The United States’ conflict history dates back to its colonial era, including wars of expansion and dispossession against Indigenous peoples, the War of Independence against Britain in the late 18th century, the Civil War over slavery and union (1861–1865), and later global interventions in the two World Wars, the Cold War (including Korea and Vietnam), and the post‑9/11 campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.
In 2025, UCDP recorded no conflict-related deaths in the United States: no wars, no fighting between armed groups, and no organized attacks on civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand United States’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
The United States occupies the middle latitudes of North America, a continent-spanning country of forests, prairies, deserts, and two long coastlines, populated today by some 340 million people descended from nearly every part of the world. The mainstream account of its history begins not with a single people finding its homeland but with an act of political founding: thirteen British colonies strung along the Atlantic seaboard declared independence in 1776 and, over the following decade, built a federal republic on written constitutional principles rather than on a shared ethnicity or ancient territory. Historians describe the country’s identity, in consequence, as anchored in a creed — the proposition, announced in the Declaration of Independence, that individuals hold certain rights merely by virtue of being human — even though the republic that enshrined this creed also enshrined slavery and dispossessed the peoples already living on the land. This tension between professed ideal and lived practice, historians argue, is not incidental to American history but recurs at every subsequent turning point, as the country has repeatedly been forced to decide who its founding promises actually cover.
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty (2009); Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (multiple editions).
Five moments changed the structure of the American state, not merely its cast of characters. The Revolutionary founding (1776–1789) replaced colonial rule with a federal constitutional order, one deliberately designed to divide power between a national government and the states rather than concentrate it in a single sovereign. The Civil War (1861–1865) settled by force the question the Constitution had left unresolved — whether the union was permanent and whether slavery could survive within it — and the failure of Reconstruction afterward left Black Americans stripped of the citizenship rights just won, a failure whose consequences ran for a century. The Gilded Age and the closing of the frontier (roughly the 1870s to 1900s) transformed an agrarian republic into an industrial one, as railroads, factories, and mass immigration remade the economy faster than its laws could adjust. The New Deal and the Second World War (1933–1945) built, for the first time, a permanent federal administrative state and thrust the country into global military and economic leadership. The civil rights era (roughly 1954–1968) forced the country to make good, in law if not fully in practice, on the citizenship promises broken after the Civil War. Each threshold reset the balance between federal and state power, or between the country’s ideals and its practice, which is why historians treat them as genuine structural turning points rather than mere episodes in a continuous story.
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (multiple editions); James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988).
In the mainstream account, the United States is an unusual case in which the nation was built on an idea rather than on the older materials of shared blood, language, or ancient territory. The thirteen colonies had no common ethnicity and no king to rally around when they broke from Britain; what bound them instead was a set of political principles — natural rights, the consent of the governed, limited and divided government — written first into the Declaration of Independence and then into the Constitution of 1787. The federal apparatus of courts, Congress, and presidency was thus built simultaneously with, and in service of, this civic creed, rather than growing up afterward around a pre-existing people. Yet the founding generation built this ideological nation atop several unresolved tensions it did not, and by its own logic could not, settle: chattel slavery persisted alongside declarations of universal rights, Native nations were treated as foreign powers to be displaced rather than citizens to be incorporated, and the states retained enough sovereignty that the question of federal versus central authority went unanswered until settled by war in 1861. Historians regard the country’s subsequent history as, in large part, the working-out of these founding contradictions rather than a departure from them.
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty (2009); Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (multiple editions).
The single long-term force that best explains the United States, in the mainstream view, is the repeated, unfinished struggle to extend the founding promise of liberty to groups the founders had excluded from it. From the abolition of slavery to the extension of the vote to women, from the dismantling of legal segregation to today’s arguments over immigration and citizenship, American history is best read as a sequence of expansions — each hard-won, each incomplete, each provoking a backlash that in turn shapes the next struggle. Historians favor this account because it accommodates the awkward fact that a country founded on universal rights spent generations denying those rights to most of its population, without treating that fact as either a hidden hypocrisy to be exposed or an embarrassment to be minimized: the promise and the exclusion are, on this reading, two faces of a single continuous process. What makes this force distinctly American, rather than a generic story of progress found everywhere, is that the yardstick against which each generation is measured was fixed early and in writing, in founding documents that were never repealed and could therefore always be turned back against the people who wrote them.
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (multiple editions); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty (2009).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
Set against the familiar image of a nation founded on liberty and later compromised by slavery, a revisionist reading inverts the emphasis: the United States as a country whose economic and political development was structured from the outset around the enslavement of Africans and the dispossession of the Native nations already occupying the continent. On this account, associated with the 2019 “1619 Project” journalism and its 2021 book-length expansion, slavery was not a regional peculiarity awaiting eventual correction but a national institution whose profits financed colonial and early American growth, and whose legal and social afterlives — segregation, disenfranchisement, mass incarceration — run in an unbroken line to the present. A parallel and complementary school, settler-colonial historiography, argues that the removal of Native peoples from their land was not incidental to American expansion but its engine: the country needed land empty of prior claimants, and its laws and wars were shaped accordingly. Together these readings ask readers to see 1619, the year the first recorded enslaved Africans arrived in English North America, and the centuries of Indigenous dispossession that ran alongside it, as being as foundational to the country’s origin as 1776. Mainstream historians do not dispute the underlying facts of slavery or dispossession; they dispute the claim that these, rather than the Revolution’s political ideas, are the country’s true starting point.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014).
The revisionist account keeps the same five turning points the mainstream uses — the Revolutionary founding, the Civil War, the Gilded Age and closing frontier, the New Deal and World War II, and the civil rights era — but reweights each toward coercion rather than consent. The Revolution becomes, in part, a defense of the colonists’ own economic interests, including for some signers their interest in slave property, rather than solely an assertion of abstract rights. The Civil War’s cause, slavery, moves from being one grievance among several to the central organizing fact of the antebellum economy, since cotton grown by enslaved labor was, by the 1850s, the country’s leading export and the collateral behind much of its early banking system. The Gilded Age’s railroads and industrial growth are read as having been built substantially on land taken from Native nations through broken treaties and outright war, a process settler-colonial historians treat as continuous rather than as a closed chapter following the country’s founding. The New Deal, for its part, is shown to have excluded many Black and Indigenous Americans from its core protections through deliberately drawn carve-outs. Because this reweighs accepted events rather than inventing new ones, it stands as serious history — though mainstream scholars, including a group of prominent historians who publicly objected in 2019, dispute specific factual claims about the Revolution’s motives and about Lincoln’s views on racial equality.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006).
In this reading, the American nation and state were formed as much through the exclusion and removal of peoples as through the inclusion of citizens under a shared creed. Settler-colonial historiography argues that the defining feature of American state-building was not simply governing a population but replacing one population with another: colonial and early federal policy treated Native nations as obstacles to be removed from land the new country needed for its own settlers, a logic the historian Patrick Wolfe described as a “structure” rather than a single event, meaning it recurred in policy after policy rather than ending with any one war or treaty. Simultaneously, the 1619 school argues, the same founding document that proclaimed universal rights was drafted by a convention that built protections for slavery directly into its text, including a clause counting enslaved people toward congressional representation without granting them any rights of their own. On this account, the nation’s civic creed and its practice of exclusion were not in tension so much as co-produced: the young republic’s capacity to expand westward and to generate capital both depended on treating some residents of the continent as outside the nation being formed. This remains a reinterpretation, not an erasure of the founders’ genuine constitutional innovations, but it insists those innovations be read alongside their exclusions rather than apart from them.
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014).
The long-term force this school places at the center is the joint production of American wealth and American nationhood through the exclusion of two groups: enslaved and formerly enslaved Black Americans, and dispossessed Native nations. In this reading, the country’s exceptional rate of territorial and economic growth cannot be separated from the fact that its land was acquired by removing prior occupants and that a large share of its early capital was generated by unpaid labor. Rather than treating slavery and dispossession as moral failures running alongside an otherwise self-sufficient story of liberty and enterprise, this account treats them as load-bearing: remove them, and the pace and scale of American development becomes difficult to explain by other means. This departs deliberately from the consensus view that expanding liberty is the central thread, proposing instead that expanding liberty and expanding exclusion grew together, financed by the same processes. Its strength is that it accounts for the speed of American growth in material terms rather than purely ideological ones; the point still genuinely argued over is how much causal weight to assign coercion against the country’s own institutional and entrepreneurial dynamism, a live debate among economic historians.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through its beliefs and its politics, the United States is a country that built its sense of self not around a single ethnicity but around a shared civic faith the sociologist Robert Bellah called “civil religion” — a set of sacred national symbols, from the Declaration of Independence to the flag to the language of sacrifice used for the nation’s war dead, that function in public life the way scripture and ritual function in an ordinary church, even though the country maintains no established church of its own. This civic faith drew heavily on the country’s Protestant dissenting origins: many of the earliest English colonists were Puritans and other religious dissenters who left Britain seeking freedom to practice their own faith, and their sense of building a righteous community in a new land — famously described as a “city upon a hill” — left a lasting imprint on how later Americans described their country’s purpose to itself and to the world. Onto this base was grafted, over the following two centuries, a second and sometimes competing story: the country as a land of opportunity for immigrants of every origin, absorbed into a single people through what is often called a “melting pot,” though historians increasingly describe the actual process as closer to a simmering pluralism of distinct communities than a true fusion.
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” (1967); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996).
The turning points, read through belief and political culture, are moments when the country’s civic and religious self-understanding was tested and revised. The Revolutionary founding fused Protestant dissenting traditions of covenant and conscience with Enlightenment language of natural rights, producing a public rhetoric that treated the new nation’s cause as simultaneously political and providential. The Civil War forced a reckoning between two regional cultures that had grown apart for generations — a Northern civic identity increasingly built around free labor and reform, and a Southern identity built around plantation slavery and a distinct code of honor — and Reconstruction’s failure left those regional identities only partly reconciled, a fracture historians still trace in American politics today. Mass immigration during the Gilded Age tested whether the country’s civic creed could really absorb people of every European origin and, later, every continent, producing recurring nativist backlashes alongside the pluralist “melting pot” ideal. The New Deal and World War II nationalized what had been a more locally rooted civic identity, binding citizens to the federal government and to each other through shared sacrifice in ways that outlasted the war itself. The civil rights era, finally, forced the country’s civil religion to confront directly the gap between its professed creed of equality and its actual treatment of Black citizens, a confrontation many historians regard as still unresolved.
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” (1967); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996).
On this reading, a shared civic and religious culture came before the state and gave it its distinctive shape: a nation defined by creed rather than by blood. The early colonists’ religious dissent, their attachment to local self-governance in town meetings and congregations, and their sense of a covenant — a solemn agreement, in the Puritan sense, binding a community to God and to one another — supplied the emotional and rhetorical materials out of which revolutionary leaders built a case for independence and, later, a constitutional order. This is why American nationalism has historically defined membership by allegiance to a set of ideas and institutions, what scholars call civic nationalism, rather than by ethnic descent, in contrast to nations whose identity rests on shared ancestry or an ancient homeland. Yet this civic definition of nationhood was never fully separated from an ethnic and religious one in practice: for most of the country’s history, full civic membership was in fact restricted along lines of race and, at times, religion, so that the ideal of a creed-based nation and the reality of an exclusionary one developed side by side. Cultural historians favor this account because the language Americans have used to describe their own country, from the earliest sermons through today’s political rhetoric, is saturated with the vocabulary of covenant, chosenness, and creed rather than of shared bloodline.
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” (1967); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996).
The lasting force, in this cultural and political reading, is the country’s continual re-negotiation of who belongs to the American civic religion and on what terms. From the Puritan sense of a chosen community, through the Revolutionary creed of natural rights, to the immigrant “melting pot” and its more recent recasting as pluralism, and on to the enduring cultural divide between a more secular, coastal country and a more religious, inland one, American public life has repeatedly redrawn the boundary of full membership without ever discarding the underlying civic faith itself. Bellah’s account gave this pattern its influential name: a civil religion distinct from any church, resilient enough to survive deep political conflict because it operates one level above ordinary partisan dispute, in the register of national ritual and shared symbol. The deep driver of American development, on this account, is this durable but constantly contested civic faith, and what impresses historians is its persistence: the same vocabulary of covenant, chosenness, and creed recurs across four centuries of otherwise unrecognizably different political circumstances, from a Puritan settlement of a few thousand people to a continental power of hundreds of millions.
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” (1967); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
The United States occupies the better part of a temperate continent, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific across fertile river valleys, vast grasslands, and mineral-rich mountains, with navigable rivers and natural harbors that gave early settlers unusually cheap access to trade. This physical abundance shaped the country’s development from the outset. In the South, a warm, humid climate suited to growing cotton created enormous demand for forced labor, and by the mid-nineteenth century enslaved people producing cotton supplied the raw material for the world’s first mass-market industry, textile manufacturing, making the American South the hinge of an emerging global cotton economy centered on factories in Britain and the northeastern United States alike. In the North and West, abundant land, taken from its Native occupants, drew a continual wave of settlers and, later, immigrants, while rivers, canals, and eventually railroads knit a continent-sized internal market together faster than in almost any comparable country. On this account, American history is best explained by the sheer scale and variety of the continent’s resources, combined with a labor system — first coerced, later free but abundant through immigration — that let the country exploit those resources at a pace few other nations could match.
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (2014).
Read through resources and markets, the turning points are thresholds of scale. The Revolutionary founding secured control of the eastern seaboard’s ports and river systems, the essential infrastructure for the Atlantic trade the new country depended on. The Civil War, in economic terms, was a struggle over whether the continent’s westward expansion would spread a slave-labor cotton economy or a free-labor industrial one, and the North’s victory locked in the latter. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 that the closing of the frontier — the Census Bureau’s declaration that there was no longer a discernible line of continuous westward settlement — marked the end of the process that had shaped the American character, since cheap available land had long served as an outlet for social pressure and a source of self-reliant individualism. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, alongside this closing frontier, converted a string of regional economies into a single national market almost overnight. The New Deal and World War II then rebuilt the federal government as an active manager of that national economy, and the war left the United States, uniquely among major powers, with its industrial base intact, positioning the dollar to become the world’s reserve currency under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Each threshold, on this account, tracks a change in the scale at which American resources were organized and exploited.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893); Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege (2011).
On this reading, the country was knit together first by markets and infrastructure, and political union followed and confirmed what commerce and geography had already joined. A continental interior rich in farmland and minerals, connected by rivers, canals, and then a railroad network that reached the Pacific by 1869, created a genuinely national market well before national institutions caught up to it: goods, capital, and people moved across state lines long before federal regulation meaningfully did. The cotton trade supplies the clearest early case: raw cotton grown by enslaved labor in the South, financed by banks in the Northeast, and manufactured into cloth in New England and in Britain, tied the country’s regions and the wider Atlantic economy into a single system of production and credit well before the Civil War tested whether that system could survive politically. Here the link between state and nation runs through infrastructure and finance rather than through shared belief: it was rivers, railroads, and credit markets that did the binding, and the federal government’s growing regulatory and monetary authority, especially after the 1930s, gave institutional form to an economic integration commerce had already achieved. The transcontinental railroad and the cotton ledger book, on this account, tell the story of national formation as clearly as any constitutional convention.
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (2014).
The force that best explains American development, in this reading, is the country’s repeated conversion of continental scale and resource abundance into whatever form of economic power a given era rewarded. The same underlying logic — abundant land and raw materials, organized at ever-greater scale — produced a slave-labor cotton economy that fed the first age of industrial textiles, then a coast-to-coast railroad market and heavy industry in the late nineteenth century, then the arsenal of the Second World War and the dollar’s reserve-currency status after 1944, and finally, in the late twentieth century, a wrenching shift as manufacturing drained from an aging industrial Northeast and Midwest — the region now often called the Rust Belt — toward a warmer, less unionized Sun Belt and toward a new technology-driven economy centered on the Pacific coast. Geography and resources, on this account, are the constant; the form of the economy built on top of them is what changes with technology and global circumstance. This reading accounts economically for events other lenses treat mainly as political or cultural, from the Civil War to deindustrialization, by tracing them back to the same underlying question: who controls, and how is organized, the wealth generated by an unusually large and richly endowed continent.
Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege (2011); Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The country’s very origin is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat 1776 and its declaration of universal rights as the country’s foundational moment, with slavery and dispossession as tragic exceptions within an otherwise principled founding. The revisionist reading treats 1619 — the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans in English North America — and the ongoing dispossession of Native nations as equally foundational, arguing that the economy and legal order the founders built rested on both. Same set of facts, different starting date.
The Civil War divides the lenses in a related way. The consensus account reads it chiefly as a political and constitutional crisis over union and slavery together; the economic account reads it primarily as a contest between two rival economic systems for control of a growing continent; the revisionist account reads slavery not as one grievance among several but as the war’s entire cause and the antebellum economy’s central organizing fact. Historians agree on the war’s outcome; they disagree on which of its causes did the most explanatory work.
On one point all four perspectives agree: the United States built its nationhood on an idea rather than on shared ancestry, and then spent its history deciding, often through conflict, who that idea actually covered. They part only on whether that unfinished business is the story’s tragic footnote or its organizing center.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty (2009); Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (multiple editions); James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988); Nikole Hannah-Jones, ed., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research (2006); Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (1967); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (2014); Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893); Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege (2011). The 2019 historians’ letter to the New York Times (Gordon Wood, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes) objecting to specific factual claims in the 1619 Project, and the New York Times’ published response, are verified against contemporaneous reporting (Washington Post, December 2019) and the published exchange; they are cited here as documented historiographical controversy, not as a source in their own right.
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To understand United States conflict history and its current position in the world under President Trump, we have to investigate its relationship with Europe and go back to its inception in the 18th century.
The United States grew out of British colonies in North America whose European settlers—mostly English, Irish, Dutch, German, French, and Swedish—declared independence in 1776 and eventually won it in the War of Independence. Many of these settlers hoped the ‘New World’ would offer an escape from the constraints of Europe: religious persecution, rigid class hierarchies, and rule by hereditary elites that often failed to serve the needs of ordinary people. At the same time, they were deeply influenced by new European currents of thought—especially Enlightenment ideas about natural rights, popular sovereignty, and individual liberty—that were still tightly constrained by the old European order. In their own eyes, America—the ‘New World’, imagined as a land of opportunity—would be the place where these emerging ideals could finally be put into practice, less constrained by the structures of the British Empire.
However, the ‘New World’ was far from uninhabited. The lands that would become the United States were home to several million Indigenous people, living in hundreds of distinct societies with their own political, economic, and spiritual systems spread across these vast territories. From the outset, relations between Indigenous peoples and European settlers were marked by profound cultural misunderstandings and conflicts. European arrivals not only brought with them epidemic diseases to which Indigenous communities had little or no resistance—causing catastrophic demographic collapse—but also a land‑hungry, expansionist way of life built around private property, commercial agriculture, and resource extraction. These patterns clashed with many Indigenous approaches to land, kinship, and reciprocity. Spiritually, too, there were deep tensions: European colonists and missionaries, shaped by Christian traditions and by memories of ‘pagan’ Europe, often regarded Indigenous religious practices as idolatrous or heretical, rather than as legitimate systems of meaning in their own right.
During the 1800’s this attitude led to the concept of Manifest Destiny, which combined ideas of divine mission, national superiority of Western culture, and inevitability: expansion was seen not just as possible or desirable, but as ordained by Providence and historically unavoidable. Manifest Destiny justified the Mexican-American war, the displacement of Native Americans and westward expansion.
It is interesting to draw a parellel to the Nazi concept of “Lebensraum”, the German translation for living space. Hitler himself explicitly framed conquest in Eastern Europe as Germany’s own “Manifest Destiny,” combining territorial hunger with racial ideology and a claimed historical mission, very similar to the driving forces behind America’s westward expansion.
Therefore, from the outset, this aspirational vision of America as a laboratory for European Enlightenment ideals—framed in the language of freedom and self‑rule—rested on a profound contradiction. The very same founders who celebrated liberty, property, and self‑government pursued those goals on lands already inhabited by Indigenous nations, whose displacement and dispossession became structurally woven into the emerging republic. This contradiction did not remain confined to Indigenous–settler relations. It deepened further in the southern United States, where an economy increasingly dependent on enslaved labor turned the rhetoric of universal rights and human equality into a second, even starker, fault line at the heart of the new nation.
This fault line—an ongoing intellectual and spiritual struggle between Enlightenment ideals of liberalism and human rights, on the one hand, and authoritarian, deeply unequal social orders, on the other—is not unique to the United States but markes the wider Western world. Europe, for instance, was first to abandon legal slavery and, alongside the United States, was an early experimenter with constitutional government and mass politics. Yet it was also in Europe that, during the 1930s, democratic institutions collapsed in countries such as Spain, Italy, and Germany, giving rise to some of the most destructive dictatorships the world had ever seen.
In the United States a similar darker strand of American politics can be seen in a line of leaders and moments that combine popular or patriotic rhetoric with persecution, secrecy, and abuse of power. In the nineteenth century, President Andrew Jackson championed the ‘common man’ while driving brutal policies of removal against Indigenous nations. After the Civil War, white elites in the South built and defended a system of legalized racial segregation—often described as a form of American apartheid—that denied Black Americans basic civil and political rights well into the twentieth century. In the early Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his lawyer Roy Cohn led the Red Scare, using fear and smear tactics to destroy reputations and restrict civil liberties. President Richard Nixon – also a strong supporter of the Red Scare campaigns – turned this logic inward through the abuse of executive power and illegal political operations, exposed in the Watergate scandal. After 9/11 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – who had previously been part of the Nixon administration – pushed expansive claims of national‑security authority, including misleading arguments about weapons of mass destruction and the use of torture and extralegal detention.
Donald Trump—coached early in his career by Roy Cohn—stands in a longstanding American tradition of hard‑edged, exclusionary politics. He has encouraged racial resentment (for example, through the birther campaign), normalized conspiracy‑driven politics, and repeatedly attacked the legitimacy of opponents, the press, and core democratic institutions.
For Trump and the MAGA movement, the “American spirit” functions much like the “Russian soul” in Putin’s rhetoric: an almost mystical national essence said to be under threat and in need of restoration. Trumpism can be read as a political backlash against the social and economic order produced by late‑20th‑century globalization, which many supporters experience as eroding national sovereignty, its social roles, dissolving clear borders, and turning citizens into interchangeable “global” individuals.
Whenever the United States has come under severe economic, geopolitical, or cultural pressure, variants of this repertoire—nativism, strong‑man leadership, attacks on “enemies within”—have tended to resurface. Yet, unlike Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, or Francoist Spain, the United States has never fully succumbed to authoritarian rule. Counter‑movements within the country, institutional checks, and periods of democratic renewal have repeatedly pushed back against these tendencies over the past two and a half centuries.
This historical experience has helped root a powerful sense of national uniqueness: the belief that the United States is the primary, or even “true,” protector of democracy in the world, often described as American exceptionalism. It also underpins a tendency to place itself above some of the international rules and institutions that it helped to create—a stance that has regularly provoked irritation and resentment in other parts of the world.
Europe, by contrast, is deeply marked by the experience of the Second World War. Its failure to stop authoritarian forces within and beyond its borders, and the horrific consequences of the Holocaust, have left European societies highly sensitive—sometimes even allergic—to anything that resembles the ideas that took hold in Nazi Germany, especially in Germany itself. Europe’s reaction to populist forces such as the AfD, Marine Le Pen, or Viktor Orbán is therefore often one of fear and defensive alarm.
The same historical lens shapes how many European leaders view Putin’s Russia. By analogy with the annexation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany, the invasion of Ukraine is frequently seen as a forewarning of further aggression against other European states. It is this fear, this underlying insecurity, that the Trump administration tends to look upon with disdain.
In his keynote speech at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February 2025, Vice President JD Vance made this clear: if Europe continues to speak the language of democracy and liberty while, in Washington’s view, suppressing certain political movements under the security umbrella that the United States provides, then the paths of Europe and America will increasingly diverge.
How can NATO expansion be seen as modern version of Manifest Destiny?
After the Soviet collapse, NATO not only persisted but enlarged eastward, with official rationales centered on spreading stability, democracy, and security to former communist states. When the Bush administration pushed for NATO’s “open door” to include Ukraine and Georgia, several European leaders—notably Angela Merkel and others in Germany and France—firmly objected, warning that such moves would escalate tensions with Russia, but Washington continued to press the enlargement agenda. Supporters framed this process as integrating new members into a “Euro‑Atlantic community” of shared values, effectively casting NATO as a vehicle of democratic modernization and a guarantor of peace. Critics, however, argued that this expansion both reflected and reinforced a belief that Western security architecture and political models should extend into spaces previously under a different order, echoing earlier “civilizing” or “stabilizing” missions that resemble Manifest Destiny in a contemporary, institutional form.
The 9/11 attacks came as a profound shock not only for the United States but for much of the Western world. The 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, were widely interpreted as a triumph of liberal democracy over authoritarianism, popularized in Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. NATO’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade seemed to confirm this self‑image: many Western leaders portrayed it as a humanitarian intervention and as evidence that a liberal, rules‑based order could enforce peace and human rights by force. In this optimistic vision, the world was expected gradually to evolve into a more harmonious, democratic “global village,” with only a few rogue yet ultimately manageable states at the margins, and even a still‑authoritarian China was often assumed to liberalize as prosperity grew.
The 9/11 attacks orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden, violently disrupted this narrative. They exposed the blowback from years of often contradictory Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs—supporting Israel as a democratic ally in a hostile region and securing access to oil while backing or overthrowing different regimes—and revealed how these policies had fueled deep resentment and radicalization. The United States reverted to a familiar pattern: backed by all NATO allies, it launched a massive military campaign in Afghanistan to destroy Al‑Qaeda and topple the Taliban, under broadly accepted self‑defence grounds. Two years later, the Bush administration invaded Iraq on the false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism, drawing the country into a second major war under far more contested pretences. In the following years the war in Iraq would significantly undermine the benevolent role of the United States and its allies in the world
The nearly twenty‑year “War on Terror” that followed did not produce the stable, democratic outcomes its architects promised. The US and its allies eventually killed Osama bin Laden in a covert operation in Pakistan, but the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was followed by the rapid return of the Taliban to power. In Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein unleashed insurgency, civil war, and the rise of groups like the Islamic State, and the country remains politically fragile and periodically violent to this day.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Under President Trump, the United States has repositioned itself in a more openly transactional and unilateral way, while still claiming to act as the indispensable guarantor of global order. This shift is most visible in three arenas: the war in Iran, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and the evolving relationship with China.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration first withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and re‑imposed sweeping sanctions, then escalated through covert action and strikes into a full‑scale war with Iran in early 2026. Publicly, this has been justified as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and defending regional allies, but critics argue it reflects a familiar pattern: reliance on military force, disregard for multilateral constraints, and a willingness to reshape regional orders without broad international consent.
In Ukraine, the United States under Trump has maintained a formally pro‑Kyiv stance, but has gradually reduced direct military support while pressing European allies to assume greater responsibility. This balancing act—signalling strategic support against Russia yet complaining that America is “paying too much” and Europe too little—fits your broader picture of a US that still claims leadership, but expects others to carry a larger share of costs and risks.
The relationship with China has moved from outright trade war toward a tense, negotiated rivalry. Trump’s second term saw renewed tariff battles followed by a 2025 economic deal that traded reductions in some US tariffs for Chinese concessions on trade barriers, critical minerals, and fentanyl precursors, even as strategic mistrust and military competition persisted. In your framing, this illustrates how the United States continues to treat China as both a systemic rival and a crucial economic partner—hoping to “rebalance” rather than fully decouple, while still assuming the legitimacy of its own leadership in shaping the rules of global trade.
Taken together, these three theatres show a United States that still sees itself as a central architect of world order, but now pursues that role through a mix of nationalist rhetoric, selective multilateralism, and episodic military escalation. In this sense, Trump’s America does not abandon the older belief in its own exceptional mission; it rearticulates it in a harsher, more interest‑driven language that nonetheless continues to claim the mantle of security, freedom, and order.
Migration pressures from Latin America, the Caribbean, and wider conflict zones have become a central fault line in U.S. politics, shaping debates over border security, asylum, and foreign aid. Successive administrations have linked domestic border control to external policies that address “root causes” such as violence, corruption, and economic instability, particularly in Central America. At the same time, polarization in Congress over immigration constrains broader foreign policy bargaining, including on Ukraine aid and trade agreements. Public concern about migration also feeds into skepticism about U.S. military interventions and foreign spending, reinforcing calls for burden-sharing by allies and a more selective use of American power abroad. Sources: [2] Foreign policy of the United States (Wikipedia); [4] EBSCO U.S. foreign policy overview; [10] U.S. State Department – What Is Foreign Policy?
The United States is Ukraine’s largest single military and financial supporter, framing the conflict as pivotal for European security and the global norm against territorial conquest. Washington has supplied advanced weapons, intelligence, training, and budget support while coordinating extensive sanctions on Russia with European and Indo-Pacific partners. U.S. troops are not fighting in Ukraine but have reinforced NATO’s eastern flank, underscoring a strategy of “forward” engagement in Eurasia to prevent Russian dominance. Domestic debates over the costs and risks of escalation have grown, raising questions about the durability of U.S. support and its willingness to underwrite European security long term in an increasingly multipolar world. Sources: [1] ASPI – Geography of American power; [2] Foreign policy of the United States (Wikipedia); [5] Washington Institute – U.S. no longer the only superpower
The United States anchors NATO and a wider network of alliances with the EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and others, using forward-deployed forces and bases to project power across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East. Its nuclear triad and extended deterrence guarantees are central to reassuring allies and discouraging adversaries, while Washington also seeks to limit nuclear proliferation. Internal U.S. debates—especially during the Trump era—over defense spending, NATO commitments, and transactional burden-sharing have exposed strains but have not overturned the basic architecture of U.S.-led security. Current strategy emphasizes maintaining military predominance, a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” and preventing hostile control of key regions and sea lanes. Sources: [1] ASPI – Geography of American power; [2] Foreign policy of the United States (Wikipedia); [8] CFR – U.S. Foreign Policy Powers
The United States was already a major industrial and financial power before WWII, with one of the world’s largest economies and strong manufacturing capacity.
Yes, US foreign policy between the wars was dominated by isolationist and neutrality ideas, reflected in the Neutrality Acts and reluctance to join institutions like the League of Nations or the World Court.
Pre‑war isolationism made the shift to permanent alliances and global leadership after 1945 a major break with tradition, which is why institutions like NATO and the UN marked a new era in US policy.
The US is protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and bordered by relatively weak neighbors, which allowed it to avoid constant border wars and focus on naval power and hemispheric influence.
The Monroe Doctrine (1823) declared the Western Hemisphere off limits for new European colonization, turning the Americas into a US geopolitical zone that later served as the secure rear area for US global power after WWII.
Continental expansion and later overseas acquisitions (e.g., Spanish–American War, Panama Canal) gave the US bases and logistical routes that became essential for WWII operations and the early Cold War.
Between the wars, the US avoided permanent military commitments but stayed active in economic diplomacy, arms limitation conferences, and hemispheric security, combining economic engagement with political distance.
The Great Depression deepened isolationist attitudes and pushed US leaders to prioritize domestic recovery, which limited early responses to crises in Europe and Asia.
Before formally entering the war, the US passed Neutrality Acts, then shifted toward support for allies through measures like “cash and carry” and Lend‑Lease, moving from strict neutrality to “arsenal of democracy.”
After WWII, the devastation of Europe and Asia and the rise of the Soviet Union pushed the US to abandon its traditional reluctance and use its pre‑existing industrial strength and geographic security to build and lead a new international order.
The United States commits to containing Soviet influence, building global alliances, expanding military bases and intelligence capabilities. This worldwide security posture, formalized through NATO and other pacts, creates the infrastructure and mindset for later global counterterrorism campaigns after 2001.
Washington leads formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, binding North American and Western European security. NATO’s collective defense framework, logistics and command systems later underpin US-led coalitions in Afghanistan and against Islamic State, shaping how the United States organizes post‑9/11 interventions.
US-led UN forces fight North Korea and Chinese troops, normalizing large overseas deployments and permanent forward bases in Asia. This conflict accelerates defense spending and a standing national security state, foundations for later rapid expeditionary operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.
US escalation in Vietnam leads to a long counterinsurgency war, large conscript army, and domestic backlash. Operational lessons about guerrilla warfare and hearts‑and‑minds campaigns, as well as public skepticism of interventions, later influence doctrines and debates during the War on Terror.
The United States ends conscription after Vietnam, creating an all‑volunteer professional military. This model, relying on smaller but highly deployable forces, enables sustained overseas counterterror operations after 2001 while limiting direct impact on most US citizens’ daily lives.
Islamic Revolution in Iran and Soviet troops entering Afghanistan reshape US policy toward political Islam and the region. Washington backs Afghan mujahideen and deepens Gulf ties, unintentionally empowering militant networks later linked to al‑Qaida, connecting Cold War strategies to post‑9/11 threats.
Attacks on US and French forces in Beirut, including the 1983 barracks bombing, highlight new asymmetric tactics by militant groups. These experiences expose US vulnerabilities to non‑state actors, foreshadowing later embassy bombings, USS Cole attack, and 9/11 methods.
US‑led coalition expels Iraqi forces from Kuwait, establishing bases and long‑term troop presence in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. This military footprint becomes a major grievance cited by Osama bin Laden and al‑Qaida, helping frame the narrative leading to anti‑US terrorism.
Militants attempt to topple New York’s World Trade Center (1993), later attacking US embassies in East Africa (1998) and USS Cole (2000). These operations signal a transnational jihadist campaign, yet US response remains limited, setting the stage for the scale of 9/11.
Al‑Qaida hijackers strike New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people. The US government proclaims a global War on Terror, creating expansive security laws, surveillance, and worldwide counterterror operations that redefine US foreign policy and military focus for decades.
US‑led forces topple the Taliban for sheltering al‑Qaida, then remain to build Afghan institutions and fight insurgents. Afghanistan becomes the central theater of the War on Terror, shaping counterinsurgency doctrine, drone warfare, and reliance on partner forces central to later campaigns.
The United States invades Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, triggering insurgency, sectarian conflict, and state weakness. US occupation and disbanding of Iraqi forces help create conditions for al‑Qaida in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State, deeply influencing subsequent US counterterror focus.
Islamic State seizes territory in Iraq and Syria, declaring a caliphate. The US forms an air‑ and advisor‑heavy coalition backing local forces. This reinforces a model of fighting jihadist groups mainly via partners, airpower, and special operations rather than large invasions.
US troops leave Afghanistan, Taliban return to power, and Washington pivots from large occupations to remote counterterrorism, drones, and limited deployments. The War on Terror persists in a lower‑visibility form, with ongoing operations against al‑Qaida, Islamic State branches, and affiliates.
