The Imperial Epithet in the Liberal Imagination

On imperialist statecraft, Edward Luce, pundit beef, and my refusal to acknowledge American imperialism in a previous life.

I spent the first half of the 2020s on a lonely island, shouting about the imperialist, militarist drift of US foreign policy.¹

Of course, almost everyone I knew in Washington was having none of it, considering empire (and primacy) an epithet without taking seriously the analytical claim. Long ago, I similarly refused efforts to describe the US as an emp…