STBontrager

What a great question! The most basic difference is that usually more "traditional" empires (Britain, France, Spain, Germany etc.) are "territorial" empires. Meaning that they build their empires by acquiring territory, which are usually defined as a colony or colonies. Most of the time the people from these empires engage in what is called "settler colonialism" which means that they leave the empire and go to the colony with the intent of never going back a la the British in Australia (or North America). They often have to invest heavily in the infrastructure of their new colonies, which comes from taxpayer expense. They have to build roads, schools, bridges, ports, etc. The U.S. is more often seen as an empire of "semi-colonies" or as a "pointillist" empire. Meaning that the U.S. doesn't acquire territory so much as it acquires strategic choke points. For example, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba allows the U.S. to hold a military installation on the island of Cuba! Americans do not have to go to Cuba, nor do U.S. taxpayers have to pay for Cuban hospitals, roads, or schools. All U.S. taxpayers have to do is pay for the military installation but doing so allows the U.S. military to patrol and control the entire Caribbean effectively. It is building an empire without having to pay for the overhead of holding vast amounts of territory. Whenever the U.S. tries to mimic the European model of territorial control, such as in the Philippines, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. It usually is not successful. What the U.S. is able to do is acquire strategic points from which they can more easily influence larger regions. Think of Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Diego Garcia, and others as originally shaping these points of control.

Thanks for your question, which is very interesting because I do not know that I have ever been asked about my personal feelings on the issue. I usually think about the annexation of Hawaii based on my understanding of the history of the annexation of Hawaii, which was incredibly problematic. American corporations, with an assist from the U.S. federal government overthrew the government of Hawaii in the nineteenth century, which was a kind of monarchy with democratic aspects to it. This act by U.S. actors profoundly undermined the ideals of democracy in its raw naked economic takeover of the islands. There was also a lot of Japanese immigration to Hawaii and the U.S government wanted to stop that as it gave Japan a competing claim to the islands. We should mention that Hawaii has always had a racial tension with white Americans on the mainland. Hawaii is also a crucial strategic point that allows the U.S. to patrol and control the Eastern Pacific ocean and the Western Hemisphere. So I think all of this is quite unfortunate. Even pre-annexation has brought a lot of devastating consequences, for example, European and American settlers brought sexually transmitted infections with them that infected Hawaiian women, making many sterile and reproduction difficult. American investors also turned Hawaii into an American tourist location for white Americans to exploit Hawaii. Agriculturalists also acquired huge plantations to export fruit. All at the expense of local people. Annexation exacerbated all of these issues. It became a centralized naval base in the Pacific important for U.S. pacific interests. One could argue that without Hawaii, the U.S. would not have been drawn into WW2. Others could argue that without Hawaii, the U.S. could never have dominated the Pacific World. I think for local Hawaiians, the annexation was probably not a very good turn of events and for mainland Americans, it was a very good acquisition. The best think I can say, is that unlike other islands in the Pacific, i.e. Guam or Samoa, Hawaii was able to move beyond annexation and become a state. This, at least, allows Hawaiians a say-so in American politics. Personally, I would love to travel to Hawaii (I have never been). It must be an incredibly beautiful place but I wish that America's relationship with Hawaii did not have such a troubling past.

Hello Reddit! I am now live and will respond to your questions as the come! Thanks so much for asking questions and starting a conversation!

Great question, thanks for asking it! The answer depends on who you ask, I suppose. If one subscribes to the idea of American exceptionalism, then America is the only real empire and its fall will be the end of history. People in this camp would most likely suggest that America is in the prime of life and they take it for granted that it will live forever. They most likely think this because the idea of American exceptionalism suggests that America is unique and a nation that will never be equaled because our origins are founded in the Enlightenment and the ideas of equality, life, liberty, and happiness, which is what makes us different from everyone else. If one believes that these ideas are fixed in nature, and if one believes that the U.S. exemplifies these ideas, then it is nearly impossible to envision an end to America's life cycle because then there would be a vacuum in nature itself. People in this camp might also argue that America is not an empire.

The premise of your questions suggests you do not subscribe to this idea. There are critics of the American empire that have argued, with good evidence, that the American empire really only existed for a few short years. They might suggest that the empire began with the end of the Second World War and that its decline began with the Vietnam War. They might argue that we are currently "living on fumes" so to speak and we are only sustained by our technological innovation and massive economic wealth. This will soon dissipate, they argue, because the system of capitalism is unsustainable and the imbalance between economic prosperity and democratic insecurity, potentially brought on by environmental global warming or the rise of a competing empire, will cause the U.S. to decline soon. Some of these individuals will say that we live in "late stage capitalism."

Still others will argue that we are in an adolescent stage. They might point to empires of the past, Roman or British, which had long life cycles particularly because they could reinvent themselves over time. If that is the case then one could argue that the U.S. is going through one of those life cycle regenerations, kind of like Dr. Who. Vietnam was just a phase that brought on adolescence and as time goes on, we will mature again.

From my perspective, I would argue that the American empire is in a peculiar position in which it is too difficult to predict the future. This is of course, how history actually works...no one in the past could predict the future with any kind of certainty and neither can we. But here is what history suggests. The U.S. developed as a nation and an empire through the guise of regeneration and competition. It had to regenerate after the Civil War. No longer was slavery, agrarian economies, and de-centralized state governments the norm. The U.S. had to structurally change by eliminating slavery, going through an industrial revolution, and transforming the economy, and moving to a federalized government. Each of these events were catastrophic at the time but the U.S. emerged from them because they had to compete against European empires intent on pouncing. In other words transforming, labor, technology, and the definition of democracy is what allowed the U.S. to regenerate. This was imperfect and it took another regeneration a century later in the Civil Rights movement. Here in the 1960s America experienced another technological, labor (mechanization of labor), and access to democracy. Again the U.S. changed the definition of democracy and controlled technology and incentivized labor to adapt to the competition of Communism during the Cold War. What we are living through now is a third revolution--technology (digitalization), labor (the threat of automation), and access to democracy. In the past we have had outside enemies to keep us somewhat united internally. Today, we have no external enemy except the War on Terror, which is very ambivalent and vague. The answer to your question depends on whether the U.S. empire can control technology (especially silicon valley) effectively, can expand the idea of democracy to include more and more people, and balance an economy that allows far more people to participate all while rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, greening the economy, and keeping hot spots around the world from morphing into full on conflicts.

This is a lot to ask of anyone, which is why a lot of people think we are at the end of the life cycle. It could very well be that we are Michael Jordan playing for the Wizards. It also could be that we are Michael Jordan playing for the Birmingham Barons! The next 15 to 20 years may give us more insight.

Thanks for your question about my book. Yes, I do discuss the veneration of Confederate soldiers and the Lost Cause myth. Initially at the end of the Civil War, Northerners were not interested in commemorating Confederate soldiers in fact, they were purposely left out of any kind of official government commemorative traditions. They were not allowed to be buried in national cemeteries and many Northerners supported the Republican Party's plan for racial equality during Reconstruction. While some Southerners were opposed to the Confederacy and opposed to commemorating the Confederate dead the politicians and local elites built a counter narrative to the American idea of freedom and emancipation. Here they developed the so-called "Lost Cause" literally in the Confederate cemeteries, one of the few places where they were allowed to speak out against Reconstruction and emancipation. They decided to commemorate their war dead to the Lost Cause, which, as I argue, was in essence a False Cause based on a purposely distorted interpretation of the war. As the nineteenth century unfolded, and in the face of those Southerners who committed themselves to the False Cause, Republican politicians began to move away from the politics of racial equality and began expanding U.S. borders in the West and in the Pacific to fuel the American economy. Particularly William McKinley looked to the West and the Pacific to "solve" the problems of the economic depressions that happened in 1873 and again in 1893. Expansion, he and other Republicans such as Teddy Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan believed, would cure any potential economic crisis. This is the context in which the Spanish-Cuban-American War began in 1898 after the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. When the U.S. invaded Cuba, it was the first major military operation in which Northerners and Southerners fought side-by-side since before the Civil War. So McKinley, and later Roosevelt, tried to win Southerners who supported the False Cause over to their political side by appealing to the war dead. They not only sought to commemorate Northerners and Southerners who fought in Cuba but also tried to retroactively commemorate the Confederate dead from the Civil War. McKinley gave a famous speech in Atlanta, Ga in 1898 promising Confederates that the federal government would now include their war dead in cemeteries. This is where the movement began to place Confederate dead in Arlington National Cemetery complete with a monument that is there to this day. Not all Confederate sympathizers supported this federal takeover. Some hard core Confederate women in the United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to stop this process because they did not want to mix the Confederate with American war dead. They ended up losing this argument but they continued to celebrate an "unreconstructed" commemoration of Confederate dead in their local Confederate cemeteries. I argue this debate illustrates one way that the ideals of the Confederacy--slave-based, anti-democratic, agrarian, de-centralized government was fused through a reunification process with the U.S. ideals of emancipation, industrial, and federalized government through the guise of the Lost Cause, which I refer to as the False Cause.