US power has organised the expanded reproduction of global capitalism over the past 70 years and continues to do so. Much ink is currently being spilled over its decline. Commentators are debating whether US decline is inevitable or overstated, whether it is proceeding rapidly or steadily, or, indeed, whether it is in decline at all. In this blog post, I want to think about US dominance not in these quantitative terms, but, rather, venture an assessment about its changing character. I will first outline how I understand the term ‘US empire’. Second, I will offer some speculative remarks about the current directionality of US empire amid generalised capitalist crisis. And, third, I will reflect on how radical struggles for gender and sexual freedom have historically taken shape in relation to the character of US empire, and what that means for queer and trans struggles today.
I
US power may be increasingly contested, and the actions of the current administration may be accelerating some of its own self-undermining tendencies, yet we nevertheless still live under US empire. And, by ‘we’, I, of course, do not just mean people living in the territories of the US. The reality of US empire is such that the vast majority of humanity is subjected to the power of US state and capital, no matter how far beyond its own territorial boundaries they live. This reality is, indeed, what differentiates US empire from past empires.
The US constituted itself as an empire precisely through its renouncement of formal empire. We see this in the way that the US advanced imperialism through a touted commitment to democracy, equality, and self-determination — that is, it formally disavowed the racial supremacy of previous empires and founded its expansion instead on an international framework of universal freedom, equality, and private property as codified within the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Explicit associations with imperialism and empire were evaded as the rhetoric of supremacy was substituted for a universalist discourse of development and modernisation. We see this too in the way that it concealed its own colonial settlements of North American territories by asserting its origins in anti-colonial struggle against the British empire.
The ability of US empire to present its ambitions in universalist terms was key to securing its hegemony. The US identified the conditions for its own imperial rule with the reproduction of global capitalism as a whole. This mediation is how the US state was able to represent its own particular interests as the universal interest of the international system. Total political, economic, and military dominance was said to endow the US state with the ability to guarantee and enforce the general conditions for the reproduction of an international system based on universal rights of self-determination and national sovereignty.
This system is what international relations scholars call the ‘liberal international order’. The liberal international order is defined by the recognition of formally independent sovereign states across the globe, underwritten by an extensive international infrastructure of international institutions, from economic institutions like IMF and World Bank to political institutions the UN and collective security arrangements like NATO. What is liberal about it? The term ‘liberal’ refers to the separation of politics and economics within this inter-state system. The US harnessed a division of the globe into capitalist states whose character was a separation between the political and the economic sphere. This division enabled US capital to exploit labour and natural resources overseas that were located under the formal political jurisdiction of another state. In other words, it opened up markets for land, labour, and resources to US capital that had formerly been enclosed within formal empires. This liberal international order allowed the US to project its economic power globally whilst also recognising the universal rights of national self-determination, political independence, and formal sovereignty of newly-formed nation-states.
II
In recent years, the US has entered a period of what can be described as ‘dominance without hegemony’. The universalist rights discourse that legitimated and sanctioned the expansion of US-led global capitalism is no longer convincing. US power is increasingly unable – and seemingly unwilling – to dissimulate its imperial ambitions through universalist discourses of freedom, security, and equality. In the first two months of the Trump administration, we have witnessed a wholesale assault on the very global infrastructure that enabled the consolidation of US dominance in the name of returning the US to its rightful position as the world’s dominant power. Everything from NATO to USAID, institutions that the US had historically wielded to advance imperial interests abroad, are, instead, framed as charity projects that are draining national resources and therefore curtailing US power. The administration, it seems, has bought into the US state’s own governing myths. ‘That’s no longer our problem’, is now the refrain of US leadership in its talks with allies — hardly the attitude of a global hegemon.
One way to think about this shift is as a transition from the informal empire of the postwar period, advanced through the US-backed liberal international order, to a formal model of empire based on territorial acquisition (see gangsterist posturing about taking over Greenland or turning Canada into a 51st state), televised face-offs with foreign state leaders, and explicit ideologies of national and racial supremacy. ‘America First’ signals dominance without hegemony, exceptionalism without universalism: the US is no longer seeking to disavow its own imperial ambitions through an appeal to the interest of the international system as a whole. Advancing its own interests is no longer mystified as advancing the universal interest.
Crucially, this has meant an erosion of the liberal character of the international order that divides states and the inter-state system into a political sphere (where states appear as formally free and equal) and an economic sphere (where states are stratified within a capitalist world-system). Examples abound: an unelected tech billionaire leading a federal advisory board named after his favourite meme. The President turning the White House into a Tesla car dealership to promote the unelected billionaire’s failing company and redesigning the Oval Office to resemble the gaudy interiors of Mar-a-Lago or a Trump Tower. The US Justice Department announcing that it will no longer enforce corruption laws against US capital operating overseas. Senators calling to abolish the TSA and replace it with private security companies, alongside the increased role of private military contracting within the Pentagon. These things are all reminiscent of the actions of the capitalist states of formal colonial empires, which often elided any distinction between the political and economic sphere. Consider how private trading companies like the East India Company were granted political rights by the sovereign state such as territorial dominion, tax collection, and army building.
The most glaring case of this development are Trump’s obscene pronouncements on Gaza. In a recent essay entitled Slumlord Empire, Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar write:
US complicity in Israel’s genocide under the Biden-Harris administration has now morphed into a complete jettisoning … of the very idea of sovereignty claims binding together states, territories, and populations. … The ideology of the real estate empire — be it personal or national — dispenses with this legitimating narrative. Instead, it advances an overwhelmingly bare and explicit profit motive as the alibi for the violence of slum clearances, managed decline, gentrification, and financialization.
Here, Trump’s imperialist imaginary proceeds through the prism of real-estate development, dispensing with all mediations of ideology, international law, and, crucially, the liberal character of the global order.
Toscano and Bhandar treat these developments as historically unprecedented. Even former (settler) colonial projects, they argue, sought to legitimise themselves through civilizing narratives and various legal technologies. I disagree with this framing. First, Trump’s vision of a sanitised and redeveloped Gaza Strip is certainly not free of familiar colonial civilising scripts. And, second, there are numerous historical cases of state-led colonial predation in which corporations were granted sovereign rights and relied on more direct forms of appropriation that forewent many superstructural mediations.
Nonetheless, they are correct to note that an AI video of a ‘Trump Gaza’ tower surrounded by luxury condominiums on the Gazan shoreline conjures up a future where Donald Trump is imagined to own the land outright. That is, it is a future in which the US president enriches himself personally through territorial settlement. A state leader participating directly in plunder and appropriation. In this colonial imaginary, institutions like the military lose their illusory status as ‘neutral’ instruments of public power and are, instead, remade as tools of personal power to enrich a political ruler. The US state is not imagined simply as the guarantor of existing property relations but, rather, as an active participant in the creation of new racialised regimes of extraction, enslavement, and exploitation — again evoking more formal models of colonial settlement and dispossession.
These developments take us beyond the liberal architecture of informal US empire. This erosion of the distinction between political and economic spheres is perhaps best captured by the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin (cited by Toscano and Bhandar) who has characterised Trump’s plan for Gaza as turning it into ‘the first sovereign corporation to join the UN.’ Even if these plans still only exist at the level of right-wing trolling fantasies, they express a desired substitution of informal liberal empire for formal fascistic empire.
III
How have political struggles taken shape in relation to this model of informal empire? In my book, I argue that persecuted populations have historically been able to appeal to the supposedly universal rights and freedoms that the US state proclaims in its constitution or in the charters of international governing bodies. However, these liberal rights campaigns ironically confirm the very foundation of the US state by mobilising its universal rights discourse of liberty, equality, and security. It is in this way that certain LGBT+ subjects have historically become contingently assimilated within the project of US empire. Jasbir Puar’s notion of ‘homonationalism’ describes this incorporation of gays and lesbians within the US imperial project during its invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and indeed during its more recent state-sponsored genocidal war in Gaza. But, while this is perhaps the most well-known articulation of this process, the book shows that it is part of a much longer history of LGBT politics.
An alternative tradition of radical queer struggle — one that I chart in my book https://www.sup.org/books/politics/eros-and-empire from gay liberation to black lesbian feminism through to radical AIDS activism — sought not to affirm the universalist discourses of the US state but, rather, to expose the realities of violence and exploitation that those universalisms formally abjure.
This is not the first time that the US’s hegemonic status is in crisis. It is also not the first time US imperial violence has found such naked expression. The radical struggles studied in the book seized upon precisely such moments of hegemonic instability to contest relations of US dominance. Many have pointed to the parallels between the seventies and today: overproduction, economic stagnation, multiplying surplus populations, and inflation precipitated by war and imperial overreach in Vietnam. It was during this period that black lesbian feminists articulated their most potent critiques of imperialism and sought to illuminate how imperialism redounded upon gender and sexual relations in the imperial core.
Or consider the nineties, when radical AIDS activists faced down successive administrations that refused to share prevention materials that featured explicit same-sex material, imposed travel bans on HIV-positive migrants (detaining some 300 HIV-positive Haitians in Guantanamo Bay), and introduced trade policies that restricted the procurement of AIDS medication in sub-Saharan Africa to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies, all within the context of US war in the Middle East. Within the first week of taking office, the Trump administration temporarily took down all federal web pages containing HIV/AIDS prevention information, prohibited organisations in sub-Saharan African from distributing AIDS medication that had been procured using US foreign aid, and announced its programme of border militarisation and mass deportation, again within the context of war in the Middle East. Queer and trans activist groups have repurposed Act Up slogans against mass death (like Silence = Death) in protest actions against the genocidal violence in Gaza.
Radicals have confronted strikingly similar conditions before. And, in their struggles, they refused to be backed into a defence of the status quo — a move that unfortunately seems to be tempting to many radical scholars today. Instead, they seized the opportunity to further heighten the contradictions of US empire and to articulate links between seemingly disparate sites of struggle: imperial predation, racialised violence, political repression, immiseration, and moral panics around gender and sexuality. With little to lose, they demanded the impossible in times when the realm of the possible seemed to be simultaneously shrinking and expanding.
