The Wild West and Its Prey

A sweeping history of the United States' boundless imperial belligerence from its founding to the present day

Is the United States empire on the decline? Donald Trump’s second presidency has initiated a new cycle of exclamations and laments regarding the collapse of American global power. But as Tariq Ali reminds us in this sharp political intervention, the US has always been an expansionist project, targeting and insatiably pursuing its prey. Trump’s brazen flouting of etiquette and norms may be shocking, but his policies and objectives align more closely with the US tradition of empire than many realize.

Though the nature of US power has transformed over the centuries, The Wild West and Its Prey demonstrates that becoming an empire was a central plank of the founding fathers and those who succeeded them. Tracing this aggressive imperial impulse from the earliest days of the country’s founding through to its maturity as a singular global political and military force, Ali provides a masterful account of America’s extermination of indigenous peoples, its wars of aggression across Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East in the twentieth century, and its allies’ dependence on and support for that predatory strategy up to the present day.

Contrary to the declinist thesis in vogue today, Ali argues that there is no end in sight to American power. Neither the US, nor its allies, are prepared to abandon the Wild West mode that has defined world politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While China appears to be the only potential check on US power in the twenty-first century, the US’s immense military capacity and brute strength remain without equal. Can anything short of war break the Wild West’s addiction to expansionist ideations?