Daniel Bessner’s Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century begins with a provocative question: Why do Americans find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the American empire? His answer is that Americans have come to regard US hegemony as effectively immovable. The empire persists, in other words, not simply because Americans believe that it is good, necessary, or even particularly virtuous, but because they have difficulty imagining that it could be otherwise.
It is an important insight, and Bessner—a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—is an unusually thoughtful writer on American foreign policy. Imperialist Realism, just published in late July, collects essays examining American power through political theory, intellectual history, foreign-policy analysis, and popular culture. Bessner, a leftist, moves easily from Barack Obama, George Soros, and Samantha Power to video games and the culture surrounding contemporary American militarism. The result is an engaging attempt to understand not merely what the United States does abroad, but how Americans understand—or in cases fail to understand—the world their government has created.
Bessner’s central concept, “imperialist realism,” borrowed from Mark Fischer’s “capitalist realism,” is particularly useful as a description of the prevailing American consciousness. The basic idea is that empire has become so deeply embedded in American political culture that it ceases to appear as a political choice. The United States maintains hundreds of overseas military installations, sustains a vast network of alliances and security commitments, intervenes repeatedly in foreign conflicts, and assumes responsibility for maintaining a particular international order. Yet much of this is treated not as the result of deliberate political decisions but as simply the way the world works: impossible for it to be otherwise.
That is a valuable observation. Ideas matter. Political orders require intellectual justifications, and the categories through which people understand the world can constrain what they regard as politically possible. Bessner is therefore right to emphasize the psychological and cultural dimensions of the American empire.
But there is an important question left unanswered: Does imperialist realism explain why the American empire persists, or does it primarily describe the ideological consciousness surrounding its persistence? The distinction matters.
Americans may indeed believe that the American empire is immovable. But why is it immovable in the first place? Here Bessner’s account seems less satisfying. The persistence of American hegemony is not simply a consequence of Americans being unable to imagine an alternative—indeed, if voting is something to be considered of consequence, it is telling that from 1990–2020 the candidate that was elected was the one who promised to do less in foreign policy in terms of interventionism. Clearly, ideas alone are not enough, and to understand the persistence of the empire one must understand its underlying political economy.
Consider the incentives facing the institutions that actually make foreign policy. The Pentagon has little reason to advocate a smaller Pentagon. Defense contractors have little reason to lobby for fewer weapons contracts. Members of Congress whose districts benefit from military spending have incentives to preserve those expenditures—and to avoid the wrath of the overwhelmingly interventionist opinion-maker class of the corporate press. Bureaucracies develop constituencies, careers, expertise, and organizational cultures around existing policies. Alliances create reciprocal commitments. Foreign governments lobby Washington to maintain American security guarantees. Think tanks, universities, consultants, journalists, and former government officials develop professional interests around the existing foreign-policy establishment.
None of this requires anyone to believe that the American empire is morally righteous.
Indeed, that is precisely the point. An empire can persist even after belief in its righteousness has weakened. Political institutions do not require ideological conviction from every participant. They require incentives.
This is where public-choice economics offers a useful complement to Bessner’s cultural analysis. The question is not merely why ordinary Americans cannot imagine an alternative. It is why the people and institutions with the greatest ability to alter American foreign policy frequently have strong incentives not to do so. The benefits of intervention, military spending, and global commitments are often concentrated, while their costs are diffuse. A defense contractor knows exactly what is at stake in a weapons program. The average taxpayer does not know how much of his or her tax bill is ultimately connected to it. The resulting political equilibrium can persist without requiring a national consensus in its favor.
There is also a problem of inertia. Once institutions, alliances, military deployments, bureaucratic procedures, and international commitments exist, dismantling them becomes politically more difficult than maintaining them. Every individual commitment can be defended as modest and reasonable even when the cumulative result is extraordinary. No single decision necessarily creates an empire. Millions of decisions can nonetheless sustain one.
This does not make Bessner wrong. Quite the opposite: his concept helps explain why this equilibrium can become culturally invisible. Political economy can explain the incentives that reproduce empire; Bessner helps explain the consciousness that makes those incentives appear natural.
But the causal relationship is important: Americans may think empire is inevitable partly because powerful institutions have made it extraordinarily difficult to dismantle. In that sense, what appears as a cultural inability to imagine alternatives may itself be partly the product of material and institutional arrangements.
Bessner is therefore most persuasive when he is describing the experience of living within American empire. He is less persuasive if “imperialist realism” is treated as a complete explanation for the empire’s persistence.
Whatever its shortcomings, Bessner has given us a compelling account of why Americans find the end of empire difficult to imagine. From the Austro-libertarian perspective, the question remains how to overcome the ideational and institutional impediments to ending it and freeing the American people. The struggle continues.
