Daniel Immerwahr

At The New Yorker, he's covered subjects from 17th century piracy to the seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

I spoke with him last week.

Daniel, let's start with the events of the past week.

They're astonishing.

In your 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, you wrote of the United States that even when it comes to oil, flare-ups of naked imperialism have been rare and haven't ultimately led to annexations.

You wrote this during Trump's first term.

Yeah.

What's changed?

Exactly that has changed.

I described in the book the passage from a desire for annexation as a form of projection of power, so claiming large territories, to a more subtle form of power projection, lots of military bases all over the map, other ways of exerting power.

And it seemed to me at that time that the age of colonial empire was not totally over.

There are still some colonies, but, you know, really near extinction.

And it is extraordinary to hear Trump talk in a way that not only presidents haven't talked in decades, but I think presidents haven't even thought in decades of his desire to claim territory, to annex new places, Greenland, Canada, etc.

How would you describe the map of contemporary American empire, and what is it?

Because we do have military bases.

I think not everybody's aware of it, just how extensive that map is.

So what does American empire look like now?

Okay, so there are five inhabited territories that are still part of the United States, and more than three million people live in them collectively.

Puerto Rico is by far the largest.

But then you're exactly right.