Political economists are trained to ask a simple question when confronted with puzzling events: cui bono—who gains? More often than not, that is where the explanation lies. Someone, somewhere stands to gain—or just as often, is keen not to lose—and that someone is applying pressure to make sure their interests are protected. They might do so by blocking regulation, or accelerating it; by pushing for a treaty, or sabotaging its negotiations. But whatever they’re doing, it can usually be explained by material interests.
Yet looking over the geopolitical developments of recent weeks, my usual approach to the world is falling short. The United States has embarked on a series of moves that are diplomatically costly and difficult to justify on strategic or economic grounds. Washington has mobilized adversaries, unsettled allies, and yielded little in the way of concrete gains. Not even the president—so often the answer to the question cui bono—appears to profit in any obvious sense.
So what is going on? One possibility is that political economy is the wrong approach. To make sense of these actions, it may help to ask a different question—one more familiar to students of culture than of markets. Not who gains, but what is being staged. What is driving U.S. behavior seems less a calculation of advantage than the cultivation of a particular look. If concerns over aesthetics, more than rational interest, is driving U.S. behavior, the question becomes: What are those aesthetics, and where did they originate?
For decades, the United States perfected a subtle form of power: It sought the benefits of influence without the imperial optics—military bases without colonies; financial leverage through swap lines rather than formal monetary unions; foreign influence through technocratic institutions rather than annexation. This was hegemony dressed up in a navy blazer rather than imperial garb. Washington could project its might without proclaiming manifest destiny, as it once had. It could control without claiming ownership. What we are witnessing in recent months is a curious reversal: Here we have the trappings of imperialism, without any of the associated benefits.
The rationale for the made-for-TV capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has kept shifting—from concerns about drugs entering the United States to the talk of Washington running Venezuela’s oil fields. Yet as many have pointed out, the United States’ drug crisis is not driven by cocaine, but by fentanyl. And as an energy proposition, Venezuela’s oil is among the world’s least attractive: costly to extract, difficult to refine, and plagued by decades of institutional and political decay. Even ExxonMobil’s leadership has publicly described the country as “uninvestable.” Ditto Greenland. President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that the U.S. “must have” the island to protect its national security ignores the fact that Washington already enjoys enormous leverage there. Under the 1951 U.S.-Denmark defense agreement, the United States maintains extensive military access, operates a major strategic installation at Pituffik Space Base, and could, if it chose, dictate Greenland’s security policy.
So then, cui bono? It’s unclear.
These are moves that appear to be the power grabs of empire. But, so far, they look to have delivered little in the way of the tangible security or economic gains that we would expect. They carry real costs: mobilizing adversaries, unsettling allies, and deepening mistrust. But they lack commensurate gains in security or economic advantage.
Perhaps French theorists from the 1960s might have had better luck in coming up with an explanation. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argued that modern power no longer rules primarily by transforming material conditions, but by staging itself as power—by remaining relentlessly visible. Politics, in this view, becomes less about outcomes than about images: Authority must be seen, replayed, and circulated, even when it achieves little. What matters is not effectiveness, but presence. Debord’s contemporary, Jean Baudrillard, offered an even more unsettling story, where power takes the form of a simulacrum: a sign that no longer refers back to any underlying material reality, but circulates on its own terms. In this sense, U.S. moves may not be failed attempts at old-fashioned empire. They are successful performances of the images of empires past.
Those images came from somewhere. To understand why they retain such force, it helps to recall why imperial strategies once made very good sense for powerful states—and why they no longer do, even if their shadow still shapes political imagination.
For most of modern history, territorial control was the most reliable way to secure strategic advantage. In a world of weak international enforcement, fragmented markets, and rudimentary infrastructure, planting a flag did real work. Establishing a fortified port, a colony, or a resource basin under a state’s sovereignty secured access to trade routes and raw materials, provided defensive depth, and just as importantly, denied rivals the same advantages. Ownership was not symbolism; it was an enforcement mechanism.
If a state possessed the resources to take and hold territory, conquest could therefore be an effective way to achieve geopolitical goals. That logic underpinned imperial expansion across centuries. The British Raj structured the Indian Ocean economy; French possessions in Africa were promised strategic access to the continent; the Dutch expansion into the East Indies anchored a global trading network. In each case, sovereignty over land translated directly into control over flows of goods and capital that could not be achieved otherwise.
In the 21st century, however, outright ownership of land and resources rarely delivers the same payoff. The central features of modern capitalism—multinational firms, integrated global markets, enforceable contracts, and transnational legal regimes—have displaced much of the rationale for territorial control. That even proves true of oil. Once the quintessential imperial prize, it is now extracted by publicly traded multinationals that are owned by dispersed shareholders and priced in global markets. Sovereign ownership does little to increase pricing power.
Interestingly, one way in which territory does still matter is control over the world’s financial plumbing. The global economy may look immaterial, but its infrastructure is stubbornly physical. Data centers occupy physical space; undersea cables make landfall on real coastlines. This has given the U.S. tremendous leverage over other countries—not so much because the United States owns all the assets of the global economy, but because so much infrastructure for that economy passes, routinely and invisibly, through American-controlled choke points.
But that only reinforces the point. This is not empire in the classical sense. No land was seized; no populations were governed; no flags were planted. Leverage arose precisely because the U.S. did not pursue territorial control, but instead presided over institutions, markets, and networks that others found useful to adopt. What matters today is not owning space but getting others to join your networks. The irony is that the one domain where territory still counts is the one that is least compatible with imperial aesthetics: dull data centers in northern Virginia, anonymous clearinghouses in New York, server farms and balance sheets rather than maps and monuments. That power is very real—but it does not look like empire.
What displaced empire was not, at least initially, was a moral awakening. It was an accounting insight. Over the course of the 20th century, powerful states gradually discovered that the objectives once pursued through conquest—secure access to markets, predictable returns on investment, and influence over other countries’ economic policies—could be attained more cheaply, reliably, and with less political friction through institutions rather than claims of outright ownership. Stable courts, arbitration mechanisms, trade agreements, and credible commitments did not merely civilize international politics; they streamlined it. Empire was brutally effective, but as it turns out, it was also ruinously expensive.
Territorial control requires armies, administrators, infrastructure, and constant coercion. It invites resistance, imposes reputational costs, and binds the occupier to the governance of distant populations whose compliance is never voluntary. Institutions, by contrast, allowed powerful states—and the firms based within them—to secure many of the same benefits without the costs of direct rule. Enforceable contracts replaced garrisons. Arbitration substituted for annexation. Access replaced ownership. The result was a transformation in how power worked. States like the United States learned to project dominance through networks rather than maps.
Those old material incentives did not evaporate without leaving a mark. They remain in the imagery of empire, which retains a seductive pull. That’s because image is sticky. It encodes what power is supposed to look like, and that cultural material is transmitted across generations, even as the conditions that once made those gestures effective have changed.
Powerful states did not merely hold territory—they represented themselves holding it in art, architecture, maps, public ceremonies, and official portraiture that fused sovereign identity with territorial domination. Empire was staged as much as it was enforced. From Rome to Britain, imperial powers relied on a shared visual grammar—arches, columns, gilded façades—to present their power as legitimate, inevitable, and timeless.
Empire had centuries to refine its aesthetic canon. Equestrian statues, official portraits, and faces stamped onto coins—these devices personalized sovereignty and made it omnipresent. Ritual, regalia, and choreographed displays complete the spectacle, presenting authority as settled and beyond contestation. The result was a style of rule capable of surviving its own obsolescence, much as the ceremonial life of Europe’s remaining royal families persists long after their political power has vanished.
It’s an odd policy combo: The Trump administration is reviving the look of empire while dismantling the conditions that once made empire unnecessary. On the one hand, it has busily discarded the very institutions—trade rules, legal commitments, and multilateral constraints—that made territorial empire unnecessary by offering cheaper and more efficient means to growth and security. On the other, it is trying to revive the imagery of an older world: ownership, seizure, and territorial possession, moves that correspond to a material reality that no longer exists.
If this diagnosis is right, then the usual responses miss the point. Sanctions, legal rebukes, and economic penalties all presume rational calculations over material gains and losses. They assume that cui bono remains the right question to ask. But when the objective is not advantage but appearance, that question loses its grip.
In that setting, imposing costs might backfire. Punishment becomes part of the performance, supplying additional drama for the spectacle. Defiance turns into a brand; resistance acts as proof of authenticity. By now, complaints of unjust treatment are a familiar move in the populist playbook.
Trump is not alone in being moved by those trappings of an earlier age. Majorities in the U.S. may be against the use of force in Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland. And yet, the imperial styling retains its appeal. The gilding, the military fanfare, the inflated talk of seizure and possession: It does seem that a sizable constituency of the American public reads it as strength. Here’s a politics that looks like power, instead of one that hides behind procedure. Insofar as these are canny aesthetic instincts, Trump is offering an alternative code to the liberal-professional preference for restrained institutional blandness, where competence looks boring. Visual cues can remain seductive even if they are counterproductive as policy. Which is why direct rebuttals can misfire: Denunciation risks supplying the scolding elite that the spectacle is designed to provoke.
If the appeal is aesthetic, then perhaps the response should be framed in the same terms. U.S. commentators and elites still play an outsized role in determining which styles of power are treated as impressive, credible, or embarrassing. Beyond just listing the material costs of Trump’s policies, they need to undercut the optics. Yes, it is important to show that Trump’s version of imperial rule is illegal and geopolitically self-defeating. But it might be just as important to expose it as passé.
