American imperialism

• 1. Introduction

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  American imperialism is the exercise of power by the United States outside its borders. In 1786, then-private citizen George Washington described his new nation as an "infant empire". Within a generation, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the United States "must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be peopled." The questions those words raise are still being argued today. How did a nation born in rebellion against an overseas king come to circle the globe with hundreds of military bases? How did a republic that championed freedom justify removing sixty thousand people from their homes on the Trail of Tears, or propping up dictatorships from Guatemala to Indonesia? And when does foreign policy end and empire begin? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Land and Conquest

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  The 1830 Indian Removal Act set in motion the forcible relocation of sixty thousand Native Americans west of the Mississippi River, a journey that killed sixteen thousand seven hundred people. That act was the sharpest expression of a philosophy already baked into the republic: manifest destiny, the popular 19th century belief that American expansion was not just natural but inevitable.

  The land itself was taken in immense pieces. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase transferred eight hundred twenty-eight thousand square miles from France. The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 added another five hundred twenty-five thousand square miles stretching from Texas to the Pacific. Alaska came in 1867 when the Andrew Johnson administration paid Russia for its six hundred sixty-five thousand three hundred eighty-four square miles.

  In California, that expansion carried a particular brutality. Estimates of deaths in what historians call the California genocide range from two thousand to one hundred thousand. The state government enabled the killing through the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which legalized forced indenture of Native Americans. Some California towns paid bounties for killings.

  In Colorado, six chiefs of the Southern Cheyenne and four of the Arapaho signed the Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861, surrendering ninety percent of their land. Warriors who refused to recognize the treaty unsettled settlers, and the resulting Colorado War included the Sand Creek Massacre, in which up to six hundred Cheyenne were killed, mostly women and children.

  The Dawes Act of 1887 delivered a final blow to Indigenous land tenure by replacing communal holdings with private property. Between 1887 and 1934, roughly one hundred million acres passed out of Native American hands.

• 3. The Logic of New Imperialism

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  In 1898, Senator Albert Beveridge stated the commercial argument plainly: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."

  Theodore Roosevelt, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy before becoming president, was instrumental in preparing for the Spanish-American War. He told colleagues that Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden", written for him directly, was "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Roosevelt rejected the word imperialism but embraced expansionism, and the distinction mattered to him more than it did to those on the receiving end.

  Philosopher Fiske's conviction in "Anglo-Saxon" racial superiority and clergyman Strong's call to "civilize and Christianize" other peoples provided ideological cover. Social Darwinism supplied an academic framework. And investment interests supplied the money: American capital flowing into Cuba's sugar, Hawaii's pineapple, and Central American bananas meant that protecting those investments and expanding markets were inseparable goals.

  In Hawaii, the sequence was especially transparent. King Kalakaua signed a tariff-free sugar treaty with the United States in 1885. Then in 1887 the Hawaiian League, an illegal secret society, threatened him into signing a constitution that stripped him of most of his power. After his death in 1891, his sister Queen Lili'uokalani took the throne. She was deposed in 1893 in a bloodless coup supported by marines from the USS Boston. Hawaii became a US territory and eventually the fiftieth state in 1959.

• 4. Economic Infrastructure of Empire

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  In October 1940, geographer Isaiah Bowman wrote to President Roosevelt that "the US government is interested in any solution anywhere in the world that affects American trade. In a wide sense, commerce is the mother of all wars." By 1942 that view had hardened into a secret policy document articulating the "Grand Area" concept: under that plan the United States would seek control over the Western Hemisphere, Continental Europe, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Far East, and the British Empire.

  The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement established an international currency system and created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Political economy scholar Adam Hanieh notes that by the mid-1950s, the US controlled sixty percent of world manufacturing and twenty-five percent of global GDP, while housing forty-two of the world's fifty largest industrial corporations.

  After the 1973 oil crisis quadrupled oil prices, petrodollars flooded into the US financial system and were lent outward to developing nations. According to the IMF, the foreign debt of one hundred non-oil-exporting developing nations surged by one hundred fifty percent between 1973 and 1977. When the "Volcker Shock" of high US interest rates made repayments unsustainable, those nations accepted IMF and World Bank bailout packages conditioned on privatization, deregulation, and cuts to public spending. The forced sale of state assets allowed US and other Western corporations to acquire resources at discounted prices. By 2004, the world's poorest countries had paid an estimated four point six trillion dollars in debt service to the wealthiest nations.

  A cornerstone of this structure was the petrodollar arrangement with Saudi Arabia. In exchange for US security guarantees, Saudi Arabia priced oil exclusively in US dollars, displacing British sterling and making the dollar the primary international reserve currency. Saudi oil revenues were then channeled back into US Treasury securities, and the Gulf region became a primary market for US military exports.

• 5. Intervention and Regime Change

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  General Smedley Butler, the most-decorated Marine of his era, delivered a frank assessment in 1933: "I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism... I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in... Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

  Butler's seven overseas armed interventions under President Wilson included Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, Mexico, and Honduras. The US invaded Haiti on the 28th of July, 1915, and administered it until 1934.

  In Iran, the parliament voted in March 1951 to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, whose revenues from Iranian oil exceeded the entire Iranian government budget. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected on that platform. In late 1952, the CIA launched a coup via Operation Ajax with British support. The Shah then replaced the nationalized company with a consortium of BP and eight European and American oil companies. In August 2013, the US formally acknowledged its role in the coup, including bribing Iranian politicians, security, and army officials.

  In Guatemala, the Guatemalan Revolution expanded labor rights and land reforms that redistributed property to landless peasants. Lobbying by the United Fruit Company, whose profits were damaged by those policies, helped push the US toward Operation PBFortune to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz in 1952. The US provided weapons to exiled officer Carlos Castillo Armas for an invasion from Nicaragua, culminating in the 1954 Guatemalan coup. The subsequent military junta banned opposition parties and reversed social reforms. The US continued to support Guatemala throughout the Cold War, including during a genocide in which up to two hundred thousand people were killed.

  In Indonesia, after the murder of six army generals that Suharto blamed on the Communist Party, an anti-communist purge killed up to one million people. Declassified documents released in October 2017 showed that the US government had detailed knowledge of the massacres. Historian Bradley Simpson described the cables and reports as containing "damning details that the U.S. was willfully and gleefully pushing for the mass murder of innocent people." By 1967, companies including Freeport Sulphur, Goodyear, General Electric, American Express, and Lockheed Martin were exploring business opportunities in Indonesia.

• 6. Oil, Bases, and Military Architecture

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  A US State Department analysis concluded that Saudi Arabia's oil resources "constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated that "the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States."

  In 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that anyone controlling the flow of Middle Eastern oil would hold a "stranglehold" over the US economy and "that of most of the other nations of the world as well."

  Energy analysts describe Saudi Arabia's oil spare capacity as "the energy equivalent of nuclear weapons." In the mid-1980s, at the request of CIA Director William J. Casey, Saudi Arabia used that capacity to crash global oil prices to ten dollars a barrel, a drop of more than fifty percent. According to Christopher M. Davidson, this price collapse led to the implosion of the Soviet oil industry and accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

  The physical architecture of this strategy rested on bases. In 1953, the National Security Council document NCS-162/2 stated that striking power depended "for the foreseeable future on having bases in allied countries." By 2003, the US had bases in over thirty-six countries. The Department of Defense reported five hundred eighty-seven bases in 2015; an independent count found eight hundred, including one hundred seventy-four in Germany, one hundred thirteen in Japan, and eighty-three in South Korea. Some, like Ramstein Air Base, are city-sized, with schools, hospitals, and power plants. As of 2024, approximately one hundred sixty thousand active-duty US personnel were deployed outside the United States and its territories.

  Political theorist James Burnham observed on the eve of NATO that a federation "in which one of them leads... and holds the decisive instrument of material power, is in reality an empire." Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later described three goals of US geostrategy: "to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

• 7. Debate Over the Name

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  The phrase "American empire" appeared more than one thousand times in news stories between November 2002 and April 2003 alone. Two major academic journals, History and Theory and Daedalus, each devoted a special issue to empires in 2005.

  The debate is old. Historians such as Donald W. Meinig and Charles A. Beard viewed the entire westward expansion as imperialism. Historian Paul Kennedy stated that "from the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation." Daniel Immerwahr considered the territorial expansion across North America at the expense of Native Americans to fit the definition squarely.

  Others drew lines. Pat Buchanan, writing in 1999, contrasted the earlier continental expansion with what he saw as a later, different drive toward empire. The US Army War College, in a 2005 study of empires, classed the American Empire as accidental and defensive rather than intentional and aggressive, driven by the need to contain Soviet Communism.

  After September 11, commentators who once decried US overseas actions began arguing instead for explicit imperial power. Niall Ferguson concluded that US military and economic power had elevated the country into history's most powerful empire, while fearing that the US lacked the long-term commitment to maintain it. Max Boot advocated openly for the US to seek empire.

  Noam Chomsky offered a different framing: in 2008 he stated that "the US is the one country... that was founded as an empire explicitly," and argued in a 2003 book that following World War II, the US sought to reestablish the former colonial world as a service appendage to the global capitalist system. Critic William Blum argued that in almost all US interventions in the Third World since World War II, the target was overthrowing "a policy of 'self-determination'." Thomas Friedman, writing in 1999, made the structural point directly: "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas," and the global success of Silicon Valley is ultimately secured by the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.