The new American imperialist
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The USA is behaving like a rogue state since the election of Donald trump.
The world is back in the early 1900s when strongmen ruled, and imperialism was the order of the day. Empire-building through might was the norm until the Second World War established a singular power as the world's industrial and economic hegemon with a military to match. That country was the USA with the Soviet Union and its Eastern European vassals as the main adversary.
The USA began its ascendancy to world hegemon after the American Spanish War in the 1800s, when the country began its own imperial expansion in its hemisphere and taking possessions such as the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific.
In the First World War, the US came to the rescue of the UK and France, both imperial powers at the time, to push back the German Kaiser.
The Second World War ended with the destruction of Western Europe and much of the Asian Pacific, apart from countries such as Australia and New Zealand, which were fortunate to avoid much of the aggression of Japan. However, the key beneficiary of the war was the USA. The USA was untouched by the Second World War apart from the raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that dragged a reluctant US into WW2.
The USA was an isolationist power that adopted the Monroe Doctrine that stated that it was supreme in the Western Hemisphere. It was a reluctant interventionist in the First World War.
However, the entry of US troops in World War 1 gave the advantage to the UK and France over Germany and its allies. The First World War was the beginning of the USA’s march to world hegemony.
The Second World War established finally the USA as world hegemon. The US, through its industrial power that supplied its allies with the weapons that won the war, used that industrial might derived from the battlefield to rebuild the war-devastated world. That project of rebuilding war destroyed Europe and Asia, established the US as the supreme economic power and industrial power.
From 1945, the Dollar became the world's reserve currency. The US, with the humble acquiescence of allies such as the UK and France, which were in reality little more than vassals of a triumphant USA after the war ended, established the institutions that established a new world order at Bretton Woods- the IMF. UN, WTO, World Bank, and then NATO.
For 80 years, the world order led by Bretton Woods’s organisations and the Dollar, which was essentially liquid capital backed by American might, decided the standard and quality of life for most of humanity. The Dollar was an especially powerful tool of hegemony managed by another supremely powerful US Bank: the Federal Reserve.
Donald Trump’s impunity and swagger at DAVOS is simply a raw display of this US power.
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10 Responses to “The new American imperialist”
I tend to take a more Hobbesian view of human nature, and in that sense, Trump is moving in the direction that actually makes strategic sense. Overreach? Sure. But you can always pull back. It’s the old principle: better to have strength and not need it than to need it and not have it.
And frankly, I’d rather put my chips on a society that’s organized enough—and secure enough in its institutions—to change leadership every four years, than end up trapped under a dictator for life.