Why not build an American Empire?

Perhaps it’s my English blood, but what if…

It occurred to me this morning that the expensive and troublesome nation building in Iraq seems inefficient. And the unstable middle East is going to remain unstable for hundreds of years, like it has for the past few thousand.

If this was business, it’d be ripe for private equity or an acquisition — stability and better realization of potential.

What if the US just seized Iraq? I‘m no history buff, but I’m guessing the British Empire was assembled as more of a more literal land grab focussed on wealth and exploitation of natural resources.

Could an Empire exist and grow in modern times that is rooted in the ideals of democracy and other pre-2017 American ideals such as equality and freedom? Would those noble intentions outweigh the gross homogenization and feelings of the repression of global independence?

Costs of the new government setup would be offset by good old natural resources of the acquired land (oil) — remember, we talked about seizing Iraq’s oil just for fighting a war there. It’s not as though our presence there right now is cheap. And we’d get valuable experience folding a huge non-white non-christian population into the Stars and Stripes.

And we might be able to acquire that most unstable of geographies, Afghanistan, in Q4 of 2020. Too hard? If we believe in American exceptionalism and that we’re the Earth’s big brother, why not lean into that role and take a more hands on approach?