Behind the News: The New US Imperialism w/ Nikhil Pal Singh and Greg Grandin

The United States is no longer governed by the liberal, rules-based international order that defined its post-WWII empire. Instead, historian Greg Grandin and Nikhil Pal Singh argue we are witnessing a return to a raw, settler-colonial form of imperialism—one that thrives on domination without hegemony, where military force, mass deportation, and carceral expansion replace the old promises of universalism and shared prosperity. This shift, they contend, is not merely a political spectacle but a structural rupture: the end of the 'frontier' as a political and ideological safety valve that once allowed domestic progress to coexist with foreign violence. With the Cold War order dissolved and globalization exhausted, the U.S. now operates in a state of perpetual crisis, where the ruling class sees the state as a resource to be stripped rather than a public good to be stewarded. The result is a nation that is both hyper-militarized and internally fractured, with no viable path forward except through radical reimagining of solidarity, finitude, and non-exclusionary governance. The real danger isn’t just war abroad—it’s the collapse of the very idea that democracy, equality, or collective well-being are possible within the current system. The conversation reveals that the U.S. empire was never truly universal. Its liberal façade was always sustained by expansion—whether territorial, economic, or ideological.