To celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, US President Donald Trump is hosting a packed card of UFC championship fights on the south lawn of the White House. Fighters will walk directly from the Oval Office to the octagon. Weigh-ins will take place at the Lincoln Memorial.
Journalist Peter Hartcher has put this down to Trump’s unique “need for constant displays of violence”. Speaking on the Morning Edition podcast on 12 March, he complained that this grisly spectacle is an insult to American tradition. Citing JFK’s 1962 speech that called Independence Day a celebration of a “revolution in human affairs”, Hartcher wondered aloud if “this celebration marks a regression of human affairs”.
Centrist critics of Trump, like Hartcher, see him as a slightly embarrassing interlude in an otherwise upstanding institution. They want to have their cake and eat it too—disavowing Trump’s brash theatrics, while maintaining that the United States is fundamentally a force for good, and urging continued connivance with a world order in which it reigns supreme. Hence Hartcher’s support for Australian involvement in the war on Iran, despite his criticisms of Trump.
But if we’re being honest, a modern-day version of Rome’s gladiatorial games is the perfect way to celebrate the anniversary of the United States—the most brutal empire the world has ever seen. And worshipping violence isn’t a unique psychological quirk of Trump; it’s a beloved pastime of the entire US ruling class.
On the presidential campaign trail in 2024, Kamala Harris promised the United States would always have the “strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, to loud cheers from US liberalism’s true believers. Following the 2011 murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton channelled Julius Caesar: “We came, we saw, he died”. And in a 9 March speech, Trump said that the military officials told him that they sink Iranian ships rather than capturing them because “It’s more fun”.
This worship of violence and death in ruling circles is part of what ensures the US has gotten to and remains at the top of the imperialist pecking order. But a myth still prevails today that the early US state was, unlike the great European empires, an “isolationist” and benevolent power that promoted free trade and rejected colonialism. In reality, US criticism of European colonial practices was just a cover to grab some of their territories.
The United States went to war with Spain in 1898 to seize Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. When Filipinos took US rhetoric about self-determination as good coin and declared independence, the United States violently subjugated them, leading to a million deaths from war, famine and disease. Their conduct was so piratical that Mark Twain suggested the US produce a special flag for their Philippines colony “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones”.
President Woodrow Wilson, architect of early 20th century American liberalism, made it clear that their vision of free trade and commerce would be backed up by gunboats, ready to “batter down the doors of closed nations”. Democratically elected governments that haven’t enthusiastically embraced the liberating force of American capital exports have been overthrown, from Guatemala to Chile to Iran.
It’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment the United States asserted itself as the dominant world imperialist power. At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb half a kilometre above the city of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands were instantly incinerated. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 70,000, half the city’s population. Both were civilian targets with no military value. By the end of 1945, 140,000 had died as a result of the bombing.
While the official justification for this atrocity was that it was necessary to shorten the war and prevent further loss of life, in reality Japan was already thoroughly beaten. On 12 July, President Harry Truman’s diary recorded: “Telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace”. He admitted, “The bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our terms at the end of the war”.
The purpose of dropping the bomb was to send a message to future rivals that the United States was not to be trifled with. War Secretary Henry Stimson said, “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. We have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way”. US hegemony announced itself to the world with one of the greatest crimes in human history.
During the Cold War, the United States backed military dictatorships and crushed independence movements to maintain dominance and ward off Soviet influence.
While the war in Vietnam is still commemorated by mainstream historians as a tragedy of good intentions gone awry, the conduct of US officials tells a different story. Their approach at times bordered on the genocidal. Colonel George S. Patton III, a combat commander in Vietnam, sent out Christmas cards in 1968 which read, “From Colonel and Mrs. George S. Patton III–Peace on Earth”. The attached Christmas cards contained photographs of Viet Cong soldiers dismembered and stacked in a pile.
For rank-and-file troops, the war was a bewildering orgy of racism and senseless violence. As one combat veteran recalled of basic training, “The only thing they told us about the Viet Cong was they were gooks. They were to be killed”.
The gravity of these crimes polarised US society, sparked resistance, and created a lasting cynicism about US imperial adventures. The first two Gulf wars aimed to rehabilitate the US empire and re-assert its inalienable right to dominate wherever it pleased. Just like today, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified on the basis of absurd lies about weapons of mass destruction posing an existential threat to the West. The price paid for this attempt to rebuild US imperial credibility was around 1 million deaths, overwhelmingly civilian, across the region.
Throughout all this, Republicans and Democrats have competed for the title of most enthusiastic warmongers. Dropping the A-bomb? Democrats. Incinerating half of Korea? Republicans. The napalming of Vietnam? A team effort.
The US empire has committed unspeakable crimes as the dominant imperialist power over the last 80 years—but today we are in a new, dangerous phase. The US is a power in long, slow decline. It has been weakened by failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It faces a multipolar world with different powers jostling for position, and it is losing out economically to China, its main rival.
But the US still retains advantage in one area—its overwhelmingly superior ability to inflict destruction, pain and death. Trump’s UFC-style warmongering, which has dominated so much of politics in 2026, is the expression of many things—the rapid radicalisation of the Republican Party, the ascendancy of Christian nationalists in US politics and the desire to distract and deflect from internal dysfunction and turmoil. But whatever the immediate political considerations, violence and war are so often the answer for empire because they are what underpins power.
Violence has to be used routinely to protect and extend the economic power of the capitalist class. It’s used both to intimidate potential rivals and to repress resistance from below. But the fatal flaw of violence is that it tends to spark resistance—as during the Vietnam war, when US and Australian soldiers revolted against their orders in large numbers and made their rulers’ war aims impossible to pursue.
It’s currently unclear whether Trump’s strategy of blatant aggression will ultimately strengthen US power or weaken it. But that’s beside the point—when great powers make strategic blunders. it only begets more violence, as empire lashes out and attempts to reassert control. The only off-ramp from this situation is to build resistance to war internationally, a resistance that aims to jam up the machinery of imperialism and eventually overthrow the people that administer it.
