Por Richard Drake
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Events in the Middle East following the February 28, 2026, US-Israeli bombing attack on Iran recall for us the prophecy recounted by Herodotus of the oracles of Delphi to Croesus the king of the Lydians: if he attacked the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire. The doomed empire turned out to be his own. The political, economic, military, environmental, and moral catastrophe of the current war unleashed by President Trump has raised questions around the world about his mental bearings and the future of the American Empire.
Much of the criticism aimed at Trump for taking the United States into the ruinous Iran war concerns his alleged authoritarian departure from constitutional norms. A loud chorus online and in the press denounces him for flouting the Constitution’s separation of powers principle with regard to the provision granting Congress the role of declaring war. That Congress has surrendered this role since World War II suggests that something other than Trumpism bears the responsibility for the imperial presidency under which we now live. This is not to take away from the Trump administration’s unprecedented levels of incompetence and malfeasance. The fundamental problem, however, lies in the Article II qualifications and powers of the presidency in the U.S. Constitution itself.
It might be well to review some of the key anti-Federalist arguments of 1787-1789 for insight into the origins of the abyss now stretching before our feet. The anti-Federalists thought that the machinations of any fool or knave who happened to occupy the presidency would be furthered by the 1787 Constitution devised in Philadelphia. In the vast literature that they produced, two speeches by Patrick Henry before the Virginia Ratifying Convention synthesized the dangers lying in wait for the American people under the proposed new government.
In the first of these addresses, on June 5, 1788, it is as if Henry were looking ahead to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this past January 7 and 24, respectively. Henry observed that under the new Constitution, the people had no power against tyranny, should it come to pass. He foresaw the prospect of American citizens who could not assemble “without the risk of being shot by hired soldiers, the engines of despotism.” The existing law of the land, the Articles of Confederation, did not make allowances for a chief executive or for direct taxation by the central government to support vast military capabilities against which the power of the citizenry would prove unavailing. What resistance could be made, Henry asked, by ordinary people against a Federal establishment thus armed.
Two days later, in a second speech, Henry expanded on his fears about Article II of the Constitution: “there is to be a great and mighty President, with very extensive powers, the powers of a King.” The framers of the Constitution supposed that the government would be honest, but Henry countered, “If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute.” The panoply of government power is in his hands. The constitutional provisions to remove such a man seemed highly technical and abstract to Henry, not in the least equal to an easily imagined scenario involving a ruthless seizure of power. Who would be there to stop such a president?
William Appleman Williams, the American historian most attentive to the concerns of the anti-Federalists, expressly called for the replacement of the US Constitution with an updated version of the Articles of Confederation. In a speech that Williams gave on November 5, 1965, about the increasing dangers of the war in Vietnam, he said of the Articles of Confederation: “That document offers a conception and a structure of regional and local communities for the maintenance and extension of democracy.” In his view, the Constitution of the United States had concentrated overwhelming power in the Federal government as the anti-Federalists prophetically had warned at the time of its formulation. Under the auspices of the Constitution, Washington had achieved a comprehensive mastery over American life: “Our humanity is being pounded and squeezed out of us by the consolidated power of a nationalist corporate welfare capitalism.” He counseled radicals to seek alliances with those traditional conservatives who, in their core political views, descended from the anti-Federalists and succeeding generations of the Constitution’s critics.
In much of Williams’s published work, but particularly in Empire as a Way of Life (1980), he identified the exigencies of defending and augmenting the corporate capitalist status quo as the source of all American wars. Patrick Henry had said in sadness on June 5, 1788, “Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire.” Williams thought that by analyzing America’s wars from Plymouth Rock to Vietnam the growth and true purposes of this empire could be determined.
One had to begin by overcoming the cumulative effects of the disorienting propaganda that had accompanied all these wars. Williams began his book with a lesson in semantics. Patrick Henry had been an outlier in his condemnation of the American empire. At the time of their Revolution, Williams noted, American leaders often and unashamedly had used the words “empire” and “imperialism” to describe what they were doing in replacing the British Empire with one of their own. Fashions changed, however: “Later generations became steadily less candid about their imperial attitudes and practices, talking more about ‘extending the area of freedom’ and then ‘saving the world for democracy.’” Through such verbal sleights did empire become a way of life for the American people as a means of “transforming the realities of expansion, conquest, and intervention into pious rhetoric about virtue, wealth, and democracy.”
The historical process that Williams called “our imperialist deception” culminated in the 1949-1950 National Security Council study known as NSC-68 when Americans “asserted the unique right and responsibility to impose their chosen ‘order among nations’ so that ‘our free society can flourish.’” We decided that the corporate capitalist status quo, which he dubbed the American Present, would be the future of the world. He thought that nothing in world affairs down to the present made any sense without reference to NSC-68, the Magna Carta for the United States to operate globally as a warfare state. The many codicils to this document, down to the U.S. National Security Strategy declarations of November 2025, proclaim America’s will to power.
The first practical illustration of the intentions behind NSC-68 became manifest in 1953 with Operation Ajax. Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, had sought to put an end to the exploitation of the country’s oil resources. The Mosaddegh government nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. To Washington and London, such an affront signaled the onset of a communist takeover in Tehran. The CIA and MI6 swiftly moved in to rectify the situation, overthrowing the Mosaddegh government and reinforcing the dictatorial powers of the Shah of Iran. A golden age of cooperation ensued between the CIA and SAVAK, the secret police of Iran.
Operation Ajax, the first US covert action to overthrow a foreign government in peacetime, became a model for subsequent actions of this kind in Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), and the many other episodes analyzed in Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (2020). The overthrow of Mosaddegh also set in motion the events ultimately leading to the US-Israel war against Iran: the American-backed dictatorship of the Shah, the triumph in 1979 of the Islamic Republic of Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the American hostage crisis of 1979-1981, America’s support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Islamization of Iranian society, and exporting the Iranian Revolution to many countries and groups throughout the region. Most fatefully of all, a parallel development involving the complete absorption of America’s foreign policy for the Middle East into the orbit of Zionism’s Greater Israel colonialist fantasies centered on the destruction of Iran have brought us to a decline and fall moment.
President Barack Obama correctly had understood that the only alternative to war lay in diplomacy, but the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked out during his administration had incurred the opposition of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. President Trump, the most devoted mouthpiece for the Israel lobby in the history of an office crowded with rival claimants for that distinction, took the United States out of the agreement. He has since replaced diplomacy with Israel’s regime decapitation strategy for Iran of do what we say or we will kill you. Some militarily impressive but morally reprehensible assassinations and mass murders have followed.
The high-tech recrudescence of the famous slaughters of political opponents perpetrated by the hoodlums of the Italian Renaissance and celebrated by Niccolò Machiavelli in his post-Christian manual The Prince (1513) is the subject of gloating and mirth in the Trump administration. The historian Jacob Burckhardt leaves no doubt in his classic Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) that these savage depredations and their excited approval by Machiavelli gave evidence of a fatal decline in Italian morality. American morality cannot be vouched for by Burckhardt’s standards.
The anti-Federalists of the eighteenth century did not foresee with precision the decline and threatening fall of the United States in our present circumstances. Men like Patrick Henry could not have conceived of a personality in the mold of Donald J. Trump, least of all as the twice-elected president of the United States. Certainly, some profound alterations in the American character had to have occurred between their time and ours for a state of affairs like the present one to become normalized as an essential part, even the dominant part, of the country’s politics.
What the anti-Federalists did see was the problem in the machinery of the Federal government now obvious to all and long evident to discerning critics: empires do not need constitution-bound presidents; they need emperors of the “I am the state” variety. President Trump outshines all his predecessors in the delight that he derives from this role. William Appleman Williams identified Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and every occupant of the White House since NSC-68 as authoritarian presidents in reality and only bound to the Constitution when it suited their purposes. All these earlier presidents knew enough, however, to tamp down their excitement at the levers of power in conformity with the rhetorical norms of republican leadership.
For Patrick Henry it was just a matter of time before a megalomaniac careless of the niceties of power like Trump came along. The police and military force of the national security state, which Henry would not have had any trouble imagining in principle, had been implicit in the system from the beginning, not only by what the Constitution had said in Article II, but by what the document left unsaid about the inevitable corruptions of power. Henry had asked in 1788, “Have we not come through a dangerous war to free ourselves from a king’s tyranny. Why would we risk our freedoms for the assurances of mere words on parchment?” It is a question for today.
Richard Drake holds the Lucile Speer Research Chair in Politics and History at the University of Montana. Among his publications are Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism and The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion.
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