The last two weeks have been intense. As Israel attacked Iran, Trump reversed his previous aversion to such an attack, and then ordered some air strikes of his own, the response and rhetoric from much of the American right was disheartening for many opponents of Washington’s endless wars.
There was never a serious expectation that Trump would effectively dismantle the warfare state by the time he left office. After all, his rhetoric in the lead-up to the election was often more hawkish against Iran and China than the political establishment. However, Trump’s occasional moment of sanity about foreign policy, his unusually genuine concern about causing needless deaths or risking nuclear war, and the utter panic his rise seemed to garner from establishment hawks had generated some hope that Trump represented some degree of change.
But then Trump succumbed to neoconservative pressure and gave in when Israel ignored his opposition to attacking Iran, publicly bragged that negotiations had been a ruse, ordered a direct military strike deep in Iran, and put out a post in support of regime change. The majority of his most vocal supporters fell right in line.
All of the progress that had appeared to have been made on the American right seemed to disappear overnight. Iran hawks like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro were gloating about the success of their effort to steer Trump away from the “dangerous isolationism” taking root on the right. Reporting indicated that the hawkish hosts at Fox News were exerting the most influence over the president’s thinking. And firm Never Trumpers like establishment hawk Adam Kinzinger and neoconservative Bill Kristol were heaping praise on the man they claim to believe is single-handedly bringing fascism to America.
Even after Iran coordinated a symbolic, de-escalatory response and Trump—thankfully—reversed course again and came out in favor of peace, the episode still poured cold water on the idea that the neoconservative faction is no longer a viable political force within the GOP.
Time will tell whether these past two weeks turn out to be nothing more than a tragic and unnecessary, but limited, loss of life and trust in future negotiations or, worse, a step down the path toward an eventual full-on war with Iran. But it is worth remembering that opposing the warfare state and pushing for a radical change in direction is not just worthwhile but the most important front in the battle for the future of the United States.
The United States is, after all, an empire. It is the most dominant empire in the world right now, by far. It exerts direct and indirect control over a staggering amount of the planet. But the unprecedented size and scope of the modern American empire shouldn’t fool us. Our situation is far from unique.
Human history is littered with empires. And all share some important characteristics. To start, all empires are relatively wealthy. Because building and maintaining an empire is expensive. So, as Hans Herman-Hoppe has explained, by necessity, every society that eventually went on to become an empire began with a period of dramatic wealth creation. And both economic history and theory make it very clear that periods of dramatic wealth creation are caused specifically by a market division of labor, a robust capital structure, and subsequent improvements in technology—all coordinated by entrepreneurs operating under a private property norm and a reliable, sound monetary system.
In other words, for a society to become successful enough to even consider developing into an empire, it must first adopt the institutions of private property and sound money. Only then can the market process kick into a high enough gear to generate the kind of wealth needed to fund the state’s imperial ambitions.
Indeed, if you study empires from history, you’ll always find an early phase of relative political decentralization and a greater respect for private property than surrounding societies. For classical empires that happened during the misnamed Greek Dark Ages and the early days of the Roman Republic. European empires, such as the British and the French, were fueled by the extreme political decentralization and strong legal and cultural institutions of the Middle Ages. And the United States exploded onto the world stage thanks largely to a century of extremely limited government that followed its founding.
Of course, there are innumerable other factors involved in determining how history unfolds. But institutions that generate wealth are always there to fuel the societies that become empires. However, it doesn’t last. Because the process of turning a society into an empire attacks the very institutions that made the society wealthy in the first place.
Political institutions are centralized into a single strong state. That state then expands out and attempts to rule over people further and further away from both the location and demographic of the ruling class. That expansion is carried out and conserved through war. And, as the state attempts to control more territory, subjects, and foreign adversaries, these wars become significantly more expensive. They require more resources and money to be siphoned out of the domestic economy through taxes, debt, debasement, or inflation.
And taxes, debt, debased currency, and the inflation it causes begin to rot away at the institutions society is built on. It doesn’t all collapse immediately. After all, the institutions that precede empires are strong and can deal with the initial drain. That allows imperial states to act like they alone have brought about a period of national glory when, in fact, all they’re doing is embarking on a spending spree with previously generated wealth. But, as history has shown over and over again, that rot festers and spreads as the state tries to build on, maintain, and eventually return to that period of national glory by doubling down on its imperial project.
As Pat Buchanan put it, war is “how empires perish.” It is how the classical empires perished. It is how the British, French, Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires perished. And it will be how the American empire perishes—unless we do something about it.
That is far from easy. The American political class has amassed a tremendous amount of wealth and power due to its empire-building. Highly-organized and well-funded pressure groups representing weapons companies and foreign governments are constantly pushing to draw more wealth away from the American people to buy and use more weapons in more conflicts all around the world.
But beneath all of that, the true source of fuel for the Washington war machine is not some department or foreign lobby. It’s an idea. The idea is that it is our government’s role to uphold and defend a liberal international order and, further, that our government alone is capable of taking on that supposedly sacred burden.
The people actually running our government have made it very clear through their actions that they do not actually subscribe to this idea. They have been quick to violate the so-called liberal principles they claim to be upholding whenever it suited them to do so. But it has proven to be a very useful story to get the American public to accept the constant expansion of the warfare state. It is the founding myth of the American empire.
If we’re ever going to escape this imperial death spiral, that myth needs to be abandoned. The American people need to understand that a single government enforcing world peace at gunpoint is neither a realistic nor desirable ideal. And that our government’s actions taken in the name of this ideal have only harmed our country and set us on the path to our own destruction.
Tearing down and replacing a near-universally-accepted idea is not easy. And it does not happen quickly. It takes a lot of time, requires a lot of work, and involves plenty of setbacks. That is to be expected.
If it were easy, history wouldn’t be full of empires expanding and collapsing into depressing shells of their former selves. The sheer volume of impressive societies that were unable to avoid that fate should dispel you of the notion that a few years of podcasting is all that’s needed to reverse course.
This has been and will be a long battle. But it’s a battle worth fighting. We are an empire that can opt out of its decline, recommit to the institutions responsible for its success, and avoid all the misery that comes from the late stages of imperial collapse. Don’t let a setback or some disappointing rhetoric from government officials discourage you. There’s work to do.
