The Long Shadow of Empire

The question of what America owes the world – and what the world owes America – is as old as the republic itself. George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, counseled the young nation to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” warning that passionate attachments to other nations would distort the republic’s judgment and drag it into conflicts that served no American interest. Washington was not naive; he understood that a nation barely a decade removed from revolution could not afford the perpetual wars of European monarchies. His counsel was strategic as much as philosophical. The republic had to survive before it could aspire to anything else. Hamilton shared this pragmatism; Jefferson, despite his rhetoric about the “Empire of Liberty,” largely agreed. For the first century of the nation’s existence, the advice held – not because Americans were pacifists, but because the continent itself provided enough challenge, danger, and opportunity to occupy the national ambition.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 marked the first expansion of this framework. President Monroe, with John Quincy Adams as intellectual architect, declared the Western Hemisphere closed to European colonization. On its face, this was defensive – a young nation asserting a sphere of influence to protect itself from encirclement. In practice, it planted the seeds of American hegemony over Latin America, a dominance exercised with increasing boldness as the century progressed. The doctrine said the Americas belonged to the Americans – and by “Americans,” it meant the United States. The contradiction between republican self-governance and regional dominance was present from the beginning.

Manifest Destiny provided the ideological fuel for the Mexican-American War, the displacement of Native peoples, and the relentless push westward. It was imperialism dressed in providential language, establishing a pattern that would repeat: the conviction that American expansion was qualitatively different from other empires’ conquests, that it carried civilization and liberty rather than subjugation. This exceptionalist narrative – America not merely a nation among nations but a special project with a unique mission – has been the through-line of American foreign policy from the 1840s to the present. It has justified both the noblest and most destructive chapters in American history abroad.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked the decisive turn from continental power to global empire. The destruction of the USS Maine – almost certainly an accident, relentlessly propagandized as Spanish aggression – gave war hawks their pretext. In months, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and established control over Cuba. The Philippine-American War that followed killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and introduced Americans to the moral costs of empire in ways that eerily foreshadowed Vietnam and Iraq. The debate between imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt and anti-imperialists like Mark Twain was the first great national argument about whether America could be both a republic and an empire. It was never resolved. It has simply been relitigated in different forms ever since.

Woodrow Wilson’s entry into World War I and his campaign for the League of Nations represented the most ambitious attempt to redefine America’s global role. Wilson believed that balance-of-power diplomacy had failed catastrophically, producing the carnage of the Western Front, and that only collective security, self-determination, and open diplomacy could prevent future wars. The Treaty of Versailles satisfied no one – not the idealists who wanted a just peace, not the realists who wanted to crush Germany, and not the American Senate, which refused ratification. Wilson’s failure was not merely political; it was a failure of the American public to accept the implications of its own power. The nation had become strong enough to shape the world but was not yet willing to bear the permanent costs of doing so.

The interwar isolationism that followed was not, as sometimes caricatured, a retreat into ignorance. It was a deliberate political choice, driven by disillusionment with Wilson’s broken promises, the Nye Committee’s revelations about war profiteering, and the conviction among millions that European quarrels were not worth American blood. The Neutrality Acts reflected a democratic consensus that the country had been swindled into the Great War and would not be swindled again. That this consensus was wrong – that fascism and militarism posed existential threats – does not make the sentiment irrational. People who had watched 116,000 Americans die in a war that solved nothing had every reason to be skeptical of the next call to arms.

World War II shattered isolationism and created the architecture that still largely governs international relations. The United Nations, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, GATT – all created between 1944 and 1949 – represented the most extraordinary assertion of American power in history. The Marshall Plan poured billions into European reconstruction, not out of charity but from the cold-eyed recognition that impoverished nations would be fertile ground for Soviet communism. For the first time, America accepted permanent peacetime alliances, permanent overseas deployments, and permanent responsibility for international stability. This was the birth of the “liberal international order” – liberal not in the domestic political sense, but in the sense of open markets, international law, and collective security. Whether this order was genuinely liberal or merely American hegemony wrapped in institutional clothing has been debated ever since.

The Cold War that followed defined American foreign policy for nearly half a century. Containment, articulated by George Kennan, held that Soviet communism was inherently expansionist but could be checked by firm, patient resistance. This strategy produced genuine achievements – the defense of Western Europe, the reconstruction of Japan and Germany, the eventual peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. It also produced catastrophes. Korea killed nearly 37,000 Americans and ended in stalemate. Vietnam killed over 58,000 Americans and somewhere between one and three million Vietnamese, tore American society apart, and ended in defeat. CIA interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and dozens of other countries overthrew elected governments, installed dictators, and generated anti-American resentment that persists generations later. The Cold War demonstrated both the power and the limits of American influence – the ability to maintain a global order, and the inability to control the consequences of every intervention within it.

The Soviet collapse in 1991 produced what Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment” – unchallenged American dominance unprecedented in human history. The temptation to reshape the world was irresistible. The Gulf War seemed to validate the model: clear aggression, broad coalition, decisive victory, limited objective achieved. But the interventions that followed – Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo – grew progressively more complex, more ambiguous, and more entangled with questions that had no clear answers.

The September 11 attacks and the War on Terror represent the most consequential foreign policy disaster since Vietnam – perhaps in American history. Afghanistan had clear justification, but the mission expanded from destroying al-Qaeda to rebuilding Afghan society, a task for which no outside power has ever succeeded. Iraq, launched on false premises and fantastical beliefs about democratic transformation, was a catastrophe by any measure: hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, trillions spent, the region destabilized, ISIS born, American credibility shattered. Twenty years of war ended with the Taliban retaking the country in days and images of desperate Afghans clinging to departing aircraft. The War on Terror consumed roughly eight trillion dollars, killed over 900,000 people directly, and left the United States strategically weaker, financially strained, and morally exhausted.

Today, American foreign policy has pivoted to “great power competition” – strategic rivalry with China and Russia as the organizing principle of national security. China’s military modernization and assertiveness represent the most significant challenge to American primacy since the Soviet Union. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the post-Cold War European security order. The question is whether America can manage these challenges while also addressing climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and persistent instability – and whether the American public, exhausted by twenty years of failed wars, is willing to bear the costs.

The echo of Rome is inescapable. The Roman Republic faced precisely this tension as it expanded from city-state to Mediterranean empire. The conquests that made Rome powerful also made it ungovernable as a republic. Permanent armies required permanent commanders who became political forces the Senate could not control. The wealth of conquered provinces enriched a narrow elite while impoverishing the citizen-soldiers who built the empire. The debate between Cato and Caesar was never resolved peacefully; it ended in civil war and the death of the republic. Every great power – Spain, France, Britain, the Soviet Union – has faced the same dilemma. Paul Kennedy formalized it as “imperial overstretch” in 1987. The question is not whether America faces this dilemma – it manifestly does – but whether it can navigate the tension between security through strength and overextension through ambition more wisely than its predecessors.

That history is not merely prologue. It lives in the bones of the five Americans who follow, each of whom has inherited a different lesson from the same story.