At 250, the cracks are showing in America’s imperial façade

Militarily, the US might be ‘utterly dominant’, but that does not guarantee achieving its strategic goals. Iran is only the latest reminder of that.

To celebrate his 80th birthday on 14 June, Donald Trump turned the White House into the backdrop for a cage fight. The televised event’s name, ‘Freedom 250’, referenced the two-and-a-half centuries of US history that will be commemorated on 4 July. Yet the reality beyond the tents erected on the White House lawn gave the spectacle an air of the late Roman Empire, with inflation rising because of the war in the Middle East, a president with historically low approval ratings and the Republicans’ majority under threat in both houses of Congress as the midterm elections approach.

It would take a modern-day satirist with the talent of Juvenal to comment on the decline exemplified by this circus: that of a virtuous republic which has drifted towards oligarchy and empire. Yet tensions and oscillations between these two poles have existed since the US was founded: on one hand, a constitution revered for the exceptional guarantees it provided for the freedoms of a new world that was very different from the old; on the other, a beacon whose light could illuminate the entire continent in the pursuit of ‘manifest destiny’, and later spread across the oceans through the Open Door Policy. US exceptionalism and universalism have long vied with each other to define the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.

When Trump announced his first presidential bid in 2015, he aligned himself with an isolationist version of US exceptionalism. He lambasted his Republican rivals for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, promised to improve relations with Russia and questioned the usefulness of NATO. By the end of his first term in 2020, he could boast of not having started any wars. Five years later, when he returned to office, this same impulse towards retrenchment appeared intact. One of the new administration’s first strategic documents insisted that ‘the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and (…)

Full article: 2 245 words.

Alexander Zevin

Alexander Zevin is an associate professor of history at the City University of New York.

(3) Ben Casselman, ‘Forget coders. The real AI threat is in the back office’, New York Times, 10 June 2026.

(5) Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, ‘The governance gap Mythos exposed – And how to address it’, Just Security, 29 April 2026.

(7) Dario Amodei, ‘Policy on the AI exponential’, darioamodei.com, June 2026, and Jim Vandehei, ‘Axios interview: Reimagining government + business + AI’, Axios, 13 May 2026.

(8) Skyler Seets and Kaitlyn Radde, ‘Most new data centers in the US are coming to rural areas’, Pew Research Center, 13 April 2026. Other sources put the figure higher.

(9) Andrew Cockburn, ‘The data-center divide. Why politicians are squandering the anti-AI backlash’, Harper’s, New York, June 2026.