Donald Trump and the Aesthetics of Empire

Political economists have been trained to ask a simple question when faced with puzzling events: Who benefits? Most often, this is where the explanation lies. Someone, somewhere, is going to gain – or, more often, anxious not to lose – and someone is applying pressure to make sure their interests are protected. They may do this by obstructing or accelerating regulation; By pressing for a treaty, or sabotaging its negotiations. But whatever they do, it can usually be explained by material interests.

However, given the geopolitical developments of recent weeks, my usual approach to the world has fallen short. The United States has embarked on a series of diplomatically costly moves that are difficult to justify on strategic or economic grounds. Washington has mobilized its opponents, annoyed its allies, and achieved little in the way of tangible gains. Not even the president—so often the answer to the “in the public interest” question—seems to be making a profit in any clear sense.

So what’s going on? One possibility is that political economy is the wrong approach. To understand these actions, it may be helpful to ask a different question—one more familiar to students of culture than of markets. It is not who wins, but what is regulated. It seems that what drives US behavior is not so much a calculation of advantage, but rather the cultivation of a certain appearance. If concerns about aesthetics, rather than rational concern, drive US behavior, then the question becomes: What are those aesthetics, and where did they originate?

For decades, The United States had mastered a subtle form of power: it sought the benefits of influence without the optics of empire—military bases without colonies; financial influence through barter lines rather than formal monetary unions; Foreign influence through technocratic institutions rather than annexation. This was the hegemon wearing a navy tunic instead of an imperial uniform. Washington can display its power without declaring a clear fate, as it did before. She can control without claiming ownership. What we are witnessing in recent months is a strange reversal: here we have the trappings of imperialism, without any of the associated benefits.

The rationale for the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on television continued to shift, from concerns about drugs entering the United States to talk of Washington’s management of Venezuelan oil fields. But as many have pointed out, the drug crisis in the United States is not caused by cocaine, but by fentanyl. As an energy source, Venezuelan oil is among the world’s least attractive: it is expensive to extract, difficult to refine, and suffers from decades of institutional and political decay. Even ExxonMobil’s leadership has publicly described the country as “uninvestable.” Ditto Greenland. President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that the United States “must own” the island to protect its national security ignores the fact that Washington already has enormous influence there. Under the 1951 US-Denmark defense agreement, the United States maintains extensive military access, operates a major strategic facility at the Petovik Cosmodrome, and can, if it chooses, dictate security policy in Greenland.

So, why good? This is not clear.

These moves appear to be a seizure of power in the empire. But so far it appears to have achieved few of the tangible security and economic gains we expected. It has real costs: mobilizing adversaries, destabilizing allies, and deepening mistrust. But they lack commensurate security or economic gains.

French theorists from the 1960s may have had better luck coming up with an explanation. in Scene AssociationGuy Debord argues that modern power no longer rules primarily by transforming material conditions, but by presenting itself as power—by remaining relentlessly visible. From this point of view, politics becomes less about results and more about images: power must be seen, reworked, and circulated, even when it achieves little. What matters is not effectiveness, but attendance. Debord’s contemporary Jean Baudrillard offered a more troubling story, in which power takes the form of a travesty: a sign that no longer refers to any underlying material reality, but spreads on its own terms. In this sense, American moves may not be failed attempts to build an old-fashioned empire. They are successful displays of images of empires past.

Those pictures came from somewhere. To understand why it retains such power, it is useful to remember why imperial strategies once made so much sense for powerful states – and why they no longer do, even if their shadow still shapes the political imagination.

For most of modern history, control of territory was the most reliable way to secure strategic advantage. In a world of weak international enforcement, fragmented markets, and primitive infrastructure, planting science was real business. Establishing a fortified port, colony, or resource basin under state sovereignty ensures access to trade routes and raw materials, provides defensive depth, and, just as importantly, denies competitors the same advantages. Ownership was not symbolic; It was an enforcement mechanism.

If a country possesses the resources to seize and hold territory, conquest can be an effective means of achieving geopolitical goals. This logic underpinned imperial expansion over the centuries. The British Raj organized the Indian Ocean economy; French possessions in Africa promised strategic access to the continent; Dutch expansion into the East Indies established a global trading network. In each case, sovereignty over land translated directly into control of flows of goods and capital, which could not be achieved otherwise.

But in the 21st century, full ownership of land and resources rarely delivers the same returns. The basic features of modern capitalism—multinational corporations, integrated global markets, enforceable contracts, and transnational legal systems—have displaced many of the justifications for territorial control. This applies even to oil. Once this quintessential imperial prize, it is now extracted by publicly traded multinational corporations owned by dispersed shareholders and priced on global markets. Sovereign ownership does little to increase pricing power.

Interestingly, one factor in which land still matters is control of global financial pipelines. The global economy may seem immaterial, but its infrastructure is stubbornly material. Data centers occupy physical space; Submarine cables reach land on real coasts. This has given the United States enormous influence over other countries – not because the United States owns all the assets of the global economy, but because much of that economy’s infrastructure passes, routinely and unseen, through US-controlled choke points.

But this only reinforces the point. This is not an empire in the classical sense. No land was captured. No population was ruled. No flags were planted. Influence arose precisely because the United States did not seek to impose its regional control, but instead presided over institutions, markets, and networks that others found beneficial to embrace. What matters today is not owning the space, but convincing others to join your networks. The irony is that the only realm where land still matters is the realm least compatible with imperial aesthetics: faded data centers in northern Virginia, anonymous clearinghouses in New York, server farms and balance sheets rather than maps and monuments. This power is very real, but it doesn’t look like the Empire.

What the empire that replaced it was, at least initially, was a moral awakening. It was an accounting vision. Over the course of the twentieth century, powerful states gradually discovered that the goals they sought through conquest—secure access to markets, expected returns on investment, and influence over the economic policies of other states—could be achieved more cheaply, more reliably, and with less political friction through institutions rather than outright claims of ownership. Stable courts, arbitration mechanisms, trade agreements, and credible commitments have not only civilized international politics; They simplified it. The Empire was brutally efficient, but as it turned out, it was also very expensive.

Territorial control requires armies, administrators, infrastructure, and constant coercion. It invites resistance, imposes reputational costs, and obliges the occupier to rule distant populations whose compliance is never voluntary. By contrast, institutions have allowed powerful states – and the firms within them – to secure many of the same benefits without the costs of direct rule. Enforceable contracts replaced garrisons. Arbitration is an alternative to annexation. Access has been replaced by ownership. The result was a shift in how power worked. Countries like the United States have learned to project their dominance through networks rather than maps.

Those old material incentives did not disappear without a trace. They remain in the image of empire, which retains a seductive allure. This is because the image is sticky. It symbolizes what authority is supposed to look like, the cultural material that is passed down through generations, even as the circumstances that once made those gestures effective have changed.

Powerful states not only controlled territory, but represented themselves as possessing it in art, architecture, maps, public ceremonies, and official images that fused sovereign identity with regional hegemony. The empire was regulated as much as it was imposed. From Rome to Britain, imperial powers relied on shared visual bases – arches, columns, and gilded facades – to present their power as legitimate, inescapable, and timeless.

The empire had centuries to improve its aesthetic code. Equestrian statues, official portraits, faces stamped on coins – these devices personalized sovereignty and made it ubiquitous. Ritual performances, slogans, and dances complete the scene, presenting authority as stable and uncontested. The result was a style of government capable of outlasting its demise, just as the ceremonial life led by Europe’s remaining royal families continued long after their political power had disappeared.

It’s a strange mix of policies: The Trump administration is reviving the appearance of empire while dismantling the conditions that once made empire unnecessary. On the one hand, it was busy ignoring the very institutions – trade rules, legal obligations, and multilateral constraints – that made regional empire unnecessary by offering cheaper and more efficient means of growth and security. On the other hand, it attempts to revive images of the old world: ownership, appropriation, and territorial possession, moves that correspond to a material reality that no longer exists.

If this diagnosis True, the usual responses miss the point. Punishments, legal reprimands, and economic sanctions all assume rational calculations of material gains and losses. They assume that cui bono remains the right question to ask. But when the goal is not feature but appearance, this question loses its grip.

In this context, imposing costs may be counterproductive. The punishment becomes part of the performance, providing additional drama to the scene. The challenge turns into a brand; Resistance serves as proof of authenticity. By now, complaints of unfair treatment have become a familiar step in the populist playbook.

Trump is not the only one influenced by these early-era motifs. The majority in the United States may be against the use of force in Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland. However, the Empire design retains its appeal. The gilding, the militaristic fanfare, the inflated talk of appropriation and possession: a large circle of the American public seems to regard this as power. This is politics that looks like power, rather than politics that hides behind procedures. As subtle as these are aesthetic instincts, Trump offers an alternative symbol to professional liberals’ preference for constrained institutional nicety, where efficiency seems dull. Visual cues can still be tempting even if they are counterproductive as a policy. For this reason, direct refutation may be fruitless: denunciation risks providing rebuke to the elite that the spectacle aims to provoke.

If the appeal is aesthetic, perhaps the response should be couched in the same terms. Commentators and elites in the United States still play an outsized role in determining which modes of power will be treated as admirable, credible, or embarrassing. Beyond simply listing the material costs of Trump’s policies, they need to undermine the optics. Yes, it is important to show that Trump’s version of imperial rule is illegal and self-destructive on a geopolitical level. But it may be equally important to expose it as outdated.