We can pivot to become the Good Republic
Yes, will America become the next Evil Empire? Perhaps we already are. Many who study world history and analyze current affairs say we already are. They say we have been despite all the immense good America has done for so many people around the globe. Just ask, however, Indigenous Americans. Ask the Vietnamese and others in Southeast Asia, in the Koreas, and those across the Middle East and all over Latin America and the Caribbean. Today ask Canadians, Greenlanders, and the Danes. We Americans destroy and build shiny new places, but at such enormous costs we bury the ruins beneath those glowing beacons atop our hills. Sometimes such actions has paid off for everyone, such as rebuilding Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Regardless, however, we humans everywhere are rife with contradictions and the inability to perceive what we refuse to see.
Donald Trump has turned the world against the United States. His actions highlight his imperial ambitions as he consolidates more and more raw power than anyone else in US history. Events highlights America as the largest, de facto, unofficial world empire in human history, and it is not an enlightened one. If anything, we Americans have always had an empire ever since they wrested their constitutional democratic republic away from both the British Empire and Native American tribal confederacies. America as a constitutional democratic republic is deeply flawed, yes, and shackled by large corporations run mostly by White men, and it’s still a constitutional democratic republic. Furthermore, the United States is, always was, and remains an empire in all but name. Our empire isn’t as much about ownership, although much was conquered, and some, including Cuba, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal Zone were let go. The US empire is primarily an economic, corporatocratic capitalist regime backed up by multiple military alliances with over a thousand military bases at its height. As such this imperial superpower is more for control and less about ownership. Most Americans, despite being caught up in waves of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism over centuries, aren’t comfortable with being an empire. As an American myself, I know and am too aware of what many of my fellow citizens simply do not know nor care to know.
The US empire flourished after its Civil War even tho Reconstruction and opening the West and the Pacific took time, blood, and resources. The same occurred again in the wake of and even during each of the World Wars and the Cold War.
The world had been divided into more or less the good guys versus the bad guys plus all those in the middle. The bad guys included the drug cartels, terrorist groups, and nations such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Belarus. The good guys were the NATO countries, the EU, the USA, the UK, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Israel, and so forth. Much of the world from Brazil to India sat in the middle. Now all of that has been turned upside down by Donald Trump and his stupid, idiotic, bombastic, and destructive socmeddy posts.
Trump’s threats over Easter included the extinction of Iran’s Persian civilization, among the world’s oldest, and wanting the United States to leave NATO turned the world against the USA. Imagine that. As if we were Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Thing is, the Axis were far worse than the Allies in the scale, methodology, and intention of their war crimes. The dictatorship of Iran is far worse than our quasi-authoritarian POTUS. The regime, based in Tehran and Qom, openly murdered 30 to 50 thousand of its own people out in the streets and untold dozens and maybe hundreds more inside its detention centers. But comparison, the regime of the Orange Man in the White House shot two fellow Americans dead with less than a hundred detainees dying in ICE/CBP detention centers.
Our hypercapitalist, corporatocratic economy, dominated by oligarchs, has mutated into a top heavy Ponzi scam made even more volatile for its inverted or upside down pyramid. The global economy is so addicted to fossil fuels, especially oil, stoppages and slowdowns brings entire nations to the precipice of economic collapse. We have entered into a so-called “Age of Deglobalization,” and the truth is while strong local economies are vital to worldwide financial health, we are a planetary species. We best thrive as a planetary species with an integrated, local-global economy, yet there is little real social and environmental responsibility from any of the national and regional economic systems. Capitalist, communist, socialist, monarchist, whatever, they all fail as they’re each as obsolete and as anachronistic as tribalism, feudalism, and mercantilism. We’re too busy arguing and yelling at each other with overheated usage of the same tired old -isms from the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. And now we’re over a quarter of the way thru the 21st, and we’re still debating private versus public control, control versus ownership, state versus nonstate, capital versus management versus workers, energy resources, and cooperation versus competition.
We Americans can choose to work together across our many partisan differences to help make America an even better nation. Together we can pull back from so-called forever wars, especially in the Middle East and South Asia, and reinvest our treasure here at home. Our country sprawls from far-flung islands in the Western Pacific to Alaska to Puerto Rico to Florida, Minnesota, and Maine. Our empire spans the globe. We can withdraw from these scattered military bases in stages and still support our allies. The people within numerous US territories can choose to join as States United or become fully independent.
We do not need, however, to continue being chained to historical patterns and jerked along by small thinkers and shriveled hearts. The United States can walk away, openly and proudly, from its empire and its wars. America can take a stand for all nations of Planet Earth to come together, not as part of America or for an empire but for a global federation. The USA can choose to stand up for a constitutional, democratic world republic with a democratic world parliament or federal congress to be built out by the people of the world. Stop playing small. For as Trump abandons America’s alliances and punishes its trading partners, he in turn is stupidly, ignorantly casting off chunks of empire. Instead of pushing them away, at least let them go freely and stay allies with equal say in our alliances. Let them stay as trading partners free to trade with anyone else. Let them take over our military bases or close them. Every empire falls eventually. No republic has to. And nation-states and stateless-nations around the world can choose to integrate themselves into a truly democratic planetary union. We humans ready ourselves for the stars above by first uniting ourselves to take care of our home planet. No one needs to be an evil empire any more anywhere.
William Dudley Bass
Thursday 9 April 2026
Monday 13 April 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Copyright © 2026 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.