It’s…the imperial liquidation sale

Stripping the empire and selling it for parts

Just how fast is the sun setting on the American empire? When I wrote last week about the age of late imperialism, I thought evening in America might still be a few ticks of the clock away. But in just a couple days, we’ve seen the dismantling of a major mechanism of imperial soft power and the Secretary of State himself admit American hegemony is on the wane. Then came Trump voicing his impulse to claim ownership over Gaza, hardly the fantasy of an isolationist hiding behind his border wall. Can we square these developments?

Yes. We can think of the past two weeks as the hostile take over of government by capital on its ruthless quest for profit. Trump is privatizing the empire, converting the inefficiencies of lofty ideals and public goods into returns for the rich. It’s the imperial liquidation sale.

First, Rubio’s comments. The former senator from Florida was once a neocon darling, a voice for the discredited American strongman contingent of US foreign policy in the aftermath of the Iraq War.¹ I remember hounding Rubio on the campaign trail while living in New Hampshire in 2015 and his schtick was familiar — American exceptionalism, defenders of freedom, greatest country in the world. He sold himself as a classic success story in the home of the brave, climbing his way up the American dream after his immigrant parents fled persecution from commie “thug” Fidel Castro.² When he was announced as Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, it felt to me like another refutation of the old “Donald the Dove” PR canard. I wasn’t the only one. Here’s how Common Dreams reported Rubio’s nomination: “The expected Rubio pick runs counter to Trump's attempt during the presidential campaign to posture as a ‘candidate of peace,’ which is how Vice President-elect JD Vance described Trump in the run-up to last week's election.”

But Rubio is striking a note heretical to his neocon bonafides in his new role. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, the sitting Secretary of State backs down from his prior apologia for American global hegemony. Watch the relevant clip: “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power…that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers.”

Rubio is an operator (a fact I’ve pointed out before). He’ll say anything if he thinks it’ll advance his career, which is why these comments are telling. He’s sees it as in his interest to make the case that we are exiting the time of American global supremacy, when we were the world’s police force, either brutal or benevolent depending on which side of the baton blow you caught.

They are mostly words for now — let’s see how many assassinations Trump calls in before we retire the badge — but they mark a striking retreat from the Washington consensus of neo-imperialism. The rhetoric cuts against Reagan’s interpretation of the United States as the “shining city upon a hill,” that beacon of individual liberty against totalitarian oppression, “still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.” Against the nobility of this vision, Rubio posits something more prosaic: America, just like any other nation, has interests, and we have to get ours. “Now more than ever,” he says to Kelly, “we need to remember that foreign policy should be about furthering the national interest of the United States.”

Let’s set aside that Rubio is a spineless appendage to the foreign policy blob. We know that the image of America as the shining city on a hill was mostly a feint (maybe the shine was always the sun glinting off the WMDs and military drones). But the image of America as a beacon of freedom gave its citizens something to believe in during a time of disenchantment — a faith that America was worth defending because it represented hope, justice, and equality in a world left wanting. This is no consolation to the victims of CIA-backed coups the world over, but it armed with a powerful weapon those striving to make America live up to its promise as the land of the free. Our national self-understanding as the protagonist of reality was, I think, both delusional and inspiring. You know the words: “all men are created equal.”

The British Empire in 1902

If Rubio is right and we’ve abandoned the high-minded for the base, then we no longer have an ideal to strive for, even as we fail to reach it. This suspension of belief in the bend of the moral universe — the sort of faith that drove both the Civil Rights Movement and the invasion of Iraq — is the prelude to national identity crisis.

Into the crisis steps capital. By replacing the virtues of self-determination and freedom with the language of “national interest,” Rubio abets the great con that equates the good of the public with the good of the few. Trump is setting himself and the rest of the oligarchs up to strip the empire for parts. It’s a fire sale and Elon Musk is cashing in.

Now, USAID. If we’ve given up on the image of the city on the hill for something less inspiring — maybe that America is just another dog in a dog-eat-dog world — then what role does a Cold War relic like the Agency for International Development play? The unglamorous work of the agency is both a literal lifesaver to places ravaged by famine or disease, and an expression of the empire’s reach. What’s the point of that reach if you’ve given up on the empire?

The national interest that Rubio says must guide US foreign policy will not be divined by agents of the state but by agents of capital. I think this is clear in the gutting of USAID. Trump’s success has shown how antiquated reputation laundering is in a country whose mediating institutions are struggling to mediate. So it is on a global scale: Musk has no use for America’s global reputation, where the expressions of soft power look like inefficiencies to be cut. In this, the administration is living up to the promise of running America like a business.

But USAID has been good for Musk’s business! A few years ago, the Washington Post reported that the agency had actually paid a premium to outfit Ukraine with the billionaire’s Starlink terminals, contrary to his claims that he had simply donated them. Why, then, is Musk now bent on gutting the agency, along with the rest of the federal government that has buoyed his net worth for decades?

Because government as such is the target. The existence of a plane beyond profit — call it government, civil service, politics — is a threat to capital. A lesser billionaire might continue to gorge himself on federal contracts, but Musk is aiming higher, at the principle that there are things money cannot buy. This imperial logic (yes let’s call it that) of capitalism and profit at any cost is the same logic which has led, in Cory Doctorow’s coinage, to the enshittification of everything. The American empire itself is a distressed asset, now under new management.

This is how I interpret Trump’s comments on “taking over” Gaza: development as in real estate, not as in foreign aid. Trump doesn’t pretend to export democracy, that euphemism of the Bush years. He extracts profit. Gaza, the federal government, you and me — we’re all the next marks.

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Burn After Reading

I concentrated on the dismantling of USAID, but Musk’s takeover of the federal government is much wider and more disturbing. Waleed Shahid calls it what it is: a coup.

But the playbook is clear: push the boundaries of executive control over spending, dare the courts to intervene, and keep refining the legal justification for stripping Congress of its constitutional authority. Musk’s operatives, now embedded in key federal agencies, are laying the groundwork for an aggressive expansion of impoundment, arguing that the president, not Congress, should dictate federal spending. Trump’s team isn’t improvising—they’re executing a well-honed strategy to seize control of government spending, one legal gray area at a time.

Elon Musk is staging a coup.

1. This memo — titled “Marco Rubio: The Neocons’ Last Stand?” — from Cato Institute in 2016 is indicative.

2. This was a lie, as the Washington Post reported way back in 2011. His parents moved to the States during the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.