Our client states are becoming our politicians’ main constituency.
Like any young right-winger, I follow Vice President JD Vance closely on X. He’s one of the most interesting and inspiring figures in the Trump Administration. Recently, he discussed an interaction he had with a Ukrainian American that got my attention. The gentleman accused Vance of abandoning “his” country, to which Vance retorted that his country is America. He then said a line that has stuck with me, something I had never heard a politician express before: “I always found it offensive that a new immigrant to our country would be willing to use the power and influence of their new nation to settle the ethnic rivalries of the old.”
What Vice President Vance succinctly outlined is a problem that naturally seems to come with empire building: becoming international waters. The United States has become a place where other nations fight to win money, power, and influence for themselves while the American people are left in the dust. Client states at the outer edges of our empire have become the constituency of our politicians and bureaucrats. Taxpayers of the empire suffer as they’re forced to fund the outer colonies, getting hardly anything tangible in return for their labors.
Since at least the end of the Second World War, and exacerbated by the end of the Cold War, America has been an empire. We’ve acted as the global hegemon, serving as the police arm of the United Nations and championing the cause of liberal democracy across the globe. America has military bases in over 80 countries. Over 43% of our civilian federal government jobs are related to the military, the State Department, or foreign affairs; that doesn’t even touch on the corrupt NGO complex that DOGE has uncovered.
With an increasingly perilous situation at home—mounting debt, a fracturing banking system, chronic inflation, and political unrest—it hardly seems in the best interest of American citizens to have such an outward, imperial focus. In fact, it is actively detrimental for the U.S. to keep embracing empire, especially the late-stage empire we’re currently living through.
Our empire has expanded beyond its means. It no longer takes in resources; it exports them elsewhere.
Bureaucrats whose positions were made for managing and expanding the empire obey Parkinson’s law: they continually create new jobs because they need new subordinates to justify their work and get promoted. Quickly, the narrative jumps from “Take down the people who attacked us on 9/11” to “remove the Taliban from power” and “establish a liberal democracy in Afghanistan,” and then finally to “protect women’s rights in Kabul.” Goals far removed from the initial intentions become the standard for new State Department and NGO jobs.
When the empire and its bureaucrats begin to stick their noses into any foreign nation, suddenly it begins to usurp roles, taking up internal policing and welfare and arbitrating conflicts with the nation’s neighbors.
This is characteristic of United States foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. Some nation comes into conflict with its neighbors, and suddenly there is a vague “U.S. interest” that needs protecting, thus mandating intervention. There are two perverse incentives that extend from said intervention: the ever-expanding bureaucracy and actors from foreign nations seeking to use the empire for their own purposes.
This goes to the heart of what Vice President Vance found in the Ukrainian who met him on the campaign trail. Since ethnic feuds of the outer empire come to be resolved at the center of the empire, it is then no surprise that feuds between Ukrainians and Russians have become one of the foremost issues in U.S. politics. It becomes more profitable to care for this new organized interest than the disorganized citizenry. That is why politicians will pass a bill to give money to Ukraine while ignoring the environmental and health concerns of East Palestine, Ohio.
East Palestine doesn’t have a bureaucratic-lobbying class to fight for them—but Ukraine and other foreign nations do.
While attending NatCon in D.C. this last summer, I saw this problem firsthand outside the White House: people waving the flags of foreign nations and yelling about their ethnic grievances with their neighbors, calling for some action by the U.S. government to rectify some wrong or get involved in XYZ conflict. The imperial city, which thrives in the country it hollowed out, is exactly that: a place the entire world flocks to to get the global hegemon to do their bidding.
It is no wonder that we see constant clashes in the streets of D.C. between representatives of different nations, none of which involve America. America is not allowed to have its own identity, yet it is our job to protect every other identity in the world. All of this is supported on the dime of the American taxpayer.
Empire is not America First. Our interests are not synonymous with those of State Department staffers and NGO directors. It is not synonymous with representatives and senators getting reelected for the sixth time and buying their third or fourth home. The perverse incentives of empire cause us to overexpand and waste money, resources, and men as we attempt to solve the rest of the world’s problems. Often, they cannot be solved at all because the native culture is typically resistant to so-called liberal ideals. One has to wonder whether this is a feature or a bug of the imperial scheme.
An America First policy means stopping this nonsense. The progressive mind see man as a lump of clay that can be molded into whatever it wishes. If Afghanis desire democracy, a little technocracy, and liberal interventionism, that alone is enough to make them into Britons in the minds of progressives.
Conservatives, however, are not utopians. We acknowledge the world is filled with tradeoffs, natural orders, and costs to every action. Americans have their own problems, and our politicians have a moral obligation to address those first.
To stop America from being treated like international waters for every other nation, it must cease being an empire and become a nation once more.
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