Evil Empire 93In that reality, the United States has long been an imperial pow-
er with white nationalist aspirations. Given the racialized nature of
U.S. imperial expansion, it makes sense that Alexis de Tocqueville
predicted, in a chapter entitled “The Three Races of the United States,”
that the United States would one day govern “the destinies of half the
globe.” In its early days, while still a slave-holding country, the United
States asserted its sovereignty through genocide on a continental scale
and annexed large portions of northern Mexico. The country went on
to overthrow the independent state of Hawaii, occupied the Philip-
pines and Haiti, exerted its regional power throughout Latin America,
expanded its international hegemony after World War II, and became
what it is today: the world’s foremost military and nuclear power with
a $716 billion “defense” budget that exceeds the spending of all other
major global powers combined.
“Taking over from the British Empire in the early twentieth-century,”
argues James Tully, the United States has used its many military bases
located “outside its own borders”—now nearly 800 in over 80 countries—
to force open-door economic policies and antidemocratic regimes on
states throughout the formerly colonized world. An extremely partial
list of sovereign governments that the United States either overthrew or
attempted to subvert through military means, assassinations, or election
tampering since 1949 includes Syria, Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, the
Congo, Cuba, Chile, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Grenada, Cuba, Korea,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Yemen, Australia, Greece, Bolivia, and
Angola. Such interventionist policies have contributed substantially to
today’s inegalitarian world in which an estimated 783 million people
live in profound poverty. In sum, for untold millions of humans in
the Global South, the seventy years of worldwide order, security, and
prosperity that Ikenberry and Deudney associate with Pax Americana
has been anything but ordered, secure, or prosperous.