By Steven Flagg
Guest Column
It sure seems like our moral and ethical fiber is getting shredded. We’re leaning hard into a “big stick” approach, where only the strong prevail, and the trouble with that style of foreign policy is that friends are only friends when you’re holding the stick.
Start with the arithmetic. The world is now about 8.3 billion people. The United States is about 340-350 million — outnumbered roughly 24-to-1. India and China alone are each in the neighborhood of 1.4–1.5 billion. In a world that big, strategy can’t just be “be the biggest bully.” The bully’s advantage is temporary. It can last for decades, but the moment the crown slips, payback arrives fast.
A simple gut-check: policies start looking imperial when a powerful country tries to override another country’s self-determination through political control, economic pressure, military coercion, or territorial ambition.
That’s not a left-wing or right-wing definition; it’s just a description of how empires behave. And yes, deterrence matters. But deterrence isn’t domination.
Recent headlines have revived the old imperial vocabulary again — and not quietly. With Greenland, the talk isn’t merely about diplomacy or basing rights. It has returned to the language of acquisition, with the White House openly acknowledging that “all options” are on the table, including military force.
Greenland’s own leaders have responded with blunt unity: Greenland is not for sale, not for taking, and its future belongs to Greenlanders, and not to Washington, and not to Copenhagen acting under pressure. Still, Greenland’s leaders have stated they remain open to strategic and business cooperation with the United States.
While Greenland is facing threats, Venezuela has become a case study in how quickly “temporary” can expand. After U.S. military action and then the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the public discussion has moved beyond sanctions and diplomacy into something much closer to direct control: talk of the United States “running” the country for a period of time, directing its oil infrastructure, and managing oil revenues through U.S.-held accounts and U.S.-designed mechanisms.
Even if supporters call it stabilization, a policy involving regime removal, asserted authority, and control of strategic resources is exactly what causes other nations to hear the word “imperial,” whether said out loud or not.
Still more sinister is that we normalize this behavior. Declaring exemption from international laws and established norms — “just this once,” “just for security,” “just until order is restored” — makes the next time, and the next time, just easier. History teaches us that republics don’t drift into imperial habits overnight, but through the accumulation of precedents and declarations of national interests.
And here, history is pretty blunt about where this road leads. Great Britain offers a long, well-documented case study, especially in the mercantilist era, of what happens when trade, force, and pride fuse into foreign policy.
Take the Navigation Acts, enacted by Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. These acts were designed to create a closed trading system that advantaged Britain and constrained the colonies. That sort of rule looked “efficient” from London’s perspective. From the other side of the ocean, it looked like extraction and control. One outcome was predictable: resentment grows, legitimacy collapses, and eventually the system breaks. And an American Revolution ensued.
Or look at the East India Company (1600–1874): a commercial enterprise granted monopoly privileges that slowly morphed into a governing power — an early warning label for what happens when a nation delegates imperial reach to a profit-seeking machine. Think oil companies today. When market access becomes a strategic obsession, coercion tends to follow. And when military power is used to pry open trade on terms favorable to the stronger party, it leaves a long moral hangover and deep, lasting distrust.
Then came Suez in 1956, the moment Britain and France discovered, publicly and painfully, that they could still deploy force but no longer set the terms of global legitimacy. The lesson wasn’t “never defend your interests.” It was that imperial habits, especially around strategic chokepoints, can trigger backlash, fracture alliances, and accelerate decline.
That’s the bully’s trap. The stronger party may win today, but it loses something harder to rebuild — trust, consent, and the willingness of others to follow its lead. In a networked world, countries don’t need to “beat” a superpower head-to-head to constrain it. They can hedge, form new blocs, deny basing rights, price in political risk, and treat every American request as a shakedown rather than a partnership.
No one can defend every past decision, but you have to say something for roughly 75 years when the U.S.-led order, while messy, imperfect, often hypocritical, still delivered a level of global prosperity and alliance-based peace that history rarely provides. The smarter move is to build on what worked and fix what didn’t, rather than torch the architecture and trust that made American influence sustainable.
If America wants to lead, the role of the biggest bully is not a strategically sound or sustainable course. The better approach is to be the most credible partner, which means strong enough to deter, restrained enough to be trusted, and wise enough to know that imperial shortcuts always come with imperial bills — treasury and blood.