The fireworks over Philadelphia on July 4 were spectacular. So was the irony. The country celebrating its 250th birthday had spent the preceding five months conducting airstrikes against a sovereign nation, holding a sitting foreign head of state in extrajudicial detention, and fighting an escalating constitutional battle over how much power one man can legally exercise in a republic founded specifically to prevent the concentration of power in one man’s hands. The founders would have recognized the danger immediately. Several of them predicted it with remarkable precision.
John Quincy Adams warned in 1821 that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” lest it become “the dictatress of the world” and cease to be “the ruler of her own spirit.” George Washington cautioned against “permanent alliances” that would entangle the young republic in the quarrels of European empires. Thomas Jefferson wrote of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” These were not naive pacifist sentiments. They were structural warnings from men who had studied how republics die — not by foreign conquest, but by the slow internal corruption of militarism, executive overreach, and the slide toward empire.
The 250th anniversary is an occasion to ask how far the republic has traveled from those warnings. The answer is: very far. And the journey did not begin with Donald Trump.
The Contradiction Written Into the Founding
The anti-colonial tradition of 1776 was genuine, and it was also incomplete from the first day. The same founders who wrote of universal rights built a political economy on enslaved labor, pursued genocidal expansion across Indigenous territory, and by the time of the Monroe Doctrine had already begun transforming a defensive posture toward European imperialism into a justification for American hemispheric dominance. Theodore Roosevelt’s “corollary” to the doctrine made the transformation explicit: the US reserved the right to intervene in the affairs of any Latin American state it deemed insufficiently stable, which in practice meant insufficiently compliant.
The Anti-Imperialist League, formed after the Spanish-American War of 1898, represented the last serious organized effort to win this argument from within the mainstream of American politics. Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Andrew Johnson’s former secretary of state shared one conviction: a republic could not govern other peoples indefinitely without transforming its own political character. They lost. The twentieth century turned the United States into a continental empire with global reach, inheriting much of Britain’s strategic infrastructure after 1945 and exceeding it within a generation.
The clearest moment when the older tradition reasserted itself — and the one that now reads as the exception that proves the rule — was the Suez Crisis of 1956. When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Eisenhower refused to endorse the operation and applied sufficient economic and diplomatic pressure to force a humiliating allied withdrawal. Cold War calculations were involved — Washington could not afford to look like a colonial power to the newly decolonized world it was competing for. But the episode nevertheless drew on something real in the American political tradition: the instinct that conquest of this kind belonged to a world the republic had defined itself against. Suez now feels like a political artifact from another civilization.
What 250 Years of Empire Does to a Republic
The founders’ deepest concern was not that America would be conquered from outside, but that it would conquer itself from within. Empire, in classical republican theory, does not merely change a country’s foreign policy. It changes its political culture — normalizing executive secrecy, expanding presidential war powers, atrophying the legislative capacity to check them, and cultivating a public that has grown accustomed to permanent military commitment abroad.
The United States currently operates over 750 military bases in more than 80 countries. The post-September 11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in three days with a single dissenting vote, has been invoked to justify military operations in at least 19 countries over 25 years, never updated by the Congress that was supposed to hold that authority. The Supreme Court has spent the last three terms adjudicating the boundaries of presidential power in ways that confirm how strained those boundaries have become — from birthright citizenship to the scope of emergency economic authorities to the limits of executive removal power over independent agencies.
The founders designed a system in which ambition would counteract ambition, where institutional friction would slow the accumulation of power. That design assumed a Congress willing to exercise its constitutional role. A legislature that holds 362 votes in a year, cannot pass a clean spending bill without a shutdown crisis, and has consistently surrendered war-making authority to the executive over the past generation has ceased to function as the counterweight Madison envisioned.
The View From the Middle East
From much of the Arab world, the question of which republic prevailed was settled long ago. The America encountered across the Middle East is less the republic of Thomas Paine than the superpower of the 2003 Iraq invasion, the global war on terror’s extraordinary rendition programs, the sustained support for authoritarian governments in exchange for strategic stability, and the provision of weapons used in Gaza even as the civilian death toll climbed into the tens of thousands.
The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s military response produced what may have been the sharpest single rupture in American global standing since the Iraq War. The UN General Assembly voted 153-10 to demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire — a resolution the US vetoed in the Security Council. Countries that had maintained broadly positive views of Washington for decades began reassessing those views in light of what they saw as selective application of the international norms America claimed to champion.
The February 2026 strikes on Iran, conducted in partnership with Israel and without a declaration of war from a Congress that has not formally declared war since 1942, followed the same logic. They were effective in narrow military terms. They were also a demonstration of exactly the kind of unconstrained executive military power that Madison warned would corrupt the republic’s character if left unchecked.
The Question That Has No Easy Answer
Trump did not create this trajectory. He accelerated it, stripped away the liberal internationalist language that had previously wrapped American power in universalist justification, and made visible what had often been obscured. The nakedness of the current posture — from Venezuela to Gaza to the Iran war — is in some ways more honest than the “freedom agenda” rhetoric that preceded it. It is also more dangerous, because it forecloses the possibility of the first republic reasserting itself through its institutional mechanisms.
Those mechanisms are still nominally in place. The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship against executive nullification this month. Federal courts have blocked or delayed significant portions of the executive’s immigration enforcement program. Congress, however dysfunctional, has not formally surrendered its constitutional existence. The Anti-Imperialist League lost in 1898, but the tradition it represented — skeptical, liberty-focused, suspicious of concentrated power — did not entirely disappear. It resurfaced at Suez. It surfaced in the congressional opposition to the Vietnam War. It surfaces now in the polling data showing that substantial majorities of Americans across party lines are increasingly skeptical of open-ended military commitments abroad.
The question the 250th anniversary actually poses is not whether America lived up to its founding ideals — it manifestly has not, and arguably never fully could, given the contradictions built into the founding moment. The question is whether the political tradition that generated those ideals retains enough institutional strength to constrain the second republic’s worst impulses. The founders would not have put good odds on the answer. They had read enough history to know how this usually ends. They built the Constitution anyway, and then warned that only an engaged citizenry could make it last.
Original analysis inspired by Sam Hamad from The New Arab. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
By ThinkTanksMonitor
