Daniel Immerwahr

There's a lot of privileges that the United States enjoys vis-a-vis the world.

They're totally visible to people outside of the United States, but often invisible to people in the United States.

It's not the only kind of power, and it certainly uses its military all the time.

But it's really easy if you grew up in the United States.

to look around the world and not recognize that all of the tailwind is at your back, materially, culturally, in so many ways, and everyone else is facing a headwind.

I mean, this is a country essentially that was born on third and thought it hit a triple.

Yeah, I was really interested in the smooth functioning of US power.

And what I didn't see was a willful return to the rough exertion of US power.

You know, we've had a decades long relief from the kind of border crossing, large scale imperialist warfare that marked the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And that was really helpful in two ways.

That spared us a lot of the wars of pacification, which came with colonialism.

And it also spared us the conflicts of imperial rivalry, both of which turn out to be really dangerous forms of warfare.

And I'm not saying we've been free of wars, but a lot of the conflicts have been civil in nature.

And it seems like we, not just through Trump, but through Putin as well, it seems like we may be headed back to a different way for countries to project their power.

And if that's true, it's going to be really dangerous because it's, A, it's all the old kind of violence, but B, now with nuclear weapons.

And so the Scrooge Fed is a really good example of how, just in like the most quotidian ways, the United States has like colonized the washing machines of India.

You know what I mean?

Like just like in all these little ways, the mark of the United States is already everywhere, all over the world.

Daniel Imervar is a professor of history at Northwestern and one of our most interesting writers on foreign policy and American imperialism.

His most recent book, a bestseller, was called How to Hide an Empire.