The end of the American Empire

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There's this meme that went around a couple years back about men and how often they think about the Roman Empire. This one guy shocked his girlfriend by saying, once per day. And like, I get it. The Romans were doing some freaky stuff. But if some people are thinking about the Roman Empire, maybe too much. I think there's another one. We're not thinking about enough. the American Empire. We just did an episode about how American colonialism drives the labor behind

AI. So this is something I've been thinking about a lot. My colleagues over at Code Switch did this incredible episode on why we don't really consider ourselves an empire, even as we hold colonies and military bases all over the world. And why President Trump might actually be the reason our empire is crumbling. There's some eye-opening stuff in here. I can't wait for you to hear it. Here it is. It's good, y'all. You are listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. A while ago, there was the story I really wanted us to cover at Coates, which, you know, never came to be, which happened sometimes. But it was right up our alley over

here. So, okay, there was this big conference of folks from colleges and universities from all over the country. It was a convention for Agent American and Pacific Islander student associations. You know, so there was, you know, conference stuff, panels and workshops and afterparties and Kee-King, you know, all that good stuff, right? But at one of the big sessions at this conference, this existential question was kind of introduced. And that was, should the Pacific Islander folks, that's the P-I in that AAPI initialism, even be conferencing and Kikin at this thing? Like, there were a few parts to this argument, but they all kind of hinged on a larger history. And the people making it said, okay, the story of Asian Americans in the United States, very broadly, is a story of immigration, people who came to the United States. But the story of Pacific Islanders in the United States, folks whose people, you know, hail from the Philippines or Native Hawaiians or people from Samoa, that is a story of colonization, of the U.S. coming to them very forcibly and taking over their ancestral homes and subsuming it into America.

Some of the folks argued that in many ways, Pacific Islanders actually had more in common with Native Americans and indigenous people in the U.S. than they did with Asian Americans. And so obviously this was very chewy and fraught and like so many conversations like these. They've been around before this convention, they're around after this convention, right? What stuck with me most about this discourse was that it was a straight and direct addressing of this thing that most of us in the U.S. just never really talk about the United States as an empire. It's just like not true that the United States hasn't had this colonial history.

It's differently shaped than that of other countries, but it turns out to be a big part of its history. That's the historian Daniel Emmervar, and he has a book called How to Hide an Empire, a history of the greater United States. And in it, he writes that most people in the continental U.S. think of empire as this thing that, you know, other countries do. England.

in France and Dutch, and that we don't know and haven't really understood or reckoned with the long history and the present colonizing the United States has done. We don't think about the millions of people all over the world who are political subjects of the United States, but who can't say vote in U.S. elections. So, for example, at the time that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Japan, like its infamous access partners, struck first and declared war afterwards. Hawaii was a U.S. territory. At the time, so were the Philippines and Guam and the Wake Islands.

What gets left out and what we don't learn is that at the same time that Pearl Harbor was being attacked, Japan also bombed the U.S. bases on all of those Pacific islands. And this is a detail that kind of blows my mind a little bit, y'all. But, like, Daniel says that at that specific moment in U.S. history, There were more colonial subjects of the United States elsewhere in the world than there were black Americans in the United States. But even though we are generally just inclined to overlook the scale and inner workings of American Empire, the news is making that head in the sand thing harder all the time. Like just over the past few years, right? the destruction wrought by Hurricane Maria.

And like, not for nothing, the rise of bad bunny has brought all this fresh attention, like these new eyeballs, to the U.S.'s colonial relationship with Puerto Rico. Just in these first few months of 2026, the United States sent troops to Venezuela, and President Trump threatened to take over that country's natural resources. And now the United States is engaged in an escalating war with Iran that has involved attacks on and from permanent American military bases in places like Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait.

And so, on today's episode, we are talking about the state of American Empire right now. We are in an empire state of mind, you could say. Why is that we as Americans don't ever say the seaworth? That's colony nasty ass, get your mind off the gutter, and why Daniel Imervar says that Donald Trump with his penchant for breaking things might be breaking our empire too.

This week on up first, President Trump heads to the NATO summit with a stark warning for Iran, make a deal or the U.S. will, quote, finish the job. We're tracking what the escalating tension means for energy prices, plus a critical Senate race upended as Democrat Graham Platner faces faces sexual assault allegations. That's this week on up first. Listen every morning on the NPR. app or wherever you get your podcasts. The fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years. This is open in your face. How are there no answers? Our investigation has uncovered new evidence and witnesses who say they've never talked to police. Did police ever call you?

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Listen to We Keep Us Safe on the Embedded podcast from NPR. Hi, it's me, Peter Sagle, host of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. It's summer, and if you want to turn your pool party into a nerd fest, check out our news quiz. comedians, we got celebrities, we got games to help you laugh about the week's news. Yeah, that news. It'll be just like, we're all hanging out at your backyard barbecue. Listen every week to wait, wait, don't tell me on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Daniel, I should tell you, you are the author of a book that a few people in our team have

kind of like Loki obsessed with for a minute. So can you tell me what how to hide an empire is about and what prompted you to write it. Yeah, so How to Haddon Empire is a history of the United States, but not as the United States as I had been conditioned to see it, so not as the contiguous shape. And the reason that I was prompted to write this is that I had been a U.S. historian. I'd been teaching U.S. history classes. And I found myself, for reasons unrelated to this book, traveling to Manila in the Philippines. Okay. And look, I'm not an idiot, and I'm a fairly like capable historian. And so I had known that the Philippines had been colonized by the United States, like, for about 50 years. But there's something, like, different between knowing it and, like, knowing it.

And it's, you know, it's like reading the lyrics and hearing the music. And when I got to Manila, I was like, oh, yeah. I'm looking at streets named after U.S. presidents. I'm looking at, like, a transit system that is based on repurposed U.S. Army Jeeps. Like, in so many ways, I was like, oh, this is a kind of place that I know. know with some interesting differences. And to the U.S. historian that I was that hadn't really thought through this, I was like, have I really contemplated what it means that the Philippines was part of the United States for that long?

Like, that's not really part of my stories. That's not how I teach. That's not how I teach. It's not how we learn. It's not how we learn, right? So, like, maybe there's like a chapter set in 1890s where, like, the United States colonized a bunch of places. And then you hear nothing more about them. And you're like, oh, did Puerto Rico just vanish?

And so the second you ask these questions, the second it's not just the Philippines, it's, you know, what's up with Hawaii and Alaska and Guam and hundreds of military bases that the United States has. So there's all these ways in which the United States is spatially not the thing that we think it is. And it turns out that once you sort of open your mind to that fairly indisputable fact, you get a really different kind of U.S. history. So when people think of a sort of classic, if we call it classic empire, what do you think they're imagining? Because I imagine that doesn't line up with the way they envision the United States. Yeah, so I think our classic vision is based on European Empire and particularly British Empire. So you've got these like mustachioed men in pith hats and Judd Purrs and they're going out to, you know, do their horrible business. And so usually what we say is that, okay, the United States, whatever its flaws, didn't do that kind of thing.

Didn't do that thing, right. And then sometimes we say, I'm so upset with U.S. foreign policy that it is almost like that thing. You know, this is a disguised form of empire, the new form of empire, whatever. And I'm saying that in a semi-sacastic way. I don't mean to be dismissive. These are positions that I myself have adopted at times. But that's usually how we do it, right, so that the United States has a kind of metaphorical relationship to empire. But, man, I can tell you, those guys had mustaches, and occasionally they wore pith hats.

And, like, they were out there. They look good in khakis. So it's just, like, not true that the United States hasn't had this colonial history. It's differently shaped than that of other countries, but it turns out to be a big part of its history. I mean, you write in the book about the United States government sort of self-consciously trying to brain itself as something very different, right, than empire. Historically, the country has been, like, diametrically opposed to the British Empire and, like, the domination implicit in that. Like, you talk about how in FDR is famous, like, the day that will live in infamy speech. He talks about the Empire of Japan.

attacking the United States. Where does that perceive difference come from? Yeah, so I think it comes from two places. One is that the United States's founding moment is a rebellion from an empire. And that wasn't just a strict separation. You know, we're fine with the politics. We just want to be doing it over here, not there. It was supposed to be a transformation. Is that we reject the form of politics that led us to this and that we, you know, we don't have kings and, you know, that kind of thing. And like the name of the country, the United States of America, was meant to mean something. One, it was states, not colonies.

That was really important. And two, it was a union, not an empire, that these are, like, a union like a marriage. Like, we've entered into this consensually. Now, it turns out to be the case that that's, like, not actually correct. So, like, by the time the United States has its independence from Britain, it is not just a union of states. It's an amalgam of states and territories. It's that on day one. It's that today.

It's been that every day in between. but the United States has always had this story about itself that like it's different. It's politically different from its predecessor and, you know, from bad old Europe. And I think that refusal to identify as an empire has led to some real differences. The British were very open about the fact that they had an empire. They're proud of it. The sun never set on the British Empire. They had a holiday called Empire Day that they like celebrated in the schools.

And the United States has always felt really uncomfortable. with its overseas holdings and often tried to kind of squint until they just disappear or sweep them under the rug or choose your metaphor. And I think the effect of that has been sometimes quite damaging on those places themselves because it's quite a dangerous thing to live in the shadows. And when your country kind of like mumbles in your presence about like your very existence, that can mean a lot for the military protection you receive. That can mean a lot for the federal support. I mean, there's all kinds of ways in which that might be a queasy situation.

There's one detail that I think about all the time, which is like you mentioned that at the onset of World War II, you were more likely to be a colonial subject of the American empire than you were to be a black person, which is a bananas thing. It shows you about the scope of how much we don't know about this. because the story of, you know, black folks sort of, like, struggle for self-determination in this country is, like, so central to the story we tell ourselves that there's other sort of struggles that are happening alongside of it that are sort of invisibleized. And that was really inspirational for me because, you know, it used to be the case decades, decades ago that U.S. historians just told the history of the United States as the history of white people.

And then we had this, you know, long fight in my profession. again, this is quite a while ago, about whether the experience of African Americans is relevant to the large telling of the story. And boy, did we win that fight. Like, that is just absolute, like, absolute victory. Like, everyone understands that if you're going to tell the history of the United States,

like you can't explain anything unless you understand the position of black people within the United States. Yet when it comes to the overseas territories, even though at various points, there have been significantly more colonized people than black people in the country, they just sort of just, like, slide off the edge the map. And the notion that, you know, you would need to think about the colonies to explain anything

is almost foreign to us, despite the fact that, like, World War II starts for the United States when Japan attacks a territory of the United States, Hawaii. And then, and we hardly ever talk about this, goes on to attack many of the other U.S. territories, like, the same day. Like, we never even talk about the fact that the Philippines got attacked that day. And that's just a measure of the way in which the colonies just sort of, it's not just that you have subordinated. populations, it's that you have subordinated populations who, like, just don't rank in historical consciousness for most people in the United States. I mean, the truth is that, look, if by empire you mean a polity that has, like, different rules for different places, like a hierarchical

polity in which there's, like, a center where, like, the good rules hold, and then there's an edge where the less good rules hold. That's the United States. And, like, it's really hard to find any other word for it. The words that U.S. leaders like to use are, they often get very euphemistic. territories and holdings, possessions. But, like, I don't really know what else to call it if you're zooming out. So I think we should just be forthright about that, that the United States has always been, just in the strictest sense, an empire. And I don't even mean that as a moral charge.

Often when we say that, we mean, like, oh, the United States, it's so naughty. It is an empire. You know, and, like, Star Wars is about, like, fighting galactic empires and all that. Look, I'm no fan of imperialism as a form of government. but I think we actually just need to be more okay admitting that the United States has and continues to be in many ways, like just in the technical sense and empire. And that's not just bad, although, you know, I'm happy to welcome that moral judgment. It's also really interesting and it's really telling about the history of the country.

So you said territories and holdings. And that like is part of this sort of very intentional effort to not call them colonies. So can you talk about why the United States, even at the like sort of the height of colonialism in the early 20th century, late 19th century, the United States was like sort of keeping his distance, keeping that term collidy at arm's length. Yeah, it's interesting because there is like a brief moment around 1898, which is when the United States

starts seizing a lot of overseas territories or a lot of populace overseas territories. In that really quick moment, colony is not a bad word. And like Teddy Roosevelt uses it and like Woodrow Wilson used it. But then like by about World War I, so like the 1910s, it's really hard to find governing officials talking forthrightly about colonies. And occasionally you can find them saying things like,

we don't really use the C word around here. We have other ways of saying it. And I think that's because it's hard for the United States to square the story that it tells about itself and that it uses when it is presenting itself internationally with the fact that it has colonies. Because like a lot of, you know, in the 20th century, a lot of this way in which the United States

sought to legitimize itself as a global power, you can trust us, we're different from, you know, the bad old British or the French, is that the United States was uniquely untainted by empire. And that's why it's okay for it to like have the, you know, world's most powerful military. That's why it's okay for it to have 750 military bases spread around the world. I think just empirically that's like an incorrect claim, but it's been a really important one for the U.S.

I mean, you mentioned the military bases around the world. And it is like a thing we take as a given as American citizens, right? like, oh, we just have, we just have military bases in Germany, in the UAE, right? That's normal. That's just normal, right? Like, you know, you point out, like, if there was a French military base in Texas, we'd be like, what the... We'd be losing our minds.

Right, right, right. Oh, my God. Or a Chinese base, you know, like... Oh, my God, right. Just like, what are, you know, and unsurprisingly, that is often how other people have reacted when the United States stations its own bases in their country. We think of these bases as just, like, in fact, we don't usually think about it. about them in the United States. They're just kind of there humming in the background.

Unless you know someone who was stationed there or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. Like most people don't know how many they are. In fact, we don't know how many there are because the U.S. military won't tell us. So we think it's roughly 750. But these bases have been enormously contentious. So like one really good example is what was the thing that Osama bin Laden was most mad about? It was the stationing of U.S. military troops in Saudi Arabia, the holy land that contains Mecca and Medina. Like that was his rink. rallying cry. And fine.

I mean, like, you know, I'm no big Osama London fan. But that's a really, like, that's a thing that the U.S. does a lot that tends to irritate or infuriate people around the world just like time and time. Again, there's been two Japanese prime ministers

who've ended up losing power over domestic arguments about dealing with U.S. bases in Japan. They're arguing in favor of keeping the, having the bases, or? Well, I mean, you're often put in this awkward position if you're leading a country that hosts the base because you're getting a lot of pressure and that could be economic and that could be military from the United States to open the base and you might get inducements to agree to it. But, you know, then once the base is open, there's going to be

U.S. service members and they're going to be like driving jeeps around and every once in a while those jeeps run over someone. And then like you try to try them in your courts, but the U.S. military doesn't want like U.S. service members tried in Japanese courts so that they're tried on the base. And then like everyone gets really upset. And that happens time and time and time. time again. So it becomes really hard for a lot of world leaders to square the U.S. basing empire with what they owe to their constituents. And they have different ways of resolving it. But like those tensions just keep coming up again and again. What kind of cultures and economies like pop up around these bases like all around the world? Like what like what is the sort of

relationship the people who stay on the bases have to I imagine it's different depending on the place, but have to the people who live there? Yeah, I got really interested in this. So I mean, I think the sort of general 20th century into the 21st century base experience is that you've got people from the United States who often have like more money and more disposable income and they have a fair amount of like legal privilege because they can just sort of walk into the night and be like fairly certain that they'll be protected by the U.S. And so they they have a kind of local power and they often are walking around with their pockets brimming with U.S. dollars. And so what you tend to see around the base is,

is like quick developments of service economies. So sex work, music, just all kinds of ways of like separating those Yankees from their dollars. I mean, you sort of anticipated this question, but like who is protected and exploited in these places where there are bases? Like especially when I guess those bases are near places the United States might be threatening or like inactive conflict with? Yeah, so there's two ways this goes. Like one is what is it like to be around the base itself? And that's often a peacetime economy, an unequal peacetime economy, where some people have more illegal protections in money than others.

And you can imagine how that works. But the point of the basis is not just for stationing. The ideally there for threat posturing and potentially to be used in war. And this is what allows the United States to move its troops, move its planes, just like quickly to any part of the planet. So it's not just the kind of political issues about the basis being, you know, in your country that might be difficult. Think about like Iran, which, you know, at various times, has felt surrounded by countries that host U.S. bases. And in some ways, then feels surrounded by the U.S., feels threatened and has a whole politics around the great Satan and the ways in which the United States poses unique threats to Iran.

And that becomes a big part of, like, a legitimating part of the Islamic Republic is that like it is anti-imperialist standing up to the United States. And that's why you can trust us as a government. I mean, I want to talk about Iran, like just in the last few months, the United States have removed the president of Venezuela. We've attacked Iran. We suggested that we might, you know, make moves on Cuba. So I was surprised to read your piece in the New Yorker recently that argues that this military action that Trump administration is undertaking is not in service of maintaining this empire.

So, like, can you just walk us through your argument? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't want to suggest that Trump isn't, you know, violently lashing out. but I see him more as cannibalizing the empire than maintaining the empire. Say more about that. Yeah, I mean, so like,

U.S. presidents have been nervous about Iran, quite nervous about Iran, for decades. And we know now that they have privately talked about military strikes of this scale on Iran. And they've always held back. And you ask, okay, well, why? And we also know the answer to that. The reason they've held back isn't out of, you know,

humanitarian concern for the Iranian people or love of Iran. It's largely because they have a set of distributed interests around the Middle East. And they're like, okay, like we could bomb Iran. We certainly have the military capacity to do that. But, you know, if we did that and might shut down the Strait of Hormuz. You know, if the Iranian government collapses, that'd be a refugee crisis. Iran might counterattack the Gulf states. Like, there's all kinds of things that happen, which we're finding out. Yeah, which is all these things are happening. Right. When you attack Iran. And so it's not a lack of like ambition on the part. of other presidents, it's more that they are, they just have like a broader sense of the chessboard.

And they're like, the United States has such extensive world-spanning interests that you can't just think about one country, you have to think about the whole thing, because in some sense, the whole world is the backyard of the United States. And what's interesting about Trump is that he has really philosophically stood against that.

He's been very clear, like for decades, how much he doesn't like the idea that the United States would be the global policeman. He wants the United States just to be a competitor and a victorious competitor. And so for him, he's much more comfortable just saying, I don't like Iran, so I'm going to bomb it. There will be downstream consequences, but I don't really care because I'm not playing chess. Like, just let it happen. And in some ways, this is, weirdly, it's like, it's actually a relinquishing of a lot of forms of U.S. power that Trump is doing.

That just, like, devil may care. Like, who cares about the consequences? is in some ways that's like abandoning the notion that the United States has ongoing interest in controlling things in the Middle East. I was thinking about that. Like the United States' sort of role

in the maintaining the, I'm doing the air quotes, global order and have sort of required like some measure of restraints. Like you said, there's this giant chessboard. The people at the helm of the United States of this empire have to be cognizant of. But like the United States has acted unilaterally

even in the context of like this global order with like multilateral organizations, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I don't want to romanticize the idea that the United States has, like, has armed supremacy over the planet. And that has absolutely led past presidents into horrible wars and just, like, grievous mistakes. So, like, a really good example of that would be this sense that Dwight Eisenhower articulated, that the reason that a country like Vietnam is important is it's all connected.

For him, it wasn't a global chessboard. It was dominoes, right? One domino topples, they all topple. And so suddenly the United States, like, really has to care about Southeast Asia, even in the absence of like any direct security threat to the United States, even the absence of economic interests or direct economic interests of the United States, it has to care if Vietnam, like, goes a little socialist. And a lot of presidents have been kind of like drawn into that trap. So I think there's a way in which, you know, the pursuit of hegemony can can be a too much problem

and can lead to all kinds of excess and invasions and, you know, the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq is a really good example. With Trump, we're seeing the opposite. Trump has kind of relinquished a lot of the pursuit of hegemony. which from another president could be quite welcome. But with Trump, it's turned out to, like, remove some guardrails and has allowed him to do some things that past presidents have hesitated to do. So there's a sense that the U.S. Empire, the hegemon, is on the decline, right? Yeah, that Trump, you know, he's got his tariffs,

his sort of general sort of saber-rattling, is bringing that closer to fruition. Like, he's spinning that up. So Trump, like, from the 1980s, Trump has been a vocal critic of U.S. hegemony. And not a left-wing critic, like most critics, like I regard myself as a left-wing critic of U.S. he's been a right-wing critic. And his, like, left-wing critics usually say, U.S. hegemony isn't good for the world.

Right-wing critics say, it's not good for the United States. It's not paying out enough. Why are we spending all this money to, like, do a military empire that protects the people of Japan so that they don't have to develop their own nuclear weapons? Like, they're free-riding on us, that kind of thing. That's always been how Trump has. seen it. And interestingly, that's like compelling to a lot of voters at this point. But it's interesting that the argument is interesting because like so much of the American

economy is sort of like, you know, the fact that like the American economy is so robust, so broad like is because like of this projection, right? Like it's not, you kind of can't have American, the American economy booming the way that I imagine a lot of right wing critics of American empire would make it without the empire part of it, right? Maybe. I mean, so there is something that Trump is right about, which is that, you know, the whole like global economic order in which the United States has played a central role since World War II. You know, that, inarguably, that's paid out for the United States. But he's also right. He's like, oh, like, we've subsidized other countries. We've, like, tried to involve other

countries in our market, like, dealings, and we've tried to have, like, trade with them. And what are they doing? Now they're taking our jobs. So, like, the beneficiaries from this whole system, it's clear that, like, Asian countries, like, are on the upswing. And I think just as, like, humanitarian, we should be very happy about that. Um, you know, and it's, and And it's clear that, like, the global elite is doing fine. Like, you know, people was, you know, Trump levels, income levels. But it's also true that a lot of people in the United States, like, in the middle class and the working class, like, haven't seen the benefits since the 1970s of the global empire. So you're seeing this incredibly weird thing now where you get, like, these, like, defenders of U.S. hegemony being like, no, no, no, Trump, you don't understand.

This is all good for the United States. We claim just to be an impartial umpire. But in fact, like, this pays off. and you're going to destroy the whole thing, and we've been benefiting so much from this. So it's like a weird moment when, you know, unsaid things are coming out. All right, so Daniel, I mean,

this is kind of a big question, but like, what would it look like for the U.S. empire to come to an end? And for us Americans and for the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean, look, that's the question we're all asking because it seems that U.S. hegemony, it seems like it was already, you know,

on the decline before Trump got elected, and this kind of looks like to death. rattle of that. And one scared version of the story is, oh, no, this is really bad because we needed one country to sort of keep everyone in order. And without that, Romana, Pax, Americana. Yeah, Pax Americana. Yeah. And it's, what do you have in the absence of that? You have anarchy. Or sometimes the, um, you'll hear this. Or worse than anarchy, you'll get China or Russia doing the job. Do you want them to do the job? And those are real concerns. I really don't want to diminish them.

I think a more hopeful concern, and you heard this from Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, it's not even a concern. He's like, okay, this is a really violent and tricky period, but it's also a period of transition. And maybe what we're going to transition to

is a time where the world order is maintained not by one country, but by like a lot of medium countries working multilaterally. Like, that's kind of what we wanted, and this might be the moment we get it. And it is just an empirical question, like, what does the world minus U.S.

Hedemone look like? Does it look more equal and more democratic, or does it look more violent, either chaotic or authoritarian? And we don't know. So I'm scared of the first, but I'm actually hopeful about the second.

Daniel MFR is a historian at Northwestern and the author of the book How to Hide an Empire, A History of the Greater United States. Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate it. All right. Yeah.

Hey, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate this. And y'all, that is our show. This episode you're listening to right now was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Leidenella, and we will be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massive.

That's Christina Kala, Xavier Lopez, Dalia Mortata, Yolanda, Sanguini, M.B. A. Parker. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.

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