by Steve Bonta from the January 27, 2025 issue of TheNewAmerican.com magazine.
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God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
— Recessional, Rudyard Kipling
One year after Kipling’s cautionary hymn of imperial hubris scandalized Victorian England in 1897, America went to war with Spain following a mysterious explosion that destroyed a warship, the USS Maine, anchored at Havana Harbor. The Spanish-American War was brief and decisive, leaving the victorious United States in control of Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The war brought to a final end four centuries of Spanish colonial rule in the New World and the Pacific, and left the United States as the world’s newest global imperial power. The “splendid little war,” as then-Secretary of State John Hay characterized it, was partly motivated by American support for Filipino and Cuban freedom fighters trying to shake off the Spanish yoke. No small irony, then, that both the Filipinos and the Cubans (especially the former) soon found themselves arrayed against a new imperial master, one perhaps more benign than its predecessor, but no less resolved to impose its will in the name of civilizing influence.
One American unimpressed with this newly acquired imperial prestige was maverick Yale professor and essayist William Graham Sumner. In a caustic essay first published in Yale Law Journal entitled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” Sumner argued that, military victories aside, the Spanish-American War amounted to a fatal surrender of traditional American noninterventionism to the colonial system of the Old World — a system first developed, and most doggedly applied, by the Spanish monarchy. Wrote Sumner:
Spain was the first, for a long time the greatest, of the modern imperialistic states. The United States, by its historical origin, its traditions, and its principles, is the chief representative of the revolt and the reaction against that kind of state…. By the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of the Spanish symbol. We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies.
Indeed, subsequent decades saw America wage a bloody war against Filipino insurgents, establish a permanent military base in Cuba, and absorb both Puerto Rico and Guam as overseas territories. What Sumner and his anti-imperialist contemporaries did not foresee was the demise of colonialism along Spanish, British, and French lines by the middle of the 20th century, World War II proving the final nail in the coffin. The United States, along with the European colonial powers, divested herself of her overseas colonies (in our case, the Philippines), resulting in a welter of newly minted independent countries in South and Southeast Asia, in Oceania, and in Africa.
The demise of colonialism ushered in the rise of a new age, the age of the superpower, in which overt conquest and colonization were replaced with military bases, financial hegemony, and networks of nominally independent client regimes allied to either the United States or the Soviet Union.
During the bipolar era of the Cold War, the United States and her superpower rival, the Soviet Union, jockeyed for supremacy all over the world. That period ended with the disintegration of the USSR and its entire sphere of interest in the early 1990s, leaving the United States, for a time, as the world’s only superpower. The emergence of China and recrudescence of Russian power and assertiveness have given rise to a world dominated by three superpowers, with the United States now consumed with the challenge of summoning enough power to offset its two superpower rivals simultaneously.
Foe of empire: Yale professor William Graham Sumner opposed the Spanish-American War, which began after the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. Sumner claimed that the ideology of Spanish imperialism was the real victor in the war. (AP Images)
Modern Idol: Superpower
For several generations, no axiom of American politics has enjoyed broader and more enduring bipartisan consensus than that America’s destiny must be to forever remain a superpower. We are, goes the received wisdom, the only truly benign hegemon in world history, thrust by destiny into our anointed role as global guarantor of peace, stability, and prosperity. Scarcely a dissentient voice anywhere on the political spectrum has ever questioned whether America should have become a superpower in the first place or whether America should remain determined never to relinquish the role voluntarily.
The term “superpower” is comparatively modern, and has only been applied to a few states in our time. Similar in some respects to more traditional descriptors of large and powerful states, such as “empire” and “hegemon,” “superpower” refers less to a system of government, or even the degree to which a government can extend its rule, than to the ability and willingness to project power, both military and economic. A superpower by definition is able to project power globally, and is viewed as having an exceptional role in power politics, international finance, and trade.
For modern America, her superpower status has always been contingent on two circumstances: her unparalleled military might and the status of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. America’s world-engirding military forces allow her to project power almost anywhere, backed by the ultimate military ace in the hole, her nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the fact that the U.S. dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement has meant that the United States has enjoyed an unnatural ascendancy over global finances, dictating terms to countries whose currencies are not on as sound a footing, and exporting some of the effects of her inflationary policies abroad.
America as the world’s greatest superpower has had the luxury of conducting policy almost entirely on her own terms for several generations, all the while insulated from the harsher aspects of the military, political, and economic misfortunes that periodically roil the affairs of most other nations. We have had setbacks in war and in economic fortunes, to be sure. But over the past 80 years, no foreign adversary has breached our national defenses, and no economic downdraft has destroyed our commerce and our finances. Unlike Ukraine, the nations of the Middle East, and many of the nations of Africa, we have been spared the horrors of war on our own soil. And unlike Argentina, Zimbabwe, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Russia, and many other modern countries, we have not suffered the agonies of economic and financial collapse.
And yet — with the exception of the Civil War — the same could be said of the United States during much of the 19th century. America then, as now, was a peaceful, prosperous land of opportunity, free of the agonizing uncertainties of Old World politics, wars, intrigues, and constant economic hardship. But 19th-century America was not a superpower.
It is no coincidence that pre-superpower America was also in closest conformity to the constitutional republican form of government enjoined by the Founders. To be sure, there were irregularities even back then: The grotesque illiberality of slavery and the often inhumane and duplicitous treatment of American Indians, the expansionist war against Mexico, the dictatorial measures of the Lincoln administration during the Civil War, and the genesis of America’s overseas empire with the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 all stand as inkblots on the parchment of 19th-century American history. But these spasmodic affronts to republicanism were the exception, not the rule. Americans during that time (and well into the 20th century, for that matter) paid no federal taxes, dealt with no federal bureaucracy other than the post office, lived their lives free of government surveillance and censorship, and conducted their business affairs largely as they saw fit, starting enterprises free of the onerous yoke of regulatory compliance and burdensome quarterly taxes and expressing their opinions without fear of “cancellation” or other forms of public reprisal. Inflation was almost nonexistent, and most people prospered by accumulating savings, including gold and silver coin that was once the token of the realm. In those days, the list of federal crimes was very small, and federal law enforcement had a minimal role. Outside of large cities, law enforcement was mostly carried out by popularly elected sheriffs and their deputies rather than by permanent, professional police forces. Building codes and other local ordinances, imposing costs on business owners and homeowners alike, were unknown. This was the American republic in full flower, and while no one living remembers that time, we cannot shake the sense of irreparable loss, that the almost unimaginable degree of freedom and opportunity enjoyed by our grandparents’ grandparents has been irretrievably forfeited.
Young superpower: Gone are the days when the United States was the world’s only superpower. Communist China is now a legitimate superpower rival to American hegemony. (The Little Hut/Adobe Stock)
Republics of Old
But what, precisely, have we lost? In large measure, our republic, replaced by the modern idol of idols, the superpower. It is often maintained that our very freedoms depend upon our remaining a superpower, but the testimony of history suggests otherwise. Consider: Of all of the bona fide republics that have arisen over the past several millennia, not one of them was a superpower. Quite the opposite, in fact. Many of history’s republics have arisen on the ashes of greater powers, all of them monarchical. The canonical, but hardly the only, example of this is the Roman Republic, which was the product of a revolt against the Etruscan Tarquinian monarchy, the dominant power of the day on the Italian peninsula. For centuries after its founding, Rome in its golden age remained a regional power at best, gradually gaining military prestige and acquiring territory as a consequence of successful contests against various greater regional powers, including the Carthaginians, the Epirotes, and the formidable Germanic hosts of the Cimbri, among many others. But, as even the casual student of history is aware, Rome at the height of her power — as a bona fide superpower — was no longer a republic by any reckoning.
One of Rome’s successor states, the republic of Venice, became one of the great powers of the Middle Ages, but the Most Serene Republic of St. Mark was hardly a superpower. Venice was founded both as a refuge against repeated depredations by barbarian invaders (the Lombards, in the case of Venice) and as an attempt to reconstitute some of the rustic liberties of the Roman republic. For her unmatched economic and religious freedom, Venice became a magnet for international talent, and for her niche prowess at shipbuilding, she became the power broker for the entire Mediterranean, selling her vessels to far-mightier powers in exchange for a measure of protection. But even at the height of her prestige, Venice never wielded anything like the military and political might of the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantium, the Ottomans, or the great Frankish princes.
As the Middle Ages progressed, republicanism broke out all over Italy, with the likes of Genoa becoming a great hub of trade and exploration, while Florence turned into the wellspring of Western cultural progress, giving birth to the Renaissance itself soon after being decimated by the Black Death. These and other of the Italian republics were immensely influential and attracted talent from far and wide, but none of them were superpowers or even significant regional powers.
Nor was republicanism confined to Italy. The Swiss Confederation came into being in the high Middle Ages, and eventually won full independence from the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire in the late 1400s. From that time to this, Switzerland has been one of the world’s freest, most stable, and most prosperous states — but never has it been a superpower or even a regional power. The strength of Switzerland has always resided in its policy of armed neutrality, which has mostly kept it out of the Great Power wars that have convulsed Europe periodically over the centuries — and discouraged would-be conquerors such as Hitler from testing Swiss resolve to defend their territory.
Another splendid example of a republic was the Dutch Republic, which came together rather haphazardly in the context of the 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, and matured during the 80 Years’ War, one of the longest wars for independence in history. Throughout most of that period, it was all the hard-beset forces of the tiny republic could do to keep the Spanish imperial arms at bay. Yet it was that trying time that produced the first modern free republic, complete with religious tolerance; a cosmopolitan commercial center (Amsterdam); a banking and financial system that was the envy of Europe; a dramatic surge in artistic, engineering, and architectural innovation; an impressive number of scientific geniuses (like Leeuwenhoek and Huygens); the creation of new universities; and, above all, the first flourishing middle class. Indeed, the timeless paintings of the day, from the likes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, depict a broad range of recreational activities and social gatherings reflective of the first society ever to produce enough surplus wealth for leisure to become a phenomenon of the masses, and not merely of aristocratic elites.
But for all this, the Dutch Republic never became more than a regional power militarily, although its bankers and financiers did enjoy ascendancy over European commerce for more than a century. The Dutch Republic began acquiring overseas territories in the 1600s, in places as far-flung as southern Africa, Taiwan, and the East Indies, in addition to North America — and it is probably because of this that the Dutch Republic, unlike Switzerland, was unable to endure. Her newfound colonial interests brought her into inevitable conflict with the great imperial powers of Europe, leading eventually to the conquest of the Dutch Republic by the French in the 1700s, and her reconstitution as a monarchy (the Kingdom of the Netherlands) in 1815.
Far to the east, the freest Russian state in history was the medieval Novgorod Republic, centered on the city-state of Novgorod. A member of the Hanseatic League, Novgorod was, during its more than 350 years of independence, a center not only of commerce but of culture as well, the envy of neighboring monarchies such as the Principality of Moscow. In its heyday, the Novgorod Republic enjoyed a measure of popular participation in government unequalled anywhere else in Europe, and amassed enormous wealth as a result of the freedom of her citizens. Unfortunately, her riches attracted the covetous eyes of neighboring monarchs such as the Muscovite princes, and Novgorod was conquered and reabsorbed into Russian monarchical absolutism in the late 15th century.
In more modern times, most of the prosperous republics of central and Eastern Europe — the Baltic states, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and so forth — are fragments of former great imperial powers such as Austro-Hungary, Prussia, and the Russian Empire. All of these today are notable for the freedom and prosperity they confer on their respective citizenries; yet none is a remotely consequential world power, let alone a superpower.
Much the same could be said of many of the modern republics of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, nearly all of which constitute, if not the spectacular political and economic success stories of the Dutch and the Swiss, then at least very substantial improvements in living standards over their predecessor states. But they have this in common: Not one of them is, nor (with the exception of India) aspires to become, a superpower, even though certain of them (Argentina and Brazil, for example) might possess the material and geographical means to become such.
In fact, of modern republics, only India, with its nuclear arsenal and constant appeals for recognition as a world power, appears to share the American ambition of superpower-hood. But India is driven primarily by her twin rivalries with Pakistan and China, believing that anything less than superpower status will doom her to conquest and dismemberment in a very predatory region of the globe.
Unlike India, the United States is not, and never has been, beset about with avaricious rivals bent on territorial expansion at her expense. That this remains true even in an era of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers is a testament to the enduring power of American geography. What purpose, then, is served by our remaining a superpower?
First, there is the supposed economic and financial advantage conferred by the dollar’s global reserve-currency status. The fact that most of the world’s commerce is conducted with U.S. dollars means that there is a nearly inexhaustible demand for dollars and dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds. This in turn gives the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve license to print money virtually at will — and then export much of the effect of inflation that would otherwise be inflicted on the American people. As a result, America has been able to exempt itself from the normal laws of inflationary monetary policy, monetizing its debt on an unprecedented scale while avoiding the hyperinflationary consequences that have beset other governments, from Zimbabwe to Argentina, that have pursued similar policies.
In other words, the world domination of the dollar is a consequence of a global system of fiat money and the inflationism that enables it. Should the United States and the rest of the world renounce inflationism and restore the gold-and-silver standard, there would be no need for a global reserve currency, since all currencies would simply be different amounts of gold or silver. The fact that certain currencies, such as the Spanish doubloon, the Dutch guilder, and the British pound, enjoyed international prestige in centuries past was a reflection of the quantity of such currencies in circulation. Larger economies perforce generated a need for more minting, and so each of these currencies predominated when the national economy of the issuing authority grew, as happened during the Spanish Golden Century, the heyday of the Dutch Republic, and the dominion of the British Empire. But none of these currencies, even at the height of their popularity, constituted a “global reserve currency” that enabled its issuer to dictate financial terms to the rest of the world.
The most conspicuous feature of the modern American superpower, of course, is its peerless military, including its enormous inventory of nuclear weapons and the force-projection capabilities of its Navy. In recent months we have watched American carrier strike groups deployed to the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean to engage in combat with the likes of the Yemeni Houthis; to deter Iran from heightened aggression against both Israeli and American forces stationed in the region; and, in general, to “send a message.” But what message is being sent by our far-called Navy and other forces? Simply that America stands ready to pulverize anyone who threatens our nebulously defined “interests” in every corner of the globe. And all of this, be it noted, is rationalized as “national defense.”
Of the nine declared nuclear powers, only three are superpowers, with a fourth (India) trending in that direction out of brute necessity. The other five — France, the U.K., Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea — are in essence untouchable, despite having limited nuclear arsenals. France, for example, maintains her “Force de dissuasion” of about 290 nuclear warheads, sufficient to dissuade any conceivable enemy from attacking her, but not enough to enable her to dictate terms to the entire planet superpower-style. Much the same could be said of Israel and the U.K., neither of which aspires to superpower status, but both of which maintain a defensive nuclear deterrent nonetheless.
The American military is currently configured for far more ambitious ends than mere national defense. As a result, America has morphed into a military republic, where a significant share of government funds is spent on the military, and where a huge number of laws and regulations are dedicated, not to the preservation of individual liberties, but to the maintenance of “homeland security.” But if national defense and deterrence alone were the goals, America, like France and the U.K., could make do with much less.
Despite its modern cachet, “superpower” is nothing more than a weasel word for “empire,” albeit one of a different form than of the colonial enterprises of yesteryear. And as such, the American superpower-qua-empire is altogether at variance with the republicanism that is our authentic national heritage. Republics, for example, derive their strength from the will of the people and the popular welfare; empires must appease their elites. Republics also depend crucially on principled statesmanship, whereas empires rely on the venal politics of special interests and political parties. Corruption and foreign double-dealing are always features of empires because of the unavoidable paramountcy of “interests” over principled virtue. In our time, the corruption of the Biden family by foreign interests is merely the latest symptom.
Republics enjoy a measure of control over their national destiny — but empires do not, being held hostage by foreign entanglements and court intrigue. As a result, republics generally last much longer than empires, being far less internally unstable and less prone to the vicissitudes of war and conquest. As Sumner presciently warned:
The perpetuity of self-government depends on the sound political sense of the people [but] we can give it up and we can take instead pomp and glory…. If we Americans believe in self-government, why do we let it slip away from us? Why do we barter it away for military glory as Spain did?
The time is fast approaching — indeed, may already be upon us — when Americans will be forced to choose between the glory of empire and the perpetuity of republic. We were not constituted to hold hostage the destinies of all the peoples of the earth, but only to secure our own. It is a signal irony of our times that, in the relentless quest to spread freedom abroad by force of arms and commerce, we have reduced our own citizens to cowering subjects of bureaucratic absolutism and chattels of a modern system of financial servitude. But this is hardly surprising, since the same elitist impulse to micromanage and control the affairs of other nations will always be applied in spades domestically.
In a coming day, having drawn the envy and reproach of rival powers, as every antecedent empire and superpower has done, we will have to choose to either voluntarily renounce our illegitimate global hegemony — or have it taken from us by force. Only a return to the simplicity and humility of republicanism will spare us the inevitable consequence of imperial decadence.
. . . . .Thank you for listening.
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