An empire that cannot speak its name

There is a parlour game popular among European commentators that consists of arguing whether the United States is doomed. The optimists insist America will be fine because America has always been fine; the pessimists insist America is in decline because every empire eventually is. I believe that both are probably wrong, and that whether the verdict decline or fine remains to be seen, for what is currently happening is a transition: From republic to empire.

I owe the framing to a recent conversation with Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital, who has been thinking about it through Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm. Duncan’s book chronicles a seventy-year period of Roman history from 146 to 78 BC, and the catalogue of its disorders, from currency crises, demographic disruption, assassinations, perpetual frontier wars, to the collapse of the political centre, will be unpleasantly familiar to readers in 2026. Yet what followed all these crisis was not the end of Rome but the rise of Augustus, and the empire that succeeded the Republic lasted, depending on where one draws the line, at least four hundred years.

What an empire is and what it is not.

Empire is more than a fancy term, it an actual form of governance that has certain characteristics. An empire is less liberal than a republic, and by liberal I do not mean in the contemporary cultural sense, but the older one: Free markets, an independent central bank, a state that retreats from the commanding heights of the economy. An empire takes equity stakes in strategically important firms. An empire treats the central bank as a department of the executive. An empire designates which industries are too important to fail and ensures, by direct intervention, that they do not. You can have an empire gay marriage, but you cannot have one with an independent central bank. 

A lot of this is already underway: The American government now holds a 9.9 percent stake in Intel, a position whose value has quadrupled since the original purchase. The Department of Defense (correction: I meant to write the “Department of War” – a renaming that is about as imperial in nature as it gets) is the largest shareholder in MP Materials, the only American firm of significance in rare earths. Similar moves can be observed in other critical industries from steel to shipbuilding. Behind these moves stands the Office of Strategic Capital, expanded under last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act from a roughly $1 billion facility to a $200 billion credit window. Michael Every of Rabobank, in a very insightful paper, calls this a reverse perestroika: Capitalism with a national-security face. Where Gorbachev tried to extract the state from the economy, Trump is reinserting it. 

The European fantasy

If Europeans think the American Republic was annoying, they should get ready for the American Empire. It is a common trope to claim that Europe is nothing but an American vassal with no agency of its own. Yet anyone tempted by this story should consider what happened during the current Iran war. American aircraft sought to use European bases for operations against Tehran, but Spain, Italy, France, and – temporarily – the UK refused them. The Pentagon was sufficiently irritated that it allegedly has been internally exploring whether to suspend Spain from NATO. Usually, a vassal does not deny its overlord airfields in wartime, but apparently when the Europeans want, they can resist their US overlord. In his recent spat with chancellor Merz, president Trump threatened to withdraw US troops from Germany: Withdraw, not send. Once again it appears odd that the supposed master is threatening the vassal not with sending, but relocating troops. Another example sits in the history books: In the 1980s, Western Europe built the Soviet Yamal pipeline over the explicit objections of the Reagan administration, defied American sanctions, and forced Reagan to back down in November 1982. I assume that the future will look different. It was easier to defy the past America than it will be to defy the future one. 

What America cannot say about itself

Here, however, sits the genuine American problem. America cannot easily speak the word empire. The British carried the term with pride. The Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the Romanovs called themselves Reich and imperium without embarrassment. Even the Ottomans understood that what they were doing was empire. The American republic, by contrast, was founded in explicit revolt against precisely such structures, and that founding myth still operates. In 1783 Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to George Washington suggesting that he might wish to be made king of the new nation; Washington’s response was that the proposal was among the greatest insults ever offered him. The American Cincinnatus did not take the crown. That refusal is one of the foundational virtues of the regime — perhaps the foundational virtue.

Tom Holland has written persuasively that the genuine genius of Roman history was Augustus, who understood that the cultural register of a republic could be retained even as its substance was transformed into something else. He did not call himself emperor but picked the title of princeps, the first citizen of Rome. He allowed and encouraged everyone to continue speaking as if Rome were still a republic, even as the institutional transformation was sealed beneath them. Whether the United States in 2026 has its Augustus is a fair question, and one I do not pretend to answer. The harder question is whether the intellectual reservoir from which such a transition must draw still exists in America. The greatest acts of American statecraft in the twentieth century like the opening to China or the post-Yom-Kippur Middle East order were the work of European-formed minds: Henry Kissinger, born in Fürth, whose doctoral thesis was on Metternich and the Congress of Vienna or Fritz Kraemer, born in Essen, whom Kissinger called the single greatest influence of his formative years at Harvard University. 

What Europeans should do about it

Although I would prefer a return to the polite rules-based order of the 1990s, I think this is no longer on offer. The world that is on offer is one in which the United States transforms itself into an empire that cannot bring itself to use the word, while genuinely imperial actors elsewhere — Beijing, Moscow, Ankara, Tehran — feel no comparable inhibition. The question for us Europeans is whether Europe will choose to be the small Athens to America’s Rome — culturally luminous, strategically modest, prosperous in the slipstream of someone else’s power — or whether it will continue to insist on a sovereignty it cannot back with any of the things sovereignty actually requires. Both options are humbler than the European elite would like. But humility is the beginning of seriousness, and seriousness is what the present moment demands. The American empire is being born in real time. Europe will have to come to terms with the kind of neighbour it now has, even if neither of us, just yet, wants to admit out loud what that neighbour has become.