America's Unique Form of Imperialism

The concluding words of Daniel Immerwahr's new book should leave no one in doubt as to where he stands. “The history of the United States is the history of empire,” he observes, stripping away the pretense of a U.S.-led liberal international order and demoting the United States from benevolent superpower into the ranks of greedy European imperial states. America's overseas territories and military bases are — in Immerwahr's telling — every bit as much shaped by racist and colonialist forces as their 19th-century forebears. America today still constitutes what he describes as a “pointillist empire”: a globe-spanning hegemon enabled by the tiny specks of land it controls across the globe.