I suppose that every Royal Rascal that discovers himself to be powerful is tempted by the Devil to create an empire. And usually succumbs.

In the case of the U.S., I’d say that the Spanish-American war in 1898 was the test to see if the U.S. was powerful enough yet for empire. Then, in 1907, President Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world.

Painted white to signify peace, the fleet was a display of American naval power, showcasing the U.S. as an emerging global force.

So of course, you would expect a dull college president like President Woodrow Wilson to buy into the narrative that the U.S. was “an emerging global force” and jump into World War I in 1917 “to save the world for democracy,” and he did.

And of course, as you’d expect with a college president, Woodrow Wilson botched the peace in the subsequent punitive Treaty of Versailles, which led to the Federal Reserve’s first botched credit crisis in 1929, which led to Literally Hitler.

Then there was World War II, in which the U.S. cast itself in the starring role of not just saving democracy but annihilating Nazism. But, oh no! After World War II the U.S. found that the Communist Soviet Union had occupied half of Europe, so we had to rev the U.S. Empire up into overdrive to save the world from Communism.

No problem, because the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-91; so the Cold War was won.

Of course, after the defeat of Communism the political and administrative leaders of the U.S. didn’t step up to the mark and wind up the U.S. Empire. Instead, the institutions created to fight the Cold War waddled along into well-fed middle age and dined on the Middle East and then Ukraine. What’s the point of the State Department and the CIA and the whole USAID ecosystem if it isn’t meddling in other countries’ politics and manipulating regime change -- to save democracy?

Although well-fed, President Trump is no administrative bureaucrat. He lived his life “in the arena” of risk-taking business. And the rest of the world seems to be waking up to find that in the Trump Era they are not in Kansas anymore.

Here’s Gregory Copley:

U.S. President Donald Trump, during the first year of his second presidency, severely shook strategic relationships with key historical allies in the Anglosphere, the traditionally English-speaking societies of the world.

And the Canadians are really, really offended, so Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is really going to… Well, just wait and see: after all, Mark Carney in his former life was a great and powerful Oz central banker, so there!

Then there’s Aris Roussinos, who feels that the “West” is now paying for blindly following the U.S. into the future of the 1990s: letting manufacturing wither, advocating for human rights, saving the world for climate change, encouraging mass immigration because diversity is our strength.

Now “the West” finds that its blind followership has led to decline and decay. And the U.S. has elected a president who has pulled the plug on its post-WWII imperium. But how are, e.g., the Brits going to dig themselves out of the mess the U.S. led them into?

The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.

Oh no! Not the dreadful Nigel Farage! Yes, Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby has threatened to resign if Farage becomes Prime Minister.

Don’t worry, says Newt Gingrich. He realized in the 1980s that the Soviet Union was doomed because the “World War II Soviet military was being made obsolete by the information revolution.”

Now the world is changing again in the current technological revolution:

Ukraine will build 4 million drones this year, including autonomous vehicles capable of hitting targets 1,900 miles away.

I wonder if all those plump generals and admirals present at Quantico last week are up to the task. Did they play with toy drones and Minecraft when they were kids?

And I wonder if the rules of empire haven’t changed drastically. Used to be that emperors sent their Hoplites or legionaries or archers or Bluebellies or Doughboys or GIs off to war. So where does the Pentagon get its skilled drone operators and strategy game experts for the next war?

Or have the rules of the game completely changed, so that a great empire no longer sends armies into the field but rather startup entrepreneurs and tech gurus and VC capitalists and “art of the deal” businessmen to conquer the other economy? Today, economic imperialists like Elon Musk find that the kids are lining up at the door begging for a chance to be on the team to Occupy Mars.

Has any academic expert in critical theory researched the difference between Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Mars?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Thomas Cole