Beyond / Q&A

U.S. Imperialism Was Built In from the Beginning

The U.S. has a long history of attempting territorial expansion and economic dominance. Is there anything new in Trump's foreign policy stance?

by Aviva Chomsky, Norman Stockwell via The Progressive on February 12, 2026

...being very enamored with the U.S. model—and wanting U.S. investment and U.S. connections, and to send their children to the United States to be educated—and a kind of populist, nationalist reaction against U.S. domination. So the Monroe Doctrine has always had a mixed reception in Latin America.

Q: The interesting thing is that the Monroe Doctrine was promoted less than fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was put forward in what would become the United States. Is there a contradiction with this new country casting off an imperial colonizer and then almost immediately claiming rights to make determinations about a whole group of other countries?

Chomsky: The American Revolution was basically led by slaveholders and land speculators, and they had a lot of nice things to say about rights of man and stuff, but they were clearly founding a white man’s expansionist country. It was an imperial country from the very first days. The Declaration of Independence refers to “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” One of the sparks for the Revolution was actually British treaty making and the Proclamation of 1763, which limited settler expansion, along with immigration and naturalization. So [in terms of] the idea of being a white settler state, Britain was putting some limits on settler expansion. One of the goals of the American Revolution was to free up settler expansion.

Also, [twenty years before the Monroe Doctrine] was the Louisiana Purchase. We always hear that the United States purchased it from France, but of course France had very little presence in the entire region that it so-called sold to the United States, which was Native land. From the moment of independence, the United States embarked on more than a century of permanent and expansionist warfare against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Louisiana Purchase was not the end of declaring U.S. sovereignty in that territory; it was the first step, followed by warfare and conquest to establish U.S. control of that territory.

The same thing is true of the Mexican-American War [1846-1848]. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 created an agreement between the United States and Mexico, but it was the beginning of the Indian wars in what we call the American West to actually impose U.S. domination over the peoples who lived there.

So the United States as an imperial, expansionist power does not begin in 1898 with the Spanish-American War and the United States taking islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean; it is absolute continuity from the conquest of Native lands that begins with the first arrival of the British.