America's Imperial 'Gift': 'Crusader Democracy' Versus 'Christian Nationalism'

The United States has always fancied itself as the founder of modern democracy (aka 'Democracy'). And, although that country has been self-absorbed for most of its history, it has always sensed that Democracy was its greatest export.
'America' became involved in Africa and the 'Middle East' very early in its history. There was the American–Algerian War (1785–1795); and the Barbary Wars (1801-1805,1815), featuring the heroic re-seizure and scuttling by fire of the USS Philadelphia in Tripoli Harbor in 1804. Then there was the reverse colonisation (aka 'liberation', 'democratization') of a small corner of Africa from 1822, leading to Liberia's independence in 1862.
In the 1846, there was the small matter of the United States' invasion of Mexico, resulting in the 1848 annexation of half of Mexico's territory. 'America' brought Democracy to California, through annexation. And, in 1898, the United States appropriated Spain's remaining worldwide empire, including the Philippines. And some other territories, including Hawaii. Upon his inauguration as the 47th President, Donald Trump explicitly invoked the memory of President William McKinley, America's most notorious annexor of foreign territory.
And in 1889: "Three American warships then entered the Apia harbor and prepared to engage the three German warships found there. Before any shots were fired, a typhoon wrecked both the American and German ships." After ten years of military/political stalemate – known as the Second Samoan Civil War – the Samoan 'assets' were split between the United States, the German Second Reich, and the United Kingdom. (The UK traded its share with Germany. Britain gave up all claims to Samoa and in return accepted the termination of German rights in Tonga, certain areas in the Solomon Islands, and Zanzibar.)
America's imperial 'burden' in the last 125 years
Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden was written in 1899; "a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country".
America's empire today is partly formal, though mostly informal, with various grades of informality. Indeed, the recent acknowledgement by the European Union that it has free-ridden on the United States for its defence indicates that the United States has had a significant degree of imperial control over Europe; hegemony manifesting as control over foreign policy.
The name 'America' itself is an imperial grab. America is the name for two continents, yet even the Canadians call the United States 'America', and its citizens 'Americans'. American exceptionalism represents the weaponisation of democracy. Democracy is packaged as 'Democracy', a secular faith like 'Communism' or 'Economic Liberalism'; a faith which must be proselytised, spread across the world as some kind of holy or secular crusade.
The remaining territories on the 'autocratic' 'Dark Side' – ie territories not subject to United States' 'protection' – are mainly in continental Asia: especially West Asia (much of which is imperialistically called the 'Middle East', which extends to North Africa), North Asia, and East Asia. Though there is also very much a contest for South Asia; a contest, which if successful for the White Man's force, will bring secular Hindi along with secular Judaism fully into the imperial fold of secular Christianity. (We note that the labels Hindu and Jew have long been name-tags which confuse and conflate religion with ethnicity. So it may soon be with Christianity; with top-tier Christians behaving very much as top-tier Jews behave today, as supremacist gift-givers and bomb-throwers.)
We should note that Catholic Christianity is now uneasy about this crusader culture, having been the main perpetrator of such culture nearly a millennium ago. And Orthodox Christianity is even more uneasy. In its North Asian (ie Russian) form, Orthodox Christianity – like Islam, and Chinese atheist capitalism – is a target of the present Christian Soldiers, not a collaborator. (The decline of the Christian East came with the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Ostensibly a western invasion force going to re-recover the 'Holy Land', instead that Crusade turned on Orthodox Christian Constantinople. The result was a weak Latin empire in the east; easy prey for the Ottoman forces which in 1453 created a Muslim empire in West Asia and Southeast Europe; an empire that lasted until 1918.)
The modern American-led crusading mentality represents a schism of Protestant Evangelism (which dates back in particular to the Calvinist side of the sixteenth century Reformation) and Secular Liberalism. Protestant Evangelism (increasingly known today as Christian Nationalism) is the imperial currency of today's Republican Party, whereas Secular Liberalism is the imperial currency of today's Democratic Party (although secular Neoliberalism is presently teaming up with the Evangelists). What both have in common is a will to impose themselves upon the rest of the world. And to produce and export lots of big guns, military hardware; making money, and making American jobs.
There are some strange bedfellows. As these two American socio-cultural Gods – Republican and Democrat; protagonist and antagonist, and vice versa – have battled out their Americanisms on a world stage, we have seen a significant posse of very rich devout Economic Liberals taking the side of the Christian Nationalists. So do a number of working-class and other disempowered former ballot-box 'Leftists', who wish to cast an anti-establishment vote but don't know which way to turn. This dabbling with new right-radicalism (not unlike leftist dabbling in New Zealand in 1984 with the recently late Bob Jones' New Zealand Party) follows the slow but comprehensive gutting of the Left-project that was so buoyant in the 1960s and 1970s.
The name Christian Nationalism is a misnomer; a better name is Christian Extranationalism. Rather than being an internationalist movement – internationalism is a liberal concept – this is a movement to perpetuate and extend the global domination of American culture, through imperial merchant capitalism. The United States was born out of British merchant capitalism (and New York out of Dutch merchant capitalism); its values and institutions reflect those of eighteenth-century western Europe. Just as the British exacted tribute from their American colonies; imperial America seeks to extract tribute through the 'negotiation' of asymmetric 'deals'. Are we today witnessing an American Napoleon?
Money, Lies and God: by Katherine Stewart (2025)
Katherine Stewart this year has written about the new eclectic rightwing coalition in the United States that is coalescing under the name of Christian Nationalism. Though I've only read the introduction so far, the book has a real strength, in particular in identifying five components of this new new-right coalition: funders, thinkers, sergeants, infantry, power-players.
Of particular interest to me is the "out-sourced" relationship between the funders and the thinkers. While Stewart emphasises the 'thinkers' in the well-funded (and mostly conservative) 'Think Tanks', the real issue is that of 'selective truth', in the Darwinian sense of 'selection'. Our 'intellectual' careerists compete to publish 'truths', and the truths which prevail will be the truths purchased by the 'funders', given that the funders have most of the funds.
This kind of relationship with truth is somewhat like a 'court-of-law', where commonly two 'truths' are subject to a contest in which one will be declared 'the winner'. Not uncommonly, both rival 'truths' are at least partially false, and there may be other (possibly truer) truths that are not even 'on the table'. Evidence represents a part of the court process, but by no means the whole of that process. The truth-relationship between the funders and thinkers is a corrupt form of the 'law court' model; the more corrupt the more wealth the conservative funders control. Academic careers – indeed scientists' careers – are built on perpetuating narratives acceptable to their patrons.
While Money, Lies and God represents a prescient and useful analysis, ultimately it is part of the problem. It represents one side of the great American divide calling out the other side. The process of belligerent finger-pointing – between, in American language, 'liberals' and 'conservatives' – is the bigger problem. Why bother talking about the world when you can talk about half of America instead? Indeed, too many American intellectuals talk and write about the United States as if America is the World; a kind of mental imperialism. (Another critique of American 'Christian Nationalism' can be found in a recent Upfront episode on Al Jazeera: The growing influence of Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism in the United States.)
The problem of American imperialism belongs to both sides of the Divide; indeed, it is the Secular Liberalism of what has been exposed as the tone-deaf establishment – the Blinkens, Bidens and Nods – who represented the moral hypocrisy of America's imperial democratic gift. (The sheer stupidity of the Biden re-election campaign is documented in Original Sin, 2025, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.) That is, the belief that America created modern Democracy, and that those parts of the world – especially the 'western' world – have special rights accruing to them because they have been awarded the 'tick of Democracy'. These countries – and only these countries – have the "right to defend themselves", the right to make war (as 'defence through attack'), and the "right to possess nuclear weapons".
Contemporary American imperialism is mainly a 'West on East' phenomenon; Asia is the target. Ukraine and Anatolia (Türkiye) are border territories between Europe and Asia. Palestine, perhaps too, given its location on the Mediterranean Sea; though the Mediterranean littoral, from Istanbul to Morocco, is better understood as West Asia, not Europe. Iran is unambiguously a part of Asia. What we are seeing at present is nothing less than a Euro-American invasion of Asia. Imperialism. Nuclear imperialism; geopolitical imperialism; cultural imperialism. The gift that keeps on taking.
Note on the boundary between Europe and Asia
We should note that the core geopolitical boundary between Europe and Asia was set by Charlemagne in around the year 800; representing the border between the predominancies of Catholic Christianity and Orthodox Christianity (harking back to the Western and Eastern Roman Empires). There are other important historic geopolitical boundaries in Eurasia, of course, such as the eastern and southern borders of Orthodox Christianity; and the eastern and northern borders of Islam-dominated territories. Indeed there is perpetual tension on the Pakistan-India border.
The principal medieval-era departure from that Charlemagne-set geopolitical boundary was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which peaked in territory in the fifteenth century. The first significant modern-era fudge of that geopolitical boundary was the West's acquisition of Greece over the long 19th century (essentially 1820s to 1920s). The Great World War started in 1914 very much as an East-West border conflict in the Balkans of southeast Europe. After a week or two of fudging, the anglosphere took the Eastern side; siding with Russia over Austria and Germany.
Post World War Two, the next main geopolitical border fudges were the 'settlements' which placed a number of mainly Catholic East European countries into Russia's orb; and which placed Türkiye (then Turkey) into NATO. The current twentyfirst century fudge is one of European expansion, placing a number of predominantly Orthodox territories – most notably Ukraine – firmly into the European political realm.
This longstanding geopolitical boundary contrasts with the widely-accepted geographic boundary; the latter – based more on physical geography and ethnicity than on faith-culture – passes along the Ural and Caucasus mountain chains, and through the lower Volga River, the Black Sea and the Bosporus/Dardanelle channels. Geopolitically, Russia, Belarus and Türkiye should be understood today to be Asian countries; indeed, the lower Dnieper River and line of the military trenches in Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Luhansk constitute the current geopolitical boundary between West and East; between Europe and Asia. And the lines within Eretz Israel – separating Israel from Palestine – also represent geopolitical borders; and American geopolitical encroachment on Asia.
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin
Political Economist, Scoop Columnist
Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.
Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.
Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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