The end of the American Empire

ELI5 / TLDR

There’s a meme about how often men think about the Roman Empire. The host’s pitch: nobody thinks enough about the American one. Historian Daniel Immerwahr argues the United States has always been an empire in the plain dictionary sense — a country with different rules for different places, holding colonies and 750-odd military bases worldwide — but it has spent a century refusing to say the word. The twist: Trump, a lifelong critic of America playing global policeman, isn’t expanding the empire. He’s eating it. And nobody quite knows what the world looks like once the empire is gone.

The Full Story

The country that won’t say “colony”

Immerwahr wrote How to Hide an Empire after a trip to Manila knocked something loose. He already knew, as a trained US historian, that America had ruled the Philippines for about 50 years. Knowing it on paper and standing on a street named after a US president are two different things.

It’s like reading the lyrics and hearing the music.

The standard US history class, he says, has a chapter set around 1898 where America grabs a handful of overseas places — and then those places vanish from the story. Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, Samoa: colonized, then dropped off the edge of the map. Ask one simple question and the whole map redraws itself.

His working definition of empire is deliberately unromantic. Not mustachioed men in pith hats — that’s the British costume drama Americans picture so they can say “we never did that.” An empire is just a polity with a hierarchy: a center where the good rules apply, and edges where weaker rules apply. By that test, the US qualifies on day one and every day since.

It’s really hard to find any other word for it.

He’s careful that this isn’t a moral accusation, or not only one. The euphemisms — territories, holdings, possessions — exist precisely to dodge the technical word. He’d rather just call it what it is, because the honest version makes for far better history.

The detail that reframes everything

Here’s the fact that does the heavy lifting. At the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there were more colonial subjects of the United States living overseas than there were Black Americans living in the country.

That same day Japan also bombed US bases across the Pacific — the Philippines, Guam, Wake. Americans learn about Pearl Harbor. They almost never learn the Philippines got hit the same morning. Immerwahr’s point isn’t that these populations were merely subordinate. It’s that they don’t even register in the national memory.

They just sort of slide off the edge of the map.

He draws a pointed contrast with the history of Black Americans. US historians once told the country’s story as the story of white people, then fought a long battle to establish that you cannot explain America without understanding the position of Black people in it. That fight was won decisively. The equivalent recognition for the colonies never happened.

The bases nobody counts

There are roughly 750 US military bases worldwide. “Roughly,” because the military won’t give an exact number. To most Americans they hum quietly in the background — Germany, the UAE, wherever — and feel like furniture. Flip it: imagine a French base in Texas, or a Chinese one. The reaction would not be calm.

That’s exactly how host countries often feel. Osama bin Laden’s original rallying cry was US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, near Mecca and Medina. Two Japanese prime ministers lost power over fights about American bases. The pattern is grimly repetitive: the US pressures a country to host a base, sweetens the deal, and then American service members live there with legal privileges locals don’t get. Every so often a jeep runs someone over, the US refuses to let its people be tried in local courts, and the resentment compounds.

Around the bases, a lopsided peacetime economy springs up — sex work, music, a whole service sector built to separate Yankees from their dollars. The people inside carry more money and more legal protection than the people outside. And the bases aren’t just for stationing; they’re the machinery that lets America move troops and planes anywhere on the planet quickly. Iran, ringed by base-hosting neighbors, has built an entire national politics — the “great Satan,” the anti-imperial Islamic Republic — around feeling surrounded.

Trump isn’t running the empire. He’s eating it.

This is the argument that surprised the host. The first months of 2026 have been loud: troops to Venezuela, its president removed, threats over its natural resources, an escalating war with Iran, noises about Cuba. Looks like empire flexing. Immerwahr reads it the opposite way.

I see him more as cannibalizing the empire than maintaining the empire.

Past presidents privately wanted to strike Iran for decades and held back — not out of love for Iran, but because they were playing chess. Bomb Iran and you might close the Strait of Hormuz, trigger a refugee crisis, invite counterattacks on the Gulf states. The whole world was America’s backyard, so you had to think about the whole board.

Trump has stood against that worldview for forty years. He doesn’t want America to be the global policeman; he wants it to be a competitor that wins. So his logic is simpler: I don’t like Iran, so I bomb it, and the downstream consequences aren’t my problem. Removing the chessboard removes the restraint. Immerwahr — who calls himself a left-wing critic of US hegemony — notes the irony. From a different president, dropping the policeman role might be welcome. From Trump, it just strips out the guardrails.

Left critics and right critics want the same exit

Trump has criticized US hegemony since the 1980s, but from the right. Left critics say hegemony is bad for the world. Right critics say it’s bad for America — we subsidize Japan’s defense so they don’t build their own nukes, they free-ride, they take our jobs. That pitch lands with a lot of voters now, and for an uncomfortable reason: the global economic order has paid off handsomely for the US as a whole, but the American working and middle class haven’t felt the gains since the 1970s. The winners were Asian economies on the rise and a global elite. So you now get the strange spectacle of hegemony’s defenders quietly admitting the empire pays — the quiet part said out loud.

What’s on the other side

The big question: what does the world look like with no US hegemon? Immerwahr lays out two stories. The scared one is Pax Americana’s collapse into anarchy — or worse, China or Russia stepping into the vacancy. He won’t dismiss it.

The hopeful one he borrows from Canadian PM Mark Carney: a violent, tricky transition toward a world order held up not by one country but by many medium-sized countries working multilaterally. Arguably what a lot of people always claimed to want.

Does it look more equal and more democratic, or does it look more violent, either chaotic or authoritarian? And we don’t know.

He’s scared of the first and hopeful about the second. He doesn’t pretend to know which one arrives.

Key Takeaways

“Empire” here means something precise and undramatic: one country, different rules for different places. By that test the US has always qualified.
The euphemisms — territory, holding, possession — are the tell. A country comfortable with its empire wouldn’t need them.
At Pearl Harbor, US colonial subjects outnumbered Black Americans. The colonies were attacked the same day and still barely register in national memory.
~750 overseas bases (exact count withheld) are the empire’s load-bearing infrastructure, and a recurring source of foreign resentment.
Immerwahr’s central claim: Trump is cannibalizing the empire, not extending it — removing the strategic restraint that kept past presidents from acting on impulses they all had.
Left and right both want out of hegemony for opposite reasons, and the gains never reached the American middle class.
The post-hegemony world could go multilateral-and-better or chaotic-and-worse. Genuinely unknown.

Claude’s Take

This is a smart, well-packaged conversation, and Immerwahr is a genuinely good historian doing what good historians do — taking a fact everyone technically knows and making you feel its weight. The “reading the lyrics versus hearing the music” framing is the whole episode in one line. The Pearl Harbor statistic is the kind of thing that reorganizes a mental model in real time, and it’s true.

Where to keep a hand on your wallet: the Trump-is-cannibalizing-the-empire thesis is elegant and probably half-right, but it’s also a tidy narrative built mid-event, with the host openly cueing him toward it. “He’s eating the empire” is a great line; whether it survives contact with what actually happens in the Strait of Hormuz is another matter. Immerwahr is admirably honest about his own left politics, which is more than most guests offer, but it does mean the framing leans a particular way — “decline” is doing a lot of work, and reasonable people argue America is reconfiguring rather than collapsing.

The definitional move is the strongest part and the weakest part at once. Defining empire as “different rules for different places” is clarifying, but it’s also broad enough to catch a lot of federal states that nobody would call empires. The honest answer is that the US is a genuinely odd hybrid, and “empire” captures more of it than the textbook silence does — which is Immerwahr’s actual, defensible point.

A 7. Substantive, quotable, occasionally myth-busting, and refreshingly upfront about what it doesn’t know. Docked for being a current-events thesis dressed as settled history, and for the usual NPR thing where the host’s framing and the guest’s politics quietly agree before the conversation starts.

The end of the American Empire | It's Been a Minute