Leftists constantly harp about the evil of a supposed "American Empire" to denounce US foreign policy. As usual they are doubly wrong: the US foreign policy is precisely not an Empire, and not being an Empire is actually what makes it wrong.
Empire is power exerted to rule over the conquered.
Hegemony is power without
the responsibility of actually ruling to establish order.
There is an American Empire:
it is constituted of the 50 States,
plus US Territories like Puerto Rico.
This American Empire is
ruled by the unelected national socialist Bureaucracy of America,
with a simulacrum of elections.
Despite the cancerous growth of this Bureaucracy,
American Culture enable Americans to resist abuses by their Bureaucracy,
thanks to its strong sense of individual rights
as notably entrenched by the American Bill of Rights.
As a result, American Empire enjoys Order and Prosperity.
By contrast, the vast number of foreign countries upon which the US exerts
its world-wide military influence is the American Hegemony.
It is made of many semi-independent vassal states
that are only loosely controlled by the American bureaucracy,
through vague treaties, massive bribes,
the occasional coup, and, at the expensive and untenable margin,
military intervention.
These vassal states are themselves instituted as caricatures of America,
each ruled by its own unelected national socialist Bureaucracy,
with its own simulacrum of elections.
But this system is deeply dysfunctional.
First, the populations in most of these vassal states
lack the cultural defenses that can keep their own bureaucracy in check.
Nepotism, tribalism, corruption, massive graft, are
the necessary consequences of socialism run amok in these nations,
followed by poverty, squalor, political oppression, crime and civil unrest.
But even in those nations that do or did historically possess
cultural defenses against bureaucratic power,
such as in Europe, East Asia or the near East,
these defenses could at best resist
the domestic forms of bureaucratic power;
they could do nothing against the foreign forms
of bureaucratic influence from the American Hegemony's Bureaucracy.
The Hegemonic Bureaucracy has been slowly but steadily promoting
its choice of policies all over the vassal states as well as at home:
inflation under a dollar standard, economic controls,
victim disarmament, suppression of nuclear energy,
leftist political correctness, anti-white racism,
"social" policies,
censorship of right wing "populist" ideas and
promotion of all left-wing "popular" ideas
— except where they clash with American Hegemony
e.g. by promoting affiliation to Russia or China, or
by aspiring to the "independence" of local mass murderers.
While the American Hegemony does not have Power
to directly enact its favorite policies in vassal states,
its Influence is beyond feedback from
either the American defense mechanisms
(the soap box, ballot box, jury box, and cartridge box),
or the vassal nation's defense mechanism
(weaker than in America):
American Bureaucrats are simply out of reach of any of these mechanisms,
as they relentlessly promote their agenda,
with copious funds to promote their friends and hound their enemies.
If anything, the principal limit to their influence is that
the same lack of feedback, by detaching them from reality,
keeps them generally incompetent as well as generally nefarious.
(Mencius Moldbug also noted another factor that contributes
to bureaucratic influence, foreign or domestic,
being nefarious yet competent in nefariousness this time:
bureaucratic promotion is based on success
as measured by short term impact,
which is easily achieved by promoting destructive policies
and not constructive policies.)
Empire can create Order and Prosperity.
Its claim to fame may have been the world-wide abolition of slavery.
Hegemony only sows Chaos and Collapse.
If only the world-wide interventions of the US military
were covering the Globe with an Empire rather than a Hegemony!
At least it would create a chain of feedback and responsibility
in the ruling bureaucracy.
Unhappily, the American Left instead succeeded at
purposefully dismantling the French and British Empires,
to replace them by this American Hegemony,
putting Europe under its nefarious influence,
and establishing in its former colonial possessions
a collection of national socialist regimes.
In these new puppet regimes, legitimacy of power
doesn't stem from any objective superiority of the Rulers and their Law,
but instead from the ultra-racist principle of the race
of the local genocidal dictators being established.
Much of the evil in the world, including the massive poverty and occasional famine resulting from political oppression by murderous men of low IQ,
is the direct consequence of the US Hegemony
as spread over the Globe by the American Left
— which is by no means a endorsement of Russian or Chinese Hegemony
as alternatives offered by the more extreme Left.
