The Imperfect Empire

America at 250: a comparative analysis on America, Russia, China, and the moral difference between flawed superpower and organised tyranny.

Today, America turns 250 - a quarter of a millennium of arguably one of the most radical, and to be frank, batshit crazy experiments in political thought. Honestly, I wouldn’t expect anything less from the kind of people who would board a boat, flee persecution and imperial taxes and the ceiling that a class system nails over your head, and cross the Atlantic to a land they had only vaguely heard of - armed with a handwritten map and a compass. As one of my Southern American friends told me: yes, we’re all batshit crazy over here, because that was the original gene pool.

Think about the risk calculus though - that part always fascinated me about the United States - people today can’t get two towns over without Google Maps, so imagine the appetite for risk it takes to bet your life, your family, and your future on a one-way voyage to a rumour of a New World. And you can watch that gene express itself right down to the present - in the startups, the moonshots, in the attitude where even 10% chance of success merits going all in.

You can love that attitude or hate it (I do both, at the same time), but you cannot deny it produces results. In 250 years - a blink, for those of us who walk to work past streets laid a few thousand years ago - the achievements, the good ones and the monstrous ones, have been genuinely remarkable.

I haven’t bothered reading a single retrospective about the anniversary today. I’m sure there are fantastic ones out there. I’m equally sure that, this being the age of political tribalism, I’ll be handed the two diametrically opposed scripts. The liberal left will spend the day in penance, painting the republic as the ultimate evil of the modern world - a straight line from the slaughter of Native nations to the latest failure in Iran. The conservative right will gild the whole thing and acquit it of every charge. I’ll do neither, because - excuse my French - both are bullshit narratives.

Before I wised up, I used to burn hours arguing with Western leftists about communism. Having to defend being anti-communist is a surreal experience; it’s like being asked to justify your opposition to Nazism. But over the years I learned a trick. When someone tells me free-market capitalism is the ultimate evil, I ask one question: as compared to what? Give me a real system - not a fairy tale, not the utopia in your head, but an actual example, today or two hundred years ago - that has done better for ordinary people than the fusion of democracy and market economics. Not perfect. Just better. That is where usually the conversation goes to die, because there isn’t one. As Churchill said: democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others.

So if we are going to talk about America - not the republic, but America the superpower, America the empire - we have to talk about it the only honest way you can talk about any empire. Comparatively. Against the other great imperial traditions of the modern age. Not against the concept of heaven.

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History is written in blood

I said both scripts are bullshit, and they are. No state - never mind a superpower, never mind an empire - was ever built bloodlessly or benevolently. The whole recorded human history is a long list of conquest, displacement, and slaughter. You don’t have to like that, you don’t have to endorse the means, but the history books are written in blood, and pretending otherwise is not virtue, but naiveté and frankly - ignorance.

There’s a scene in The English, the miniseries, that I think about often. The lead character, Eli Whipp - Pawnee by birth, former U.S. cavalry scout - reminds an Englishman, plainly, that Native peoples had enemies long before the white man showed up. That one line does something rare in cinema these days: it refuses both propaganda versions of history at once. It rejects the colonial myth of savages awaiting civilisation, and it rejects the sentimental counter-myth of an untouched Eden that Europeans corrupted by importing violence. Native peoples were human societies - political, strategic, proud, wounded, and often at war with one another. European conquest did not invent violence on the continent. What it did was transform its scale, its incentives, its weapons, its diseases, and - eventually - its’ consequences.

In the New World of that era, Natives were killing Natives, whites were killing Natives, Natives were killing whites, the English were killing Scots, Germans were killing French, the Dutch were fighting the Spanish. Man against man is a monster - and the sooner you internalise that when you read history, the easier it gets. Especially under conditions of near-total anarchy: no institutions, no courts, no enforceable law. We don’t call it the Wild West for nothing.

So any honest defence of the American-led order has to begin with a confession, not a boast so typical for the American exceptionalist class. Yes, the United States is not innocent - it was born in blood, it expanded through the dispossession, it enshrined slavery, practiced segregation, interned its own Japanese-American citizens, backed coups, propped up dictators, tortured prisoners, and carries a long list of failed wars on its record.

But here is the distinction I make. America’s sins have been argued over. Exposed. Investigated. Protested. Litigated. Filmed. Taught in schools. Carved into memorials. And, sometimes, corrected - by Americans themselves.

So before I go on rambling:

Happy Birthday, America. The oldest continuous constitutional democracy on Earth, and the most self-correcting empire history has yet produced.

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As compared to what?

A few days ago I posted a short thread arguing that China’s deepest long-term problem isn’t demographics or debt, but it’s cruelty; that a society cruel to its own citizens can intimidate and coerce and dominate for a while, but that cruelty has a short shelf life, and benevolence outlasts it. The replies filled up with threats and insults from a very recognisable cast of CCP shills. I clearly hit a nerve there. Good, good.

Yet, my point still stands - you do not judge a nation by how it treats its elites or its comfortable urban middle class - those groups are often the decorative. You do not judge it by how it treats its foreign guests either, who are shown only the gleaming showroom. (Remember the Western communists of the ‘70s and ‘80s, sunning themselves on Black Sea holidays a short drive from camps where a man could be tortured for a joke about the Party? Those types.)

You judge a nation by how it treats its poor, its critics, and its minorities.

On that test, the United States is no angel either, however - when you set it beside russia and China, there is no comparison.

The point is not that America has been a straight A student. It is that America has been correctable. That is a different, rarer, and more valuable property.

russia: the empire of erasure

The russian imperial reflex has always run in three movements: dominate, erase, deny.

The domination is the part most people know - the reach of the tsars, then the Soviets, over the East. The erasure is the deportation train, the Holodomor of 1932–33, an engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, deliberately, as policy. The cattle-car deportations of Balts, Poles, and peoples of the Caucasus and the Balkans to Siberia. The 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals shot at Katyn in 1940 - a crime Moscow blamed on the Nazis for half a century. This is not distant history to me, because my region is downstream of it.

Then there’s the third act - the denial - that gives the whole system away, and it’s where russia’s difference from America, as an empire (albeit, russia hasn’t been one for a long time), becomes not just large but categorical. In December 2021, russia’s Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial: the country’s oldest human rights organisation, founded in 1987 by the dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, and the single most important chronicler of Soviet mass repression. Its entire purpose was to remember the roughly twenty million people who passed through the Gulag. The state destroyed it.

You can go read the prosecutor’s own justification for this destruction - memorial, he argued, had created “a false image of the USSR” and was trying to make russians ashamed of their glorious past. Why, he demanded in court, should the descendants of the victors be made to feel shame? The Auschwitz Memorial answered him better than I ever could: a power that is afraid of memory will never reach democratic maturity.

Ask yourself where the equivalent of the Vietnam protests lives inside russia? The marches, the leaked Pentagon Papers, the congressional hearings, the films? There is no Russian anti-war movement of scale for Afghanistan, for Chechnya, for Ukraine, because the men - we don’t really know how few or many - who tried to build one are in prison or in exile or in the ground. Has russia ever apologised for the Holodomor? For the deportations? For any of it? Or even had the decency to acknowledge it?

We all know the answer.

China: the Middle Kingdom

China’s imperial logic runs the other direction - inward first, outward second. A state reveals its true character in how it disciplines its own people long before it ever deals with yours. My thread argued that cruelty is China’s structural weakness.

Start with the Uyghurs. Since 2017, more than a million Turkic Muslims have been held in internment camps without legal process - the largest-scale detention of an ethnic and religious minority since the WWII. In the Uyghur heartlands of Hotan and Kashgar, birth rates collapsed by more than 60% between 2015 and 2018, against forced sterilisations and coerced contraception. Roughly 16,000 mosques have been razed or damaged. More than 600 Uyghur village names - the ones carrying religious or historical meaning - have simply been changed. In Tibet, UN experts document the same architecture: children pulled from their families into Mandarin-only boarding schools, coercive labor, the slow strangling of a language and a faith. This is not “cultural exchange” - just the administrative erasure of a people.

Then there’s the entire surveillance apparatus - 12 million people in Xinjiang living under suffocating surveillance. The Great Firewall, the “709” crackdown that swept up hundreds of human rights lawyers in a single 2015 operation. The tycoons and the tennis players who say the wrong thing and simply vanish from public life for a while. Hong Kong’s civil society dismantled brick by brick under a National Security Law, its opposition press shuttered, its editors jailed. And we are not even going to mention the slave-like conditions in which Chinese people in poorer provinces work, nor the infamous organ harvesting at scale scandals. Cruelty, as I mentioned, is not a bug, it’s an engineered feature of the CCP apparatus.

And the denial mechanism is identical in spirit to Moscow’s. China’s response to the countless reports on human rights violations was to try to suppress them, then to dismiss them as the “vicious lies” of “anti-China forces,” then to harass the exiled families who dared to speak up.

The real American miracle

So here is the comparison.

russia’s model is domination followed by the deletion of memory. China’s is discipline at home projected as coercion abroad. Both regimes reveal their nature in how they treat the people they already control - and neither has built any mechanism, none, by which the society can turn around and force the state to confront its own crimes.

America built exactly that mechanism, and then couldn’t stop it from running.

The United States was founded proclaiming universal liberty while it denied liberty to many over the course of its’ history. Yet, the words outlived the hypocrisy. And on this exact holiday, 174 years ago, a formerly enslaved man named Frederick Douglass stood up and asked an audience of free Americans: What, to the slave, is your Fourth of July? He took the country’s own creed and turned it into an indictment of the country’s own crime. And here is the thing that no whataboutism can dissolve: America now teaches that speech in its schools. The nation absorbed its harshest critic and handed him to the next generation as required reading.

That is the American miracle. Not innocence, but correction. Generation after generation took the founding promise and used it as a crowbar against its’ own failures, and slowly, sometimes violently, and often incompletely, the circle of liberty widened. Abolitionists. Suffragists. The civil-rights movement. Muckrakers, dissidents, courts, a free press that published the Pentagon Papers, a Congress that dragged its own government into the light.

And after 1945, an empire that did something no imperial tradition before it had bothered to do: it did not turn defeated Germany and Japan into permanent colonies to be strip-mined. It rebuilt them into prosperous democracies. It underwrote Europe’s recovery rather than merely extracting from it. It built an order of institutions, alliances, markets, and universities that other nations spent decades lining up to join.

Did it do it out of sheer benevolence? No. It was first, and foremost, driven by self-interest, but their self-interest was to have competent allies, not miserable slaves. The United States, at the height of its’ might, could’ve crushed many. It chose not to.

That’s the whole case for America at 250. It’s not about purity, but about the fact that when set against the imperial traditions of Moscow and Beijing, the American empire at its best has been an empire of invitation rather than imprisonment; of reconstruction rather than permanent subjugation; of self-criticism rather than enforced silence. Its greatness was not in never doing wrong, but in building a political civilisation where a wrong can be named out loud, fought in the open, corrected in law, and remembered by following generations.

As I keep saying: you are perfectly free to dislike, criticise, mock, and rage against the American world order. But I can guarantee you one thing - that freedom will not be extended to you if you ever find yourself living under the Russian or Chinese one.

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Balkan Candor

I was once at a dinner table full of Western Europeans when the topic of colonialism came up. I listened. Then, without any wish to downplay anyone’s grievance, I made an argument that made the room go quiet: we in the Balkans were cursed by geography to be colonised either way - so forgive me if I sometimes wish we’d at least drawn a more competent empire for a change. (If you’re Irish, I’m not talking about you. You had it genuinely bad, I’m sorry) But as a general rule, the data doesn’t lie. The Ottoman and Russian empires - Orientalist and Asiatic orders, rigidly hierarchical, allergic to modernisation, to upward mobility, to the mere idea of prosperity of their subjects - did damage to the nations under them that will take centuries to repair. They built no serious infrastructure and no lasting, trustworthy institutions. Apart from poverty, mistrust, and generational trauma - they didn’t leave anything much meaningful behind. And no - literacy levels don’t count, folks. We would’ve gotten there either way, and probably - sooner.

The tragedy of the Balkans was never that chaos is native to us - there is no Balkan gene for chaos. The tragedy is that we spent centuries trapped between imperial systems that governed through hierarchy, dependency, and communal division instead of through civic integration and impersonal law.

The Ottoman Empire didn’t merely rule territory; it organised society through religious communities, local strongmen, patronage, and negotiated submission. Then the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet sphere, layered on top of that: pan-Slavic manipulation, Orthodox patronage, secret-police paranoia, and the habit of treating small nations not as sovereign actors but as buffer zones to be spent. Austria-Hungary pushed from the other side, the Great Powers drew borders through living communities with a ruler, and imported nationalism lit the whole thing ablaze.

That’s why the Balkans became so combustible. Not a curse of a backwards region, but engineering outcome. Left to a more organic European development, the region might well have grown stable civic institutions of its own. Instead it inherited the reflexes of empires that distrusted citizenship, feared pluralism, and preferred subjects to citizens.

So when the pro-Russian voices back home lecture me about (the de facto non-existent) American imperialism in the region - and they do - I tell them, mostly to watch them flinch, that I only wish the Americans had colonised us back in the day. Say what you like about them: for all their flaws, these are people who believe in building a place up, in turning a vassal into something productive and, heck, even prosperous. And a productive, prosperous, and happy vassal is a better deal, across generations, than a miserable serf robbed of all agency and forbidden even the attempt at a better life, because the retrograde imperial order that owns him cannot conceive of a subject who thrives.

That is the choice history - and above all, geography - actually offered small nations and middle powers. Not empire or freedom, it offered which empire - the one that wants you rich enough to trade with, or the one that wants you quiet and poor.

America turns 250 today an imperfect empire, but as someone that grew up in the long shadow of the alternatives - I know exactly which shadow I’d rather stand in, if those were my only options.

Cruelty can dominate for a time, and it will always mistake that time for permanence. Benevolence lasts longer.

As I keep saying: you are perfectly free to dislike, criticise, mock, and rage against the American world order. But I can guarantee you one thing - that freedom will not be extended to you if you ever find yourself living under the Russian or Chinese one.