How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

Together with the other empire-killing technologies, global standards changed the rules of the game. Powerful countries had long secured their ability to both claim resources and move around the planet by controlling land. Those were the rules the United States had played by when it expanded westward and overseas. Those were the rules Germany and Japan had played by in the Second World War. By those rules, the end of the war had brought the United States to the dizzying heights of imperial possibility. It had new ambitions and every chance to back those ambitions by seizing territory. Had it done so, it could have locked down a resource base and a strategic position unrivaled in history. That the United States declined to follow victory with annexations—that instead it decolonized—cannot be explained by a sudden onset of altruism. It was due in part to the revolt of colonized peoples worldwide. It was also due to the lessons learned in the war. Fighting and winning that war had taught Washington the art of projecting power without claiming colonies. New technologies helped it achieve, as a writer in the forties put it, “domination without annexation.” Those technologies laid the foundation for our world today. It’s a far cry from the world Teddy Roosevelt envisioned, in which the strong violently subdue the weak and take their land. It is much closer to the one Herbert Hoover imagined, held together not by empires, but by the market. It’s a world where the great coordinati...