The Rise and Fall of Empires: Has America reached the Precipice?

Many American leaders are hesitant or flatly will not consider the United States as an empire. Part of such aversion is the fact that empires are ruled by a single powerful person, and they don’t envision that happening in a democracy like the United States. Past empires have been ruled by kings, queens, or emperors. Yet, America has been an imperial power since the beginning of the 20th century.

The second presidency of Donald J. Trump, however, is reshaping the very definition of empire as he tries to dismantle the Administrative State and usurp the power of the purse that is constitutionally vested to congress. Trump gave Americans a preview of what his second presidency would look like when he mentioned “manifest destiny” during his inaugural address. “We will plant the Stars and Stripes (the flag) on the planet Mars.” It’s quite a leap but you get the point – he plans to expand the American territory.

Manifest Destiny (aka American Expansionism) was championed by President William McKinley in the Philippine and Hawaii annexations and justified them through his “Benevolent Assimilation” policy believing that Filipinos were incapable of self-rule. He felt that he had a divine purpose for doing so by converting “pagan” Filipinos to Protestantism. His real purpose was to expand US trade and access to overseas natural resources for domestic trade.

Echoing McKinley’s imperialism push, Trump has been vocal about hostile take-overs of Greenland, the Panama Canal, Gaza, and Canada. His pitch for Mars echoes Elon Musk’s desire for dominance of the space industry. Trump also imposed tariffs as a weapon, much like his idol did.

These are not really Trump’s original ideas but are coming from influential oligarchs and others equally vested in dismantling the “deep state.” Trump, however, is not getting his wish easily as the courts had exercised an active role in preventing Trump’s ambitions. With a pliant Congress, however, Trump is already getting the royal treatment fit for a monarch.

Empires succeed when rulers enjoy popular support and Trump is capitalizing on the enormous support he got from the electorate in the last election. The primordial question now is, will Trump succeed with his ambitious agenda? Or will he cave in when Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the world fights back? Federal employees are in uproar with Trump’s closure of departments, deferred resignations, and placing people on administrative leave or fired.

Trump is not backing down believing, rightly or wrongly, that God saved him from assassination attempts during the campaign to “Make America Great Again.” As a side note, his idol President William McKinley was assassinated by a lone gunman, a blue-collar worker who lost his job and became an anarchist. The assassin deplored the idea that the president held enormous power that belonged to the people.

Will Trump’s ascendancy precipitate America’s fall from empire? The president of the United States is already the most powerful person in the world, but in a democracy, there is a thing called check and balances that provides guardrails for people like Trump. This time, however, the guardrails are gone with a pliant Congress and a conservative Supreme Court who gave him absolute power. Lord Acton’s adage that “absolute power corrupts and corrupts absolutely,” will come to life again, to remind people about unchecked power.

The last empire that collapsed was the Soviet Union, disintegrating into independent republics. The total collapse of the USSR was premeditated by people’s unrest due to economic stagnation and overextension of the military. Military expansionism and empire building is a costly business and require resources that the Union lacked. Mostly, however, it was rampant corruption that siphoned most of government resources.

There’s an old basic economic theory that you can either build more bombs or more margarines but doing both is not sustainable. The USSR built more bombs at the expense of butter. The people rebelled. Such is true in the decline and eventual fall of the longest running empire at 500 years – the Roman Empire. The fall of Rome is perhaps instructive to the present predicament.

The Roman Empire collapsed for reasons of its own doing and for creating its own enemy. Five centuries of hegemony lulled the Romans into thinking that the migrant foreigners from neighboring states (Slavic, German, Celtic, and others) who settled in Roman territories with or without permission were harmless. For centuries of peaceful contact with them and at some point, even drafted them into the Roman Army, who would have thought that someday they would depose the emperor?

The era of the Roman Empire was marked by corruption and decadence that the ordinary citizen no longer had the stomach for it, the drive, the will to defend their fatherland against the “illegal aliens” who came peacefully and took over the empire. The barbarian invasion was subtle, unlike when the Goths set Rome on fire decades before that motivated St. Augustine to write “The City of God.”

Trump’s dismantling of the Administrative State, replacing the expert civil servants running the government by loyalists willing to do his bidding sans the requisite talent and experience required of cabinet secretaries and their factotums, will probably be the impetus for Trump’s eventual fall from power and grace through the ballot. The mid-term election in 2026 will serve as a barometer on how fast republicanism will be restored in the United States.

The Empire needs to have two strong pillars to last: military and economy. The U.S. is already the most powerful military with the armature that can defeat any country now, including China and Russia. Economically, it is too. The U.S. achieved such a preeminent role at the end of the Cold War where it dictated the terms of the world’s liberal order. Modern wars, however, have shown that American power is in decline (Vietnam War, Afghanistan, and Iraq).

If Trump’s orthodoxy will hold, his domestic focus on immigration, the economy, and culture wars could precipitate upheaval from the working class. He has begun alienating with Tariff Wars with Mexico, Canada, China, and Europe. He wants less involvement with NATO, having already withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement.

With the United States retreating from international involvement (i.e. US AID), China is poised to fill the vacuum using hard and soft power and quietly applying them. Same is true with Russia. Trump’s overture to Russia’s Vladimir Putin will embolden the strongman to take another stab at Europe and probably usher in WWIII.

The U.S., however, will focus more on lethality as Trump’s Defense Secretary keeps saying. It is a coded word for production of more lethal and technologically advanced weapons to prop up the defense industry and expand the country’s weapons sales and arms dealership. The billionaires who supported Trump in the last election will stand to benefit during his term with profits soaring on the backs of working people.

English professor and historian Arnold Toynbee said it well, “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.”