In the wake of World War II, the United States crowned itself leader of the Western world through persuasion and coercion. Massive transfers of US aid helped stave off the prospect of Communist governments in Western Europe, while the deployment of American troops and materiel ensured European participation in a US-led military order. Today, Washington seeks to redraw the terms of imperial governance. As F-18 fighter jets bombarded Yemen in March, White House official Stephen Miller argued that European allies should pay for the strikes: “If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation . . . there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” Not only had the United States attacked another country in a brutal display of military might, a habit over decades of imperial leadership, but it had decided that its allies should bear the costs.

To maintain its geopolitical dominance, the United States increasingly relies on the use of economic and military force. Allies are presented with various options to pay for their participation in empire, whether buying American energy, importing its weapons, or contributing to a Rust Belt reindustrialization fund. In the White House, the maintenance of empire, and even the position of the United States as the global dollar reserve, is presented as a burden.

This is a moment of several spiraling transitions. The era of unipolar US dominance is over. In response to China’s economic development, Washington has ushered in a new Cold War, defined by bellicose rhetoric and an attempt to cohere competing economic blocs. The world is offered access to US consumer markets on one hand and punitive tariffs on the other. The economic norms of the last five decades of US leadership — the exploitative imposition of neoliberal governance — have been cast aside, and state intervention is no longer anathema.