The Question of Empire
A Reassessment of Foreign Policy
Mr. E. Dale Schalow delivered the following speech at the East Coast Forum in Virginia, on October 25, 2025. The event was hosted by the Bluestone Heritage League and Vetus Dominium Club chapters of the Old Glory Club.
I’ve wrangled over this one for three months because it raises many questions that need to be addressed. It’s primarily focused upon foreign policy, but foreign policy just as a means of understanding what our role is and what we’re supposed to do.
So, what is the Question of Empire? Well, it’s not if there’s an Empire, because I think we can all agree that there is an empire in the United States by the inherent virtue of the post-Cold War strategic paradigm; it is a world hegemon.
And if we have pretensions to being some sort of elite that has a political function — whatever that function is, whether it be within this empire or outside of it — the question as to what our relationship to it may be must be addressed. That is the Question of Empire.
But before I can tell you what the Question of Empire has in terms of consequences, I need to tell you what the state of empire is. The state of empire is that the United States is a waning, declining global hegemon; it has not yet broken, but it is on the way to it; multipolarity is not presently a reality, but assuming things are not changed, it will be in the future.
There are alternative power blocs, largely out of East Asia centered around China. Russia is its own. Iran and Turkey are competing for hegemony in the Middle East. At present, a coalition between Israel and the Gulf Arab states is trying to be made with the United States backing them to counter Turkey and Iran. Historically, the Middle East has always been divided between the Arabs, the Persians, and the Turks.
But make no mistake: the global economy and the global strategic situation is centered around the United States. This is largely due to Cold War circumstances. The United States built a coalition of nations which made up NATO; also, nations in Southeast Asia which the United States then took to counter the growing Soviet Union, which set up its own security paradigm. At the end of the Cold War, one of those two triumphed, and whatever one triumphed would have achieved global hegemony. We have inherited that situation, and therefore we must answer the questions that are brought up by that situation. And I believe one of the great impediments to answering those questions is bad ideas and bad priors; perhaps these are made by good people, people we draw inspiration and influence from, but we must move on from them in order to address these questions properly.
Isolationism
The first idea of these is that of Isolationism, that of retreating to a fortress America building bunkers on the beaches, a wall, shutting ourselves off from the world. Even economically, I’ve heard it, I see memes about it, I see it posted about on Twitter. The United States does not have everything within our own borders. We have a great deal, perhaps more than any nation on Earth. But a single example: heavy grades of crude oil. In the United States’ oil fields that are producing what we need right now, we only have light grades of crude oil. This is largely for consumer products, but the heavier grades of crude oil are for airplane fuel, fueling freighters, all of these other things. The closest one is in Alberta. Perhaps Alberta can be annexed and we get Canadian oil for pennies on the dollar, but that’s just one example. The United States is one of the best agriculture bases on Earth; it has the second largest manufacturing base on Earth, but it doesn’t have everything. Because we don’t have everything, particularly that which is required for a 21st-century political economy and a 21st-century military, which I will admit is changing, that necessitates some amount of foreign involvement. Some amount, at least for protecting trade.
I do not believe that the United States can retreat to its own borders, can build bunkers on the beaches, build walls, and shut itself off from the world. I do not believe that it can do that and pursue this ideal of autarchy and long be relevant, because you will always have some kind of foreign influence. Foreign influence can never be fully eliminated, so long as you have people with familial, cultural, filial ties to other nations. You will have some kind of foreign influence. It can be reduced, it can be managed, but it can never be fully eliminated.
And, in addition, if the United States by conscious choice decides to give up its own position as a world hegemon, there is no guarantee that someone else, some other polity — perhaps it doesn’t exist yet, but there is no reason why that other polity will not take that empty hole.
But you cannot have a global empire for its own sake. This was the mistake that the WASP liberal establishment in the 1960s made. Yes, they were excellent with policy, but they were foolish in having no spiritual or civilizational mission foundation. People talk about pragmatism for its own sake, policy for its own sake; that was what the WASPs were in the 1960s. The Stimson types. They were hollow people. You can see this with the show Mad Men. These people over time crumbled away, and many of them were captured by New Left ideologies. That’s not the model of what we want to replicate.
But the goal, the end state, of all cultures in all places in all times is expansion. You go inward to go outward. Even back in Roman times this was the case. If you look at the geostrategic situations of the Middle Ages, of the Early Modern period, of the 20th century, this is the state of things. Great Powers exist because at present the global situation does not support a hegemon. A hegemon exists because at present the global situation does not support Great Powers. And the only reason that that Great Powers situation can or will come about is due to continued mismanagement of the dominant position that the United States has.
Balkanization
Another idea that I want to blow out of the water is the concept of a Balkanized United States. Everyone talks about the geographical advantage that the Lower 48 has: more miles of inland navigable waterway than the rest of the world combined; the barrier islands off the coast which allow for interstate coastal shipping; oil fields spread throughout; any kind of mineral, whether they’re exploited or not; agricultural base; lumber (matched only by Russia). We have all of these things, we have this great wealth of resources, and if the United States were to be separated into various competing political projects with different swaths of that geographical pie, it will cease to be the dominant power that it has been. Further, it will ensure that any sovereignty of those powers is very much handed over.
This will ruffle some feathers: the example of the Confederate States. The Confederate States were legally justified, and I personally think morally justified, in fighting against the Union. But in terms of their geopolitical and political–economical foundations, they were fools. You cannot build a political economy around a single commodity export. That is what Latin American countries do. That is why they are dysfunctional. The entirety of the Southern economy was built around the cultivation and the sale of cotton and of debt arbitrage. Industry did exist, but it was actively disincentivized. This was what the entire fight over westward expansion was over. And when the war was occurring, the Confederate States received considerable support from outside forces, but even outside of the United States, westward expansion was no guarantee.
We went to war with Great Britain in 1812 because Great Britain refused to abandon forts that were aiding and abetting Indians on our borders. That’s the reason why the War of 1812 occurred. When it occurred, and when we won, then there was the matter of Spain. Spain was a geopolitical competitor until the Adams–Onis Treaty of 1819 ceded Florida. We almost went to war with Britain in 1845 over Oregon. During the Civil War, the French government propped up the Empire of Mexico as a counterweight to the United States, and had there been British and French intervention, it was very likely that French intervention would have come in through Maximilian’s Mexico through the Confederacy. We almost went to war with Great Britain in 1895 over Venezuela — and this is during the great isolationist century of the 19th century, when we were doing our westward expansion.
You will always have foreign powers, whatever they are, whatever the situation. It’s not Great Britain anymore. It’s not France anymore. But it’s someone. When you’re in the realm of geopolitics, when you are on the world stage, you will always have foreign powers undermining you, backing your opposition, finding some way to disrupt your political economy. And this needs to be acknowledged, and this needs to be understood. This needs to be taken into account for any sort of foreign policy consideration. And should the United States break into several pieces, it’s very highly likely that several of those pieces, much like the Latin American republics, will start degenerating and look very similar.
Multipolarity
Another concept is the idea of Multipolarity, which I mentioned earlier. Multipolarity means that you have several competing Great Powers. This is very much a possibility. It is not quite here yet, but it is very much a possibility. And if it does occur, then the possibility of Great Power conflicts comes back on the table. Great Power conflicts result in the deaths of tens of millions. Look at the 20th century. Look at the Napoleonic Wars. When you have several peer groups with similar spheres of influence, they will come into conflict. And other powers will be incentivized to keep a sort of balance, but it is always heading toward a single hegemon.
The 19th century was a time of various powers, of various empires. The first half of the 20th century was also such a time. In the latter half of the 20th century, it was two powers competing with each other over what the shape of globalism would look like. Now we seem to be going back in the other direction. Again, changes in demographics, changes in political economy, changes in transportation technology, may necessitate a sort of descaling. I believe that might happen. But are freighters going to go away? Are airplanes going to go away? Are the infrastructures that support them going to go away? Unless you have a total systems collapse, the likes of which has not been seen since 1177 B.C., these will not go away. You might have the flows tamped down a little bit, but they will not go away.
Furthermore, the lifestyles to which we were all acculturated to, the way we all live materially — and I’m not saying that materialism is an end in and of itself — the easy access to Internet, the access to cheap power, for economic advancement the access to cheap credit, all of it is dependent on this interdependent, global economy which is backed by the United States. And yes, when the United States set that up in the Cold War, the people who footed the bill were the middle Americans. It was the industrial base in the Rust Belt. Yes, there was a cost to it, and yes, that cost must be recouped. But you will not escape from this reality. A breakdown of global systems means deaths in the millions. And I believe it’s entirely avoidable.
Foreign Wars
Which brings me to the point of Foreign Wars. I myself am a soldier. I’m in the National Guard. I am one of the first to go and die whenever bad ideas win. And the War on Terror can be critiqued on its own terms, can be critiqued by its own memes. But Britain had soldiers occupying India for 200 years. Other parts of the world, too. And this was a source of national pride to them. We had soldiers in Afghanistan for 20 years, and it was a source of national shame to us. Why? What was the difference?
The difference is that America has a schizophrenia about itself, and this has existed, really, since the Department of the Interior declared in 1890 that the Frontier was closed; that same year Alfred Thayer Mahan published his seminal work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660–1783. Immediately after that, the United States annexed Hawaii, and the United States fought the Spanish–American War, in which it acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and turned Cuba into a protectorate state. We fought an insurrection in the Philippines, and we won an insurrection in the Philippines. The United States has seemed to have no problem fighting insurrections in the past, and yet, in the post-Vietnam paradigm, we look at all of these causes as doomed causes from the beginning. This was an image that was very consciously created; all of the media around the Vietnam War is very consciously meant to create this image.
But what is this schizophrenia? When the Philippines were acquired in 1898, several writers, prominent politicians, lawyers, Mark Twain being a famous example, created the Anti-Imperial League. The Anti-Imperial League utilized all sorts of arguments, from proto-progressivism (“Oh, America was supposed to be this Jeffersonian ideal; we were supposed to be different from the Old World”) to the Lothrop Stoddard-inspired “Why do you want to acquire all of these foreign peoples who cannot assimilate to what is required of a White republic?” What unified them was the opposition to expansion.
This schizophrenia has existed since the United States closed its Frontier and looked outward. And the schizophrenia is between the United States as this inward-looking, insular republic and the United States as a world hegemon. As long as that tension exists, you will have GWOTs, or Vietnams, or things like that.
Foreign Influence
Finally, the idea of Foreign Influence. All of us would agree that a very particular group of people has outsized influence on this country, but they’re not the first! Preceding AIPAC was the China Lobby.
When China fell to the Communists in 1949, all of the Nationalist Party Chinese went to Taiwan. They had an outsized influence within the Department of War. It’s highly possible that the Red Scare was backed and supported by the China Lobby, because it actively benefited them; they wanted China back. The United States was involved with China for 200 years, almost.
The point of this is that so long as you permit foreigners to be part of your country, which almost every polity finds a way to do, it’s a given that you will have some sort of foreign lobby, some form of foreign influence. I’m reminded of a story from the Bible, the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. The master tells his servants to go to the barn and get the wheat seeds and spread them across the field, and then the adversary comes and takes tare seeds and spreads them across the field. The wheat and the tares come up together. The master tells his servants not to go and pull up the tares because they might pull up the wheat. This is how you should be thinking about foreign influence.
My wife’s father is a citizen of the United Kingdom. Does that compromise my judgment on the United Kingdom? Very possibly. It may not. But this is what I’m talking about. You will have familial connections. You will have filial connections. You may just like a country. You cannot have a country without borders. You cannot have a country without a sense of self. But you’re also a part of a wider whole. You must have some sort of orientation to the world stage, even if that orientation is shutting yourself off from it; that’s still a relationship.
And yes, foreign powers and foreign lobbies can take possession of your country if you let them. Only if you let them. And they could take advantage of your cultural priors. The reason why AIPAC was so successful was that there was a home-grown theological movement within the United States that let that road be paved. Anything, anything can be taken by a foreign lobby and turned to their advantage. You can do the same thing to them, but this is how geopolitics works. In the world of geopolitics, in the world of foreign relations, you are either a master or a slave; if you’re somewhere in between, you’re trending in one of those two directions.
I don’t want to be a slave.
America must develop a global vision of itself, whatever that global vision is, whatever its relationship to the world stage. Given the present reality, given the present Realpolitik, it must be considered. A vision needs to be developed. It can’t be an empire just for its own sake. It’s hollow, and it will fall away. But, if you have pretensions to being one of those policymakers, to being one of those vision-setters, you must take these realities into consideration. You can’t just go and have this libertarian ideal of an isolationist country that never has to get involved, ever.
And if you don’t want to get involved everywhere, then content yourself with sliding more toward being Mexico. Because an isolated United States starts to look like a much more functional Mexico, regardless of geography. In order to create a vision, in order to bring about the vision, you need to start from the source. In order to answer these questions, in order to keep yourself from being enslaved by foreign powers, you need to go to the source. You need to go to where your faith is and draw out a vision from that. Because if you don’t, it’s almost certain that your sovereignty will pass into the hands of those who want to make the world in their image.
And I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t want to be a slave. Thank you.