Description
This paper reconceptualizes the trajectory of U.S. power at the nation’s 250th anniversary by advancing the concept of strategic reimperialization. We argue that the Trump administrations’ foreign policy—defined by simultaneous retreat from multilateral institutions and revivalist expansion through tariffs, ad hoc security mini-blocs, and annexationist rhetoric—constitutes a hybrid strategy aimed at staving off imperial decline. Contrary to interpretations of Trumpism as an aberrant populist disruption, we situate it within the enduring logic of American empire and show its affinity with the three founding doctrines of U.S. statecraft: (1) non-alignment and sovereignty through disentanglement from permanent alliances, (2) commerce as prosperity and leverage, and (3) continental expansion and hemispheric hegemony without overseas entanglements.
Our original contribution is threefold. First, we extend Julian Go’s ascent–maturity–decline cycle by demonstrating that decline often produces revivalist strategies of retrenchment and expansion in tandem. Second, we show how Trump’s foreign policy selectively revives Founding Fathers’ doctrines as a repertoire for imperial renewal. Third, we reveal how these external strategies are inseparable from domestic authoritarian restructuring—welfare retrenchment, immigration militarization, and racial hierarchy—which together form the infrastructure of revivalist empire.
By linking early republican statecraft to twenty-first-century decline management, we argue that America at 250 is not in simple decline but in a reimperializing moment, destabilizing both its domestic democracy and the liberal global order it once championed.
