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More seriously, I think it is true that one of the worst aspects of the American era of Western hegemony is the informal and indirect nature of empire. It is much cheaper than the French, British or (arguably) Spanish approaches, but it’s much more destabilized and mostly much worse for the ruled populations. Yes, Bukele aside, McKinsey under contract from the State Department could do a better job of running most of Latin America than the locals. BCG and 20,000 American mercenaries in charge of Haiti would save countless lives. It would be both humane and reasonable for America to assume control over its colonies. Hand the treasury and tax collection of every country that was a Western colony in 1950 to Citigroup + enforcers and they would do a better job than the average corps of corrupt third-world officials. America has the right to rule Israel, just as it has the right to rule the EU. It is a shame that, in practice, it rules neither (it took over a decade, a war and a little sabotage to convince the Germans to drop their pipeline, after all).
And there’s an aesthetic aspect, too. The Union flag once flew in Vancouver, in Belize, in Accra, in Cape Town, in Cairo, in Delhi, in Hong Kong, in Auckland, in New York for that matter. The American flag does not fly in Seoul, not in Tokyo, not in Riyadh, nor in Bogota or Mexico City, not even in London. It’s sad. Painting the world blue, forcing the other nations to sing your song, bow to your flag, put pictures of your leader in their public buildings, isn’t that what it’s all about? McDonald’s and Starbucks in Jakarta and Nairobi can never fully replace that.
Having other countries side with you, use your symbols and laws, and aspire to your culture by choice is certainly a more impressive measure of your global stature than only being able to make them do that by force.
Go to a political rally in Seoul and I assure you that you will indeed see countless American flags; go to Mexico City, or any City in Mexico, and you can see their numerous statues of Abraham Lincoln. American flags fly in Taiwan, in Argentina, in Brazil, in countries no one would even think of, and there are statues of Reagan, Clinton, Lincoln, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, even irrelevant Presidents like Rutherford Hayes, in countries across the world, in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, even in the lands of our mortal enemies like China and Russia.
Countries we've fought brutal wars with like Vietnam and the Philippines still have incredibly favorable impressions of us and line up for American trade and security guarantees out of choice rather than at the point of a gun; there are West Africans who will frown when they think you're British and break out into a grin when they see you're American, Liberians who will proudly tell you they are in fact American as well, 750 military bases across nearly half the countries in the world where American soldiers walk armed and freely by request of the host nation, countless constitutions and legal systems inspired by the American foundational blueprint, police forces the world over taught by Americans, a world learning English and watching American media and crossing oceans and deserts to come be part of the United States.
Don't pine for empire, we already have it - the footprint of America covers every corner of the world.
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Much like the common wisdom about political positions, under no circumstances should any country explicitly seeking a world empire ever be permitted to form one.
The problem about the American empire is that it doesn't actually work without Americans (or at least, the Americans of the past). And Americans are a real special lot simply because the founding of that country was, for the most part, one massive selection effect for those with genes expressing strong slave morality (something its geography and massive amount of natural resources also enabled).
"Slave" morality is a bit of misnomer (Nietzsche had great branding, but the branding really distracts from the underlying ideas) - it's more a statement that the ultimate good in the world comes from what you can do, and not who you are. It's the counterargument to "if you have freedom, what you get is seven zillion witches and three principled libertarians", and it's an attempt to solve the Iron Law of Bureaucracy in favor of the people who are actually providing the value; it's also why civil rights legislation and feminism [have had to] use that language to get anywhere, and wouldn't morph into the naked group supremacy movements they are today until they had stripped every branch of the "protection XYZ would make it easier for us to serve you" tree. ("Who you are" is inherently toxic to a society because it comes at the expense of "what you can do".)
But it's much better for the Americans themselves, which is what actually matters when it comes to keeping the empire operating and dominant. And the longer you can keep slave morality as the law of the land, the longer you can keep the parasites (an emergent property of any society) from strangling the golden goose that is the cultural milieu of "people actually want to serve others, serving is the highest good, and going the extra mile is godliness".
But the one thing slave morality can't solve for is "it's for your own good". You see this in the societal zeitgeist everywhere- a lot of rebelling against the people who believe they know better, and these people are never portrayed in a positive light.
Now sure, there's some master morality in America- this is why the term "Puritans" means what it means to American ears (though it wouldn't matter if they were just slightly more strict than the other three nations- not that it was, but still), and combined with the above, why that word being used is almost always meant as an insult. But it's never really been dominant- partially due to even its master-moralizers (for the most part traditionalists, but sometimes even the progressives of their day) having slave morality as a religion that could be appealed to, and partially because economic development in the US has almost never been zero-sum.
When those things are no longer true, or as they become less salient, you can expect American-specific parasitism to be pushed harder in every Western state. You can see the ones that are closest to the American orbit flying the New American flag in their government offices- typically a rainbow flag of some sort simply named "Progress"- and espousing the related social policies that the parasitic class in American power centers prefers.
I don't think this is completely true, and if anything a lot of 20th and early 21st century progressivism was imported into America rather than exported to Europe, Canada and other vassals. The US wasn't ahead of other Western countries in feminism or even racial politics, Fanon etc, Said taught at Columbia but he wasn't really a product of the metropole.
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You personally happen to care about the aesthetics of aristocracy and conquest probably much more than the average person does. Conquering a country, building a big statue of yourself in the middle of its capital, and sending your sons over to be its governors is something that, for the average person, has not seemed romantic outside of historical fiction in what, probably 80 years or so now? We live in an age in which the underdog is celebrated, the plucky rebel who blows up the Death Star, and it does not really matter whether the Empire or the Rebellion are better at giving the galaxy on average a decent quality of life. That is why, for example, in America both the left and the right paint themselves as morally righteous underdogs fighting against authoritarian oppression. There is just not much appetite among the general public for a proud "might makes right" ideology.
This is a Chesterson's Fence situation. We decided that it was Very Enlightened to not care about things like aesthetics, building giant statues, or verbalizing imperial ambitions in polite company (you are supposed to couch your imperial ambitions in terms of Saving Democracy and Spreading Freedom, much more progressive and enlightened). But without those things, it's pretty damn hard to maintain an empire. Take something like Demographic change. Is it possible for us to let go of the grug-brain attachment to flags and statues without committing demographic suicide and losing the empire? Apparently not.
I don't know, Texas is American, isn't it? Mexican-American war seems like a win, and had we kept that kind of attitude for another century, we'd have Cuba, too.
The Americans failed to take [the two major colonies that would later form] Canada in the war of 1812.
Granted, that territory is actually really defensible given there's no land border within 2000 miles that grants access to any major city (and invading through the wilderness of what is now Western Ontario would have been so incredibly difficult that it might as well have been impassable). Your supply chain can't happen unless you pull a China and construct so many ferries across the water that the enemy can't sink them all- an invasion of those colonies would have had to be reinforced by sea, and convoys would have a long journey ahead of them given they have to transit all the way around Nova Scotia into the St. Lawrence.
Mexico (and importantly, the southern US) is different- yeah, the terrain might take a while to traverse, but it is ultimately still able to be traversed (even in the winter). Its strategic position would thus be a lot more perilous (and that attempt to shore it up- what you can defend and what you can't- is why the borders look the way they do. The Texan border with Mexico is not the Big River for no reason).
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Texas was not part of Mexico at the time of the Mexican-American war and had petitioned for membership in the USA prior to the war kicking off.
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Can the American empire survive as an economic-proposition state? I don't think so. It has to have more glorious ambitions than that.
Actually I'm pretty comfortable calling that outcome - America loses. There's not enough time to make up for the manufacturing shortfall, and that manufacturing shortfall is so massively brutal that not even the US' slight technical edge will make up for it (if that technical edge is even still there in a decade, which is debatable too).
China has a material advantage in the local theater, but the best it can hope for is getting its neighbors to commit to neutrality (and at least Japan will not, and it still has meaningful shipyards). The US also can shut down Malacca.
Everyone's economy will be f'ed, but if China can't win in the span of ~9 months, it has lost. That said, I don't reject the possibility of it winning in that duration: there are just too many uncertainties to call an outcome.
China has, according to the US Navy, over 230x the shipbuilding capacity of the US. The technical edge? The US doesn't even have that anymore - the Kinzhal missiles they purchase from their now extremely close ally Russia are better than the equivalent western hypersonic. I'm not going to comment on the financial aspect, because I have no idea how much of either the US or Chinese economy is hallucinatory (except that it isn't zero for either).
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You don't even need a rival, you just need some sort of vision. What is America's vision beyond an economic zone? It's extremely lackluster. So Goodguy can say "nobody cares about imperial aesthetics anymore", but maybe that is a big part of the problem, and the reason the citizens are increasingly feeling detached and pessimistic and demoralized...
Touché, but Manifest Destiny was more than that. It was conquest, Gold, God, and Glory. A civilization only thrives in the act of becoming. Keeping the lights on within an economic zone is not that.
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