OUR HEMISPHERE

Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1806.

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Modern American political discourse suffers from a studied amnesia about power. It prefers euphemism to the older and more honest language of rule. This is not accidental. Liberal modernity is uneasy with authority because authority implies hierarchy, decision, and exclusion. Yet no political order has ever existed without these things. The attempt to deny them does not abolish power. Rather, it disguises it, often in less accountable forms.

The question of whether the United States should exercise decisive control over the Western Hemisphere is therefore not a question about whether America will shape its environment, but how consciously and responsibly it will do so. Geography, economics, demography, and military reality already ensure American predominance. What remains unsettled is whether that predominance will be ordered toward stability and civilizational continuity or squandered through moral squeamishness and strategic incoherence.

Political theory exists precisely to address this problem. It asks what rule is, why it arises, what legitimates it, and how it decays. When brought to bear on the American situation, it reveals that hemispheric order is not an aberration from the American tradition, but one of its implicit trajectories, perhaps long resisted rhetorically, yet repeatedly affirmed in practice.

Classical political philosophy begins from a premise that modern liberalism resists: politics is teleological. It aims at an end, and that end is not procedural neutrality but the ordering of a community toward some conception of the good. Aristotle’s claim that every political community exists for the sake of some good is not an ethical flourish. It is a structural observation that a regime that cannot say what it is for cannot long command loyalty.

This matters because hemispheric power is often criticized as morally incoherent unless it can be shown to serve more than American appetite. But the deeper problem is that no political order, domestic or international, can justify itself without reference to substantive ends. The alternative is not neutrality, but drift.

A hemispheric order oriented around American power would inevitably privilege certain goods: stability over volatility, law over fragmentation, economic integration over predatory extraction, and sovereignty over proxy domination by external empires. These are not uniquely American preferences; they are the conditions under which political life can endure at scale.

Aristotle’s deeper insight, however, concerns formation. Laws alone do not preserve regimes. Habits do. Citizens must be educated to desire what the regime requires. In modern terms, this is the heart of soft power: shaping elites, norms, and expectations so that order is experienced as natural rather than imposed. Aristotle’s insistence that regimes collapse when education diverges from constitutional form should haunt any discussion of empire that imagines force alone is sufficient.¹

The question of whether the United States should exercise decisive control over the Western Hemisphere is therefore not a question about whether America will shape its environment, but how consciously and responsibly it will do so.

Empire is often treated as a moral deviation—a kind of collective sin into which otherwise healthy republics mysteriously fall. This is historically naïve. Expansion is more often the byproduct of success than of mere ruthless ambition. Polities that solve internal coordination problems, mobilize resources efficiently, and cultivate discipline tend to project power outward, whether they intend to or not.

Polybius understood this better than most. Rome did not conquer the Mediterranean because it desired dominion in the abstract. It expanded because its mixed constitution generated resilience, manpower, and strategic coherence across generations. Power accumulated because order endured.²

The American case is analogous. Continental unification, industrial capacity, naval reach, and financial centrality produced hemispheric predominance long before policymakers were willing to name it as such. The Monroe Doctrine did not create American power; it acknowledged it. The real danger, as Polybius would recognize, lies not in expansion itself but in the erosion of the virtues that made expansion possible. Power without internal coherence collapses under its own weight.

If Aristotle supplies the architecture of order, Thucydides supplies its tragedy. The Melian Dialogue is not a celebration of Athenian ruthlessness. It is a warning about what happens when power severs itself from any account of justice. When necessity becomes the sole justification for action, rule degrades into domination, and that domination invites resistance. This insight matters because American hemispheric power will always face the temptation to justify itself solely in terms of security necessity. Such arguments are sometimes correct, but rarely sufficient. A power that cannot explain why its order is preferable, not merely unavoidable, forfeits legitimacy even as it prevails militarily.

The lesson is not pacifism. It is sobriety. Thucydides shows that force divorced from moral self-understanding corrodes the ruling power as surely as it destroys the ruled.³

Christian political thought does not abolish power, but it does begin to pass judgement on it. Augustine’s City of God remains unmatched in its capacity to strip empire of its illusions. Empires that mistake their success for righteousness fall prey to the libido dominandi—the desire to rule for its own sake. Without justice, Augustine insists, kingdoms differ from robber bands only in scale.⁴ Yet Augustine is not an anarchist. Peace, rightly understood, is a genuine good, even in a fallen world. Authority exists to restrain chaos, not to perfect humanity. This realism is essential. It allows one to affirm the necessity of power while refusing its sacralization.

The scholastic tradition sharpened these insights. Aquinas’ criteria for just war do not eliminate conflict. Ideally, they discipline it. Legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, and a fighting chance all function as moral guardrails rather than utopian restraints.⁵ For a hemispheric power, this means force must be intelligible as ordering, not predatory; as policing, not plunder.

Nowhere are these questions more concrete than in the early modern encounter with the Americas. Francisco de Vitoria’s reflections are indispensable precisely because they refuse both imperial absolutism and sentimental refusal. Indigenous peoples, he argues, possess true political authority and rights. Discovery alone grants no title to rule.⁶ And yet Vitoria also recognizes that certain violations of natural law—such as the obstruction of lawful travel or commerce—can ground legitimate intervention. His framework anticipates modern debates about humanitarian intervention, trade regimes, and international order. Power, he tells us, is neither unbounded nor absent, but conditional.

Bartolomé de las Casas stands as the accusing conscience of conquest. His catalogue of cruelty demonstrates how quickly claims of order degenerate into terror when power loses restraint.⁷ Any American hemispheric project that ignores this history risks moral self-deception. The point is not to reject power, but to remember how easily it corrupts.

John of Salisbury’s metaphor of the political body clarifies the distinction. Rule exists for the health of the whole. Tyranny is rule oriented toward appetite rather than order.⁸ So, empire, in this sense, is not inherently tyrannical so long as it functions as a governing head rather than a consuming parasite.

Modern political thought strips away theological language but not the problem it addressed. Machiavelli confronts rule without consolation. Founders of new lands must be willing to use force decisively, since arms matter more than laws when regimes are born. Yet Machiavelli is not a nihilist. His republican writings warn that expansion without discipline leads to decay. Power must be renewed internally or it collapses externally.⁹

Clausewitz completes the modern picture. War is not an aberration but a continuation of politics by other means. It cannot be reduced to technique or morality alone. Friction, chance, and passion ensure that force always exceeds calculation.¹⁰ This insight disciplines both moralism and technocracy. Military power cannot substitute for political clarity, but political aspiration that ignores or otherwise abandons the use of force is attempting to live in a fantasy.

Weber, finally, names the moral burden of rule. The state claims a monopoly on legitimate violence. Those who wield power must accept responsibility for the consequences of necessary actions, even when they offend moral sensibility.¹¹ A power unwilling to bear this burden will abdicate leadership just as quickly and dangerously as one that bears it without restraint will become monstrous.

Antonio Gramsci gives the most precise account of what earlier thinkers assumed: rule endures through hegemony rather than coercion alone. Institutions that shape belief, be they schools, churches, media, elites, et cetera, determine whether order is stable or brittle.¹² Soft power, which America has in spades, has less to do with public relations than in warming others to the idea of subjugation.

The United States cannot escape power. Geography and history forbid it.

For the United States, this insight is decisive. A hemispheric order imposed solely through military dominance would be temporary and resented. An order sustained through elite alignment, shared norms, and institutional integration would be durable. This requires confidence in American civilizational claims (those to the law, the natural right of property, theories of sovereignty, and rule oriented toward ordered liberty), rather than apology for them.

The Monroe Doctrine represents the moment American power becomes explicit. Monroe does not claim universal empire. He claims hemispheric responsibility. European intervention is declared incompatible with American peace and safety.¹³ This is exclusionary order, not isolationism, and it maps well to how America is to deal with rising and current threats from the Orient and elsewhere.

The Roosevelt Corollary makes the logic unavoidable. Chronic disorder invites intervention. Power vacuums attract predators.¹⁴ Whatever one thinks of the doctrine, it recognizes a permanent truth: if America does not control its hemisphere, others will.

Alfred Thayer Mahan supplies the strategic backbone. Sea power determines commercial flow, military mobility, and political reach.¹⁵ Hemispheric dominance, then, is inseparable from maritime supremacy and is the condition of independence in a world of rival powers.

Cicero’s account of natural law—“right reason in agreement with Nature”—remains foundational.¹⁶ American political identity has always depended on the belief that power answers to reason, not will alone. This belief distinguishes order from mere domination. The danger today is not that America will become too powerful, but that it will become too unsure of why its power matters. A hemispheric order justified only by interest will not endure. One grounded in deeper, civilizational ideas might.

The United States cannot escape power. Geography and history forbid it. The only question is whether American power will be exercised consciously, morally, and strategically, or dissipated through denial and guilt. Political theory offers no comfort to illusions. Order is fragile. Power is necessary. Legitimacy is earned. A hemispheric order rooted in American authority would not be liberal in the contemporary sense. It would be hierarchical, civilizational, and unapologetic about authority. Whether America still possesses the confidence to rule without apology remains uncertain. But the alternative is not innocence. It is abdication—and abdication is never neutral.

1. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord ( (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), Books VII–VIII.

2. Polybius, The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Book VI.

3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Melian Dialogue.

4. Augustine, City of God, Book IV.

5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.40.

6. Francisco de Vitoria, On the American Indians, in Political Writings.

7. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

8. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Book IV.

9. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chs. 12–14; Discourses on Livy.

10. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I.

11. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.”

12. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.

13. James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message to Congress,” 1823.

14. Theodore Roosevelt, “Roosevelt Corollary,” 1904.

15. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History.

16. Cicero, On Duties, Book I.