.
00:24:45.320 They'll greet us as liberator.
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.
00:25:10.920 The end.
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.
00:25:29.900 And I just think this is a mistake.
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.
00:26:15.760 I think it's a critical time to have it.
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.
00:26:26.340 I want to hear their thoughts.
00:26:27.520 Thank you so much for watching, guys.
00:26:29.180 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.
00:26:38.140 I'll talk to you next time.