Empires are back in vogue. In February of 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. He said, “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding…[to] build vast empires…[But] the great Western empires had [since] entered into terminal decline.” In these statements, Rubio suggested a positive view of empire. His lament of imperial decline was a rationale for him to call on Europe to join with America in revitalizing the “West’s age of dominance.”
The Guardian called the speech a “22-minute ode to empire. A love letter to conquest and colonialism…a full-throated endorsement of empire – and he did it at exactly the moment the United States, under his boss Donald Trump, is openly engaging in the kind of territorial and extractive imperialism that most western European governments spent the last 80 years renouncing.” New York Magazine, The New Statesman, and France 24 all published similar commentaries on Rubio’s imperial doctrine. Since the world is once again debating the merits of empire, it is worth reviewing the historical data.
While one would certainly not be wrong to argue against empire under political, moral, or other grounds, the economic one is the most under-interrogated. The prevailing assumption from both pro-imperialists and anti-imperialists is that imperialism must be economically logical. Imperialists may concede other arguments, such as morality, but always fall back on an economic rationale as their foundational justification. An imperialist could say “sure empire might be immoral, but at least we profit from it.” In this sense, the imperialist’s use of “we” is always in relation to the overall country at the imperial core. Thus, empire is framed in populist terms that benefits all citizens and the government of the country leading the empire.
In this essay, I will challenge that premise. Empires are not economically logical from the perspective of all citizens and the government of the country at the imperial core. Using historical data, it will be shown that empires result in over-taxing, over-spending, mediocre profits, heightened risk, and a hinderance to economic development and social progress. In the long-run, an empire acts as an institution that obviously siphons resources and wealth from colonized territories but less obviously siphons resources and wealth from the country at the imperial core as well.
This siphoning disproportionately benefits a small group of elites. This imperial oligarchy favors imperial parasitism over domestic productiveness in the face of economically unsound evidence because it can socialize the costs of empire through the imperial core country and privatize the profits of empire. Imperial territories also offer the imperial oligarchy a way to circumvent domestic and populist social progress in the forms of trade unionism and the welfare state in the imperial core country. Thus, imperial jingoism that seeks to frame an empire as inherently populist are proven fraudulent. Imperialism is the antithesis of populism. Imperial jingoism tricks the citizens of the imperial core country into paying the bills of the oligarchy for nothing in return.
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