Against War and Imperialism

Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer agree on the necessity of an American Empire.

“I’m not against war and I’m not against empire.” pic.twitter.com/TlysCNEZLN

— Fuentes Updates (@FuentesUpdates) December 12, 2025

I strongly disagree with Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes.

The American Empire has been an unmitigated disaster. White America and the West would be better off today if it had never existed. This unease is why there is a “destructive impulse” in MAGA.

In 1900, the United States was 88% White with a black minority that was 12% of the population. Blacks had been granted American citizenship and voting rights during Reconstruction mainly because of their service in the Union Army. The Civil War led to abolition and the creation of civil rights. Most Northern states were racially integrated and had repealed their anti-miscegenation laws by the turn of the 20th century because war fever against the Confederacy had given a huge boost to liberalism.

If there had not been a divisive war and a struggle to dominate, reconstruct and reincorporate the Confederacy, this unfortunate turn of events would have never happened. Northern states like Illinois would have retained their antebellum black exclusion laws. The antebellum consensus that America needed a “White Man’s Government” would have prevailed if America had elected presidents like Stephen Douglas and Horatio Seymour in the 1860s instead of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

As bad as this situation was in 1900, it was not irrecoverable. White racial attitudes hardened in the Gilded Age. The South was creating Jim Crow. Northern troops had been withdrawn from the Southern states. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had been struck down by the Supreme Court. Race realism was ascendant again. The 14th and 15th Amendments were increasingly treated as nullified dead letters. Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Force Act of 1890 was the last gasp of Reconstruction. America could have endured as an overwhelmingly White country in the 20th century with a tiny American Indian population on reservations and with blacks living under segregation in the South.

War and imperialism have always created thorny racial problems for the United States. This was true before the Civil War. The Mexican War, for example, had already saddled us with a Hispanic population in the Southwest. Oklahoma didn’t become a state until 1907 because it was full of Indians who had been relocated there from the Southern states. New Mexico didn’t become a state until 1912 because of its large mestizo and Indian population. American Indians weren’t granted American citizenship until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The United States did not incorporate “all of Mexico” as some Americans wanted to do after the Mexican War because we didn’t want to racially amalgamate with Mexicans.

Prior to 1900, Americans had a reflexive aversion to imperialism, which they rightly associated with European empires like the British Empire which they did not want to emulate. Americans drew a key distinction between expansion and imperialism. Expansion was conquering, annexing and settling adjacent territory and exporting our people, culture and institutions to new territory in order to create new states. This is how Virginia gave birth to Kentucky or Georgia gave birth to Alabama. Creating new states which were incorporated into the Union created new opportunities for American settlers. This was seen as completely different than the British model of dominating large countries like India for the sole benefit of corporations. The British were also in the business of selling opium to the Chinese.

Imagine this alternate history scenario.

William Jennings Bryan defeats William McKinley in the election of 1900 and serves two terms as America’s first populist president after fiercely campaigning against war and imperialism. The imperial course that William McKinley set America on during the Spanish-American War is rejected in favor of a return to isolationism. McKinley is never assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt never becomes president. The Inner Empire (Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines) is rejected and all become independent nations. The Great Rapprochement between the United States and the British Empire never happens because President Bryan remains deeply skeptical of the British Empire. Instead, America continues on its 19th century trajectory. Tensions with Imperial Germany never rise. Woodrow Wilson and FDR never become president. Wilson never enters World War I to make the world safe for democracy.

Germany wins World War I without American intervention which forces Britain to acquiesce to German hegemony in continental Europe. The Treaty of Versailles doesn’t happen. Fascism never rises in Europe. Communists never take over Russia and create the Soviet Union. Austria-Hungary remains a bulwark of stability in Central Europe. World War II never happens. The Cold War against the Soviet Union never happens. The United Nations is never created. Liberalism doesn’t become the hegemonic ideology of the 20th century without FDR and American victory in World War II. The European empires never fall. There is no Holocaust guilt. “Antiracism” never becomes mainstream in American culture because Hitler never rose to power and was never demonized and lived out his life as a painter in Vienna.

The West is not deracinated and flooded with Third World immigrants. White guilt never exists without the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. The Iraq War never happens because all the stepping stones before it (nation building in Haiti and the Philippines, denazification of Germany, the Korean War, Vietnam, endless meddling in the Middle East during the Cold War) never happens. Israel is never created after World War II. Christian Zionism never gains traction in American Christianity.

In our timeline, war and imperialism was the engine of the destruction of Western civilization. World War I and World War II destroyed Western self confidence and created the chaos that empowered radical leftwing ideologies like modern liberalism in the West and communism in the East. It led to the United Nations and global antiracism. All the cracks in America’s racial and cultural confidence – first, the Filipino wives of American veterans stationed in the Philippines, the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act because Nationalist China was our ally against the Japanese, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 and the Immigration Act of 1965 – were ultimately driven by Great Power geopolitics. We changed our immigration laws in the 1960s to transform America into a miniature version of the United Nations.

A peaceful and non-interventionist America which decided it didn’t want the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba and Puerto Rico for racial and cultural reasons would have avoided all the disastrous wars of the 20th century and all the waves of refugees which were resettled here. A century of war and imperialism has exhausted and ruined this country and all of its liberal satellites in Europe. There is nothing glorious about a geriatric Joe Biden fighting for “democracy” in Ukraine or Putin resettling the Donbas with non-White auxiliaries drawn from his own empire. The American Empire is a sad and pathetic waste of our resources and there isn’t a single chapter of it that anyone could point to that has left us better off.

Source: https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/12/12/against-war-and-imperialism/