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“Purchased With Blood”: Frontier Violence and Imperial Decline
Empires are most violent at their origins and their ends. When they are establishing their empires, they are conquering and controlling new territories, governments, and peoples. When they are falling apart, they are desperately attempting to hold onto their power over other territories, governments, and peoples. Both processes lead to a logic of increased violence and brutality, since it is through overwhelming violence that one can establish a hierarchy over others as fast as possible. But violence also creates resentment and reaction, so these attempts can spiral into greater violence or lead to unstable and insecure periods of relative calm. Using extreme violence might overwhelm the enemy and force capitulation. That is the obvious desired outcome of those who resort to its use. But it may also result in a long, drawn-out and brutal war of attrition in which all sides wear each other down over years. Perhaps it will impose a new order over the society and force the population into an acquiescent and obedient position for years, but it is a precarious peace bought with the blood of their people, and resentments build over time until they burst through the seams.
Referring to the Roman, British and American empires, historian Charles Maier wrote, “The Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica, and presumably the Pax Americana are purchased with blood in the decades of their creation and their dismantling.” On the frontiers – or geographic edges – of empire, “[t]here is a natural history of warfare and bloodshed,” wrote Maier. “When they are being established… and when they are being abandoned… frontiers become sites of endemic and brutal killing.” Maier added: “Whether the order they guarantee in the interim is worth the intervals of violence depends upon how long the period of stability lasts.”[1]
The Spanish and Portuguese conquests of much of the Americas, for example, were marred by endless brutality and endemic killings. The Portuguese empire, however, lasted roughly 500 years, coming to an end in the latter 20th century. Its origins were extremely violent, but so too was the Portuguese Colonial War, fought between 1961 and 1974, as African and other independence movements against colonization came up against the colonial state violence of Portugal in Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea, and which resulted in the killing of over 100,000 African civilians. But when a peaceful military coup overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship, it quickly brought the war to a close and Portugal ultimately withdrew from its African colonies. (At which point, the United States stepped in to continue another decade and a half of counter-insurgency warfare.)
Similar stories can be told for the establishment and fall of the Dutch, Belgian, French and British empires, the latter two having come to conquer or control much of the world between them, from Africa, to West Asia (commonly referred to as the Middle East, so named because it was the mid-way point in the British empire), South Asia, Southeast and East Asia. At its end, the British empire undertook massive colonial wars of domination and punishment against anti-colonial independence movements in Palestine, Malaya, and Kenya, killing potentially hundreds of thousands in Kenya alone. The French waged their brutal colonial wars against anti-colonial independence movements, most notably in Vietnam (Indochina), and then most dramatically in Algeria, killing up to or more than 300,000 Vietnamese, and somewhere between 400,000 and 1 million Algerians, comparable only with when the French first conquered Algeria in the early 19th century. Again, empires are most violent at their start and their end, and with the violence expressed most dramatically along the imperial frontiers.
Even the Soviet Union, which was a rare historical empire that collapsed relatively peacefully, its decline was still marked by a period of increased violence in the frontiers of its imperial power, not in the core in Europe, but namely in its nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, killing up to 1 million Afghans in the process. Not exactly a peaceful decline, when looking beyond the borders of Eastern Europe. However, certainly within the Soviet Union itself, its rapid decline and fall between 1989 and 1991 was unprecedented in modern imperial history for the lack of violence and warfare. But then we also have the more recent example of Vladimir Putin attempting to re-establish the Russian empire by reconquering and subjugating Ukraine, which was made independent after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This process is intensely violent, with the more than four-year-long war being the deadliest in the world at present (though the fatalities are largely of combatants, both Ukrainian and Russian, compared with conflicts elsewhere, where the fatalities are largely civilian, such as in Gaza and Sudan).
If we imagine the ‘frontiers’ of the American Empire; when it was being established both as a nation-state and an empire, it first was expanding westwards from the original colonies, and then south, conquering indigenous lands and displacing the pre-existing populations and communities. It was a brutally violent period of endemic killing, ethnic cleansing, colonization, and even genocide. The frontier, as it was known, was the ever-expanding borders of the United States. And then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the frontiers of the American Empire expanded into the Caribbean, Central America, and across the Pacific – with imperial killing and conquest reaching Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines.
But after two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century, America became a truly global empire, less focused on territorial expansion and more focused on economic integration, dependence, and exploitation. Violence was still essential, not to establish colonies, but to create pliant, obedient governments, and repress potentially revolutionary or rebellious populations. America became the ultimate global empire, its frontiers extended across the globe, near and far. It still included locations territorially close to the United States, such as in Central America and the Caribbean, and extended across much of Latin America, but also reached across oceans and continents, to places like Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia, to Germany, Greece, and Turkey.
American Violent Imperial Decline: The First 25 Years of the 21st Century
We do not appear to be so lucky that America’s imperial decline and collapse will be as peaceful as that of the Soviet Union’s. Indeed, in the waning decades of America’s imperial hegemony, that is, in the first decades of the 21st century, when America launched its major wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and launched countless military operations in and warfare against several other nations (Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Pakistan), not to mention the countless other nations where America waged its hidden ‘war of terror’, the death toll was immense. Researchers from Brown University in 2023 reported that the total number of deaths attributable to the US war on terror were roughly 4.5 million, roughly a million of them caused by direct violence, the remaining resulting from indirect deaths caused by a collapse in economic, environmental, and health conditions.
Since the period of this published report, however, the United States has consistently and strongly supported, financed and armed Israel in its genocide in Gaza, not to mention Israel’s wars and/or occupations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. While all recent US presidents have attacked multiple nations over the course of their terms, the rate and pace has accelerated under Donald Trump. President George W. Bush (2001-2009) undertook major military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan, but his administration reportedly had plans to attack seven countries in five years (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Iran), so he only managed to achieve part of his administration’s violent imperial ambitions. (Israel also stepped in with a US-backed war on Lebanon in 2006.) But other presidents would soon fulfill much of the list of intended conquests.
President Barack Obama (2009-2017) undertook military operations in seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, dropping a record 26,171 bombs in 2016 (his final year in office) alone. President Obama was in no small measure elected as a popular reaction against the large foreign wars of the Bush administration years, with two seemingly unending wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq and a globally expansive “War on Terror” that unleashed covert operations around the world. Yet, Obama was responsible for further empowering and expanding the roles played by special forces soldiers and secret wars across most of the planet.
By 2010, special forces were deployed to 75 countries, up from 60 at the start of 2009, when Obama entered office. These elite commando units were operating in countries beyond the main combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq (though also including them, of course) to Colombia, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, and across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. The commanders of special operations forces had “become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush’s administration.” One senior special forces military official was quoted in the Washington Post in 2010 as saying, “We have a lot more access… They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.” Special forces operations included raids, strikes, and assassinations, but also training the security forces of different countries in how to undertake counterterrorism operations, and then frequently engage in joint operations with those forces. As White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan said, the United States “will not merely respond after the fact” to terror attacks, but will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”
Obama further implemented this process, as he sought to wind down the large wars and occupations, which were deeply unpopular with the public and around the world, badly damaging the credibility of American political parties and politicians, and American credibility as an imperial power to both allies and adversaries. Also, in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis that badly damaged America’s economic credibility, the Obama administration sought to cut military costs by reducing the large-scale operations and occupations and increasing the size and role and range of the apparatus of secret warfare and the training of local forces around the world. As Obama put it when announcing the defense strategy in early January 2012, “our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority.”
In April 2013, the US Special Operations Commander, Admiral William H. McRaven, told the US Senate that, “On any day of the year you will find special operations forces [in] somewhere between 70 and 90 countries around the world.” As the Wall Street Journal reported in April 2015, “the sun never sets on America’s special-operations forces. Over the past year, they have landed in 81 countries, most of them training local commandos to fight so American troops don’t have to.” By late 2015, roughly half of the 7,500 elite commandos were deployed outside of the Middle East or South Asia, operating in a total of 85 countries around the world, at least according to Special Operations Command at the time. But in total, as the New York Times revealed, “Special operations personnel deployed to approximately 139 nations in 2015 – about 70 percent of the countries on the planet. While a vast majority of those missions involve training the defense forces of partner countries, a few involve direct combat.”
When Obama ended his presidency at the start of 2017, with the US remaining engaged in combat and (limited) occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, he left behind “an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.” But while he had less US forces deployed to foreign wars than many of his predecessors, with additional military strikes in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Obama left “a total of seven countries where his administration has taken military action,” noted the New York Times. And before he left office, Obama gave the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees all military special operations, “expanded power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe.”
In Trump’s first term (2017-2021), he continued this trend of bombing the seven countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya, though he also accelerated the rate of drone strikes in particular, and made their oversight more opaque. Trump also continued the trend of having special operations forces deployed around the world, engaged in training programs and military operations. In the first few months of Trump’s first term in 2017, there were a reported 8,600 elite forces deployed to 97 countries around the world, over half of them posted outside of the Middle East and South Asia. As the commander of US Special Operations Command said in May 2017, “We operate and fight in every corner of the world.” In early 2018, it was reported by the Army Times that over the course of Trump’s first year in office, special forces soldiers were “deployed to 149 countries, an increase from the previous year that saw deployments to 138 countries.” That’s approximately 75% of the countries on the planet.
President Joe Biden (2021-2025) undertook military strikes in five countries, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan, though he also strongly backed Israel’s war in Gaza. In December 2023, roughly two months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, President Biden delivered remarks to a gathering of campaign donors where he acknowledged some long-term issues in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the wider Arab world, but explained, “in the meantime, we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing,” further affirming that, “Israel’s security can rest on the United States.”
Interestingly, when you compare the list of seven countries that the US was planning to undertake regime change wars against in the early 2000s (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Iran), according to a former top general who was made aware of the plans, by 2026, all the countries that had been named on the list (and new additions as well) had either experienced major wars or collapsed into internal warfare, and the wars were either directly supported or executed by the US or its close allies (such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates).
Obviously, the US invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 until 2011, and then again in 2014, and were now expected to formally withdraw in the fall of 2026. Syria collapsed into civil war in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, but numerous other regional and global powers either covertly or overtly supported differing warring parties, including the US, UK, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Iran, and Israel. When the Islamic State established itself in territories of Iraq and Syria and the US organized a military coalition to fight ISIS, the US and numerous other nations also became more directly involved militarily in undertaking strikes against targets and deploying troops into Syria. Lebanon was attacked and invaded by Israel in a brutal 2006 war, but was subsequently and repeatedly subjected to Israeli bombardments during the course of Israel’s war on Gaza and its subsequent war on Iran, with substantial wars and invasions of Lebanon in 2024 and 2026. Libya was attacked by the US and NATO in 2011 in the wake of the unrest of the Arab Spring and subsequently collapsed into civil war and is now a divided nation ruled by warlords backed by different outside nations, including the US, France, the UK, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Sudan was mired in civil war in the early 2000s, and then again more recently, after a revolution unseated the long-time dictator in 2019, and then two military factions began a war for power in April 2023, plunging the country into genocidal violence, with the worst of the two belligerents backed by a US ally, the United Arab Emirates, itself an imperial power across the continent of Africa. Somalia has been consistently attacked since 2006 to present day, with warring parties not only including the United States, but also Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, all close US allies and security partners in Africa. And then Iran, which was first attacked directly in a war by Israel (with the United States eventually joining) in June 2025, and then in a much more significant and still ongoing war, waged by Israel and the US starting in February 2026.
Thus, the seven countries that were identified in the early 2000s by the Bush administration as targets for regime change wars may not have had US puppet states installed within five years, but in the subsequent 25 years after 9/11, they have all become engulfed in wars that have involved the US or its close regional allies, which have left their societies, countries and polities fractured, and hundreds of thousands if not millions dead. Thus, the seven countries initially identified are perhaps best understood as a list of some of the frontiers of the American Empire, subjected to acts of immense imperial violence and conquest. And of course, there are additional countries to add to the list of frontiers of endemic violence that were not included in the original list from 2001, including Afghanistan, Yemen, and Gaza/Palestine, along with more recent additions (and repeating certain ones on the list over and over, emphasizing the endemic nature of imperial frontier violence).
Which brings us to Donald Trump’s second term, starting in early 2025. In less than two years, President Trump rapidly accelerated the use of US warfare in the imperial frontiers, undertaking major military operations in seven countries, including Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Venezuela, Syria, Nigeria, military strikes in the waters of the Caribbean, and of course two wars against Iran. And with two years left to his (presumed) last term as president, we should expect the violence to accelerate, and the frontiers to proliferate as American power declines further.
It’s important to acknowledge that America’s imperial decline and exacerbated violence are not caused by Donald Trump, but he is both a symptom of this process and an accelerant to it. Thus, America’s imperial decline as a great military power extending its hegemony around the globe can perhaps be dated to October 7, 2001, when the US began its war on Afghanistan, and appropriately so since Afghanistan has long been known as ‘the graveyard of empires,’ with every attempt to conquer and control this imperial frontier ending in failure and retreat, going as far back as Alexander the Great, and up to and including the British and Russian empires in the 19th century, the Soviet Union during its decline, and the American Empire (and NATO) between 2001 and 2021, when they withdrew and the Taliban returned to power, having effectively waged a 20-year war and occupation only to return to power the very groups they sought to depose in the first place.
If we combined the countries that the US has attacked, invaded and engaged in significant military strikes and operations within over the course of the 25 years after the start of the ‘war on terror’ and invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, to present day (August 2026, as of this writing), the total is ten countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iran. If you include those countries and territories attacked by Israel, specifically since the start of the latest war on October 7, 2023, but also over the same longer time period, due to the fact that Israel’s weapons are provided and its operations heavily subsidized by the United States, there is overlap with US targets in attacking Syria, Yemen, and Iran, but with the additions of Gaza/Palestine and Lebanon. Thus, if we incorporate the US and Israel as a kind of axis of imperialism (which we should), the total number of countries they have collectively attacked, invaded, or engaged in military strikes and operations inside over the past 25 years amount to 12: Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iran.
And this is not including the activities of special operations forces or the training of local armed forces and joint operations carried out with different countries, which as we know, can be taking place in dozens of countries around the world on any given day. Thus, as the American Empire declined over the course of the 21st century, it also became more violent, attacking and partaking in military operations and deployments in more countries around the world than ever before.
Lethality and Control: Brzezinski’s Imperial Dictum
This essay incorporates the observation from historian Charles Maier that empires are most violent at their start and at their end, and that the violence is most acute on the frontiers of their imperial reach. Additionally, I would like to incorporate some observations from one of America’s most prominent imperial strategists of the 20th century, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser who was often considered to be the Democratic Party’s answer to Henry Kissinger for his hawkish strategic mind. I would argue Brzezinski was a much more intelligent and far-sighted strategic thinker than Henry Kissinger, who was primarily concerned with great power relations and ingratiating himself to the world’s rich and powerful, particularly its most prominent financial and political dynasties. Brzezinski, while also interconnected with many of the same overlapping social and political circles as Kissinger, maintained a keener and more complex understanding of the world, and acknowledged that there was a world beyond the great powers, and beyond elite circles. Kissinger once infamously dismissed the history of Latin America, Africa and Asia, proclaiming that, “Nothing important can come from the [Global] South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn [Germany], crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”
Brzezinski, on the other hand, recognized that the axis of history was more complex, and that the Global South existed and had history – and was important – regardless of whether or not he was personally involved in it or connected to their ruling classes (which was Kissinger’s only real gauge for empathy). When he delivered a eulogy for Nelson Rockefeller, a powerful scion of the rich and powerful Rockefeller family, who personally brought Kissinger into the halls of great power as a close adviser, thereafter becoming a kind of consigliere to the Rockefeller clan (in addition to other dynasties), Kissinger reflected on when he was a graduate student and first met Nelson Rockefeller, describing himself as “intoxicated by the proximity to power.” Indeed, that was an appropriate summation of how Kissinger made his way through the world. And this is not to say Brzezinski was not similar in certain respects, as his rise to power and influence was also connected to the same Rockefeller family. But Brzezinski was not so blind to believe that everything beyond the purview of his own disconnected elite experience was the full extent of the world that mattered or that had the ability to direct and influence history. In short, Brzezinski recognized the South and the people of the world, including if not especially the disaffected masses, as being participants in great history.
Brzezinski even became a fierce critic of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror,’ referring to it as “a mythical historical narrative,” and derided the war on Iraq as “a historic, strategic and moral calamity” which was “undermining America’s global legitimacy,” and reflected an “imperial hubris… reminiscent of colonial tutelage.” He also warned in 2007 against a possible war with Iran that could plunge “a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire” across the region. Such a prominent voice of opposition was unwelcome to the Bush administration, and Brzezinski was effectively “shut out” of the White House for the Bush years (2001-2009). Kissinger faced no such excommunication from the halls of power. After all, Kissinger once defined the role of an “expert” as working for their constituency (in his case, the rich and powerful), writing that, “elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.” In other words, an expert is someone who defines the elite consensus (such as himself), not someone who would dare criticize or diverge from the elite consensus. During the Bush years, while Brzezinski was shut out of the halls of power, Henry Kissinger was closely advising President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the issue of the Iraq war (which Brzezinski strongly opposed), exerting “a powerful, largely invisible influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration,” telling Bush and Cheney that “the only exit strategy for Iraq was victory.”
Brzezinski may have been a member of the American imperial elite over the course of roughly four decades, but he did not shy away from denouncing the Bush administration’s “mythical” war on terror and the “strategic and moral calamity” of the war on Iraq. Nor did he shy away from providing a more honest analysis of Israel and its relationship with the US and the Palestinians. Brzezinski regained some influence with the Obama administration, having advised President Obama on occasion. In the lead-up to the Obama years, in late 2008, Brzezinski wrote a piece for International Affairs, a prominent British policy journal, which was an edited version of a lecture he delivered to the esteemed and elite British think tank, Chatham House, entitled, “Major Foreign Policy Challenges for the Next US President.” He warned about global issues related to “human well-being” such as “climate, environment, starvation, health and social inequality.” He described what he called “the global political awakening,” writing: “For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive,” and this was generating a “global political activism” which was “generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination.”
In other words, what he identified as the “global political awakening” was a reflection of the transformations taking place across the formerly colonized and dominated world (the Global South), and among repressed peoples at home in the west itself, who had become increasingly aware of their relative deprivation compared to the powerful, and were becoming increasingly resistant to the maintenance and expansion of power over the dominated, exploited, impoverished and repressed peoples of the world. Such a situation of restless and potentially rebellious or even revolutionary populations around the world poses an obvious challenge to any imperial power, least of all the United States with its frontiers extending across the globe.
Brzezinski also identified “another fundamental change” in the world, which was “a shift in the distribution of global power from the West to the East,” noting that, “[t]he 500-year-long domination of the world by the Atlantic powers – Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Britain and, more recently, the United States – is coming to an end with the new political and global pre-eminence of both China and Japan,” with perhaps India and Russia “waiting in the wings.” Already in 2008 Brzezinski was identifying the fact that America was in a period of imperial decline, and that the world itself was becoming more complex and challenging to govern and rule over. To this point, he identified that “these major world powers, new and old, also face a novel reality: while the lethality of their military might is greater than ever, their capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at a historic low.” He explained: “To put it bluntly: in earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.” Technology, communications, education and connectivity had made people harder to rule over. But technology – particularly of the lethal variety – had also made it easier to kill large numbers of people. Harder to rule, easier to kill. Powerful states are more “lethal” than ever before, but their actual capacity to dominate subject peoples “is at a historic low.” As a result, extreme violence and lethality increasingly becomes the answer to the question and challenge of control; how to establish it, how to keep it. In this context, Brzezinski explained, “the crisis of American leadership could in fact become the crisis of global stability.”
It is this latter point, and quote, which occupies an especially relevant place in this essay and its argument about America’s imperial decline leading to accelerated violence. Just as the historian Charles Maier identified the historical fact that empires are most violent at their origins and ends, and notably so along their imperial frontiers; Brzezinski identified the specific context of violence in the modern world of America’s decline: that while it was once “easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people,” it was now “infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.” Both arguments overlap and support the thesis that as the American Empire declines, it will increasingly turn to acts of mass violence, warfare, and lethality. As American power wanes and falters, as it loses allies and gains adversaries, more and more countries and peoples will break off from under the influence of American hegemony and domination. This means that the frontiers of the American empire will proliferate exponentially. As the American Empire seeks to contain the decline of its power, or reassert its dominance, it will increasingly turn to acts of extreme violence as the most efficient means of attempting to achieve these ends.
The focus of the rest of this essay is not on the imperial decline of the past 25 years, however, but to specifically focus on the recent accelerated decline and violence of the first 20 months of the second term of Donald Trump (2025-2026). The prior historical examples from the first two decades of the 21st century aimed to contextualize the second Trump term, not as an aberration but an acceleration; to understand that Trump is not a cause, but a consequence and catalyst of American imperial decline. Donald Trump and his Make American Great Again (MAGA) fascist movement are, after all, partly a response to America’s imperial decline. Trump’s movement, like other fascist movements, espouse an aggrieved sense of victimhood and fears of community (or racial, ethnic, religious) decline. Internally, this is largely concerned with fears over immigration, Muslims, and culture wars. Externally, Trump expounds these concepts by his demand for allies to act subservient, to respect America’s unparalleled power, and for adversaries to quake and tremble at America’s military might. For Trump, America’s decline is interpreted as a lack of respect, and his answer to that problem is to strike fear among both allies and adversaries. There is no ‘soft power’ in the Trump administration.
In fact, at the start of the second Trump term, the administration dismantled and destroyed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the institutions of America’s soft power in the world that had responsibilities for disseminating vaccines, healthcare, educational opportunities, development aid and support. America’s imperial power always came with large doses of violence, but over the course of the 20th century it also came with powerful inducements, cultural exports from music to movies and art, to medicine and science and technology, to serving as a beacon to the world and to attract people and talent from across the world to learn at America’s preeminent educational institutions and prosper in its unparalleled economy. All of these facets are under attack and undermined during this second Trump term. All that is left is the hard power of military might. All that is left is violence.
As he started his second term, Trump claimed to be seeking the role of peacemaker, but his actions revealed that he has entered a dangerous and deranged new phase of petulant war mongering. Trump explained in an interview that, “I don’t need international law,” and that the only limits on his global power were, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” And after erroneously claiming to have stopped eight or ten wars (the figures changed periodically), and then failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his imagined victories, Trump angrily informed Norway’s prime minister in a text message that since Norway failed to give him the peace prize, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
America thus enters a period of accelerated imperial decline and imperial violence in a world in which “it is easier to kill one million people” than it is “to control one million people.” This is a dangerous prescription for any era, let alone one in which a fascist movement and leader have usurped the highest reaches of American power. To reiterate, Trump is not the cause of imperial decline, but he is a consequence of it and an accelerant to it. American imperial violence is not unique to Trump, but it is uniquely amplified under his rule. And we can expect America’s violent decline to spread across its many and growing frontiers. Already in the first 20 months of the second Trump term (January 2025 – August 2026), President Trump has waged wars and military campaigns in at least seven different countries and beyond, and alongside its “model ally,” Israel, is waging an imperial war along its frontiers to try to stall or reverse its decline, but which will ultimately only exacerbate it.
THE FRONTIER WARS
The following sections provide a breakdown of the violent imperial decline of the American Empire as expressed through the many wars of the first 20 months of the second Trump administration.
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