America at 250: From anti-colonial power to British Empire 2.0

There are, and perhaps always have been, two American republics.

The first declared that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed". This US Republic, founded through revolutionary war in 1776 by "enlightened Englishmen", defined itself against kings, hereditary privilege and empire, convinced that liberty could only survive if power was constrained and de-centralised.

It was this republic that inspired John Quincy Adams to warn that America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy", lest it become "the dictatress of the world" and cease to be "the ruler of her own spirit".

The second republic was born alongside it, perhaps as a corruption of it. Even as the young nation proclaimed universal rights in its constitution, it tolerated slavery, expanded across Indigenous lands through genocidal conquest and dispossession, and steadily accumulated power beyond its borders.

As the US marks the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence under Donald Trump's second presidency, it is tempting to ask whether America has lived up to its founding ideals. But perhaps that's the wrong question. The more revealing one is this: which of these two republics triumphed?

For much of the Middle East, the answer seems obvious.

The America encountered across the region is less the republic of Thomas Paine and John Quincy Adams than the superpower of alliances that prop up tyrants, devastating military interventions, sanctions and unwavering support for the rogue state of Israel, even as the genocide in Gaza has left Washington increasingly isolated from much of international opinion while causing monumental shifts within the Republic's two governing parties.

Revolution

The first republic was genuinely revolutionary.

The American Revolution was not simply a colonial tax dispute but a revolt against monarchy, arbitrary authority and the concentration of power. The founders inherited a republican tradition stretching back to classical antiquity and Renaissance political thought, caught somewhere between Magna Carta and what would become the Jacobin tradition of revolutionary France.

It was a tradition that insisted republics rarely died by foreign conquest. Instead, they decayed from within, corrupted by militarism, executive corruption and the slide towards empire.

Thomas Jefferson hoped for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none", while George Washington cautioned against permanent foreign alliances.

Their differences were considerable, and many of them lived lives that contradicted their professed ideals. Slaveholders writing of equality embodied the central paradox of the foundation of America. But their suspicion of empire and tyranny was real.

Even the Monroe Doctrine embodied both visions of the republic. Conceived largely by Adams as a warning to Europe's monarchies against recolonising the Americas, it gradually evolved into a justification for American intervention. By Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, the line between hegemony and empire had become far thinner than the founders had hoped.

Nor was America's anti-imperial tradition merely an eighteenth-century curiosity.

Throughout the nineteenth century, many Americans instinctively sympathised with peoples resisting European colonial domination. During Ahmed Orabi's revolt against British imperialism in Egypt, much of the American press portrayed his cause sympathetically through the prism of their own revolutionary heritage.

That argument reached its greatest domestic intensity after the Spanish-American War.

The Anti-Imperialist League

As the US acquired overseas territories, an extraordinary coalition emerged to oppose imperial expansion. The Anti-Imperialist League counted among its members Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie and William Jennings Bryan. They shared one conviction: a republic could not rule other peoples indefinitely without changing its own character.

They lost the argument.

The twentieth century transformed the US from a continental republic into the world's pre-eminent power. After the Second World War, it inherited much of Britain's global strategic role, constructing an international order of military alliances, overseas bases and economic institutions that came to define the American Century.

Yet even then, the first republic occasionally reasserted itself.

Perhaps nowhere was this clearer than during the Suez Crisis of 1956. When Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt following Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. President Dwight Eisenhower refused to endorse the operation and used American economic and diplomatic pressure to force the invasion to an end. Cold War calculations undoubtedly mattered, but the episode nevertheless reflected an older American instinct that colonial conquest belonged to a world the republic had once defined itself against.

Suez now feels like a distant exception.

The Cold War normalised military alliances, overseas bases and intervention. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington increasingly cast itself as guarantor of a liberal international order, from Iraq to the global war on terror. A republic born in suspicion of empire had grown comfortable exercising extraordinary power far from its own shores.

For much of the Middle East, America's relationship with Israel completed that transformation. Washington's steadfast bipartisan support for Israel throughout its brutal occupation of Palestinian lands and, most recently during the genocide in Gaza, reinforced the perception that the US no longer merely defended the regional order but had become indispensable to it.

Though Donald Trump has come to embody this America, he did not create it. What he has done is strip away many of the assumptions and delusions that once accompanied it.

American power

Trump has shown little interest in cloaking American power in the language of universal values. War with Iran, in partnership with his ideological blood brother Benjamin Netanyahu, the killing of its supreme leader and senior leadership, the seizure of Venezuela's head of state, the tightening siege of Cuba and a nakedly transactional approach to alliances all reflect a presidency that no longer feels compelled to justify American power in liberal or universalist terms.

At home, that same contempt for restraint has been reflected in escalating battles over the judiciary, the rule of law, with ICE agents running amok, executive authority and the constitutional limits of presidential power

Those debates would have been instantly recognisable to the founders.

Their greatest fear was never simply the return of a British king, but rather that republics, intoxicated by power, would gradually lose the habits that made them republics in the first place. Empire, they believed, did not merely change a nation's foreign policy. It changed its political culture entirely for the worse.

Perhaps that is the deepest irony of America's 250th birthday.

The US gave the modern world one of its most enduring political languages: government by consent, suspicion of tyranny and the revolutionary idea that power exists to serve liberty rather than the other way around. Those ideals inspired generations far beyond America's shores, including many who fought colonial rule across the Middle East.

In much of the Middle East, America's founding ideals have long since been eclipsed by the realities of American power. Washington is associated less with the language of 1776 than with catastrophic military intervention, strategic dominance and unwavering support for Israel no matter how depraved its actions.

Yet as America's image abroad has become increasingly defined by the second republic, Americans themselves have begun asking questions that would have been instantly familiar to Adams, Madison and Jefferson: how much power should a president wield? Can constitutional restraints survive political tribalism? And, ultimately, can their republic survive the accumulation of power by Trump, a wannabe despot?

At this anniversary, the question is no longer which America the world encounters. It is whether the first republic still possesses the strength to defeat the second.

Sam Hamad is a writer and History PhD student at the University of Glasgow, focusing on totalitarian ideologies.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.