Hal Draper’s America as Overlord was first published in the long shadow of Vietnam, at a moment when the contradictions of American imperialism were forcing themselves into view. Its recent republication by Haymarket books, as Donald Trump embarks on his second presidency, raises a pressing question: what happens when the overlord no longer knows how to rule?
The book is a collection of essays written between 1954 and 1969, tracing the contours of U.S. global power in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is, among other things, an indictment of the persistent fiction that the United States merely “polices” the world, intervening reluctantly and with noble intent. Instead, Draper presents America as the stabilising force of global capitalism: a regulator of its allies, an enforcer against social revolution, and, in his most original formulation, the arbiter of the Western bloc. This was not just a question of military supremacy. If American hegemony persisted, it was because, for much of the post-war period, the system needed it to.
“By default, the U.S. became the overlord and arbiter required. It alone had sufficient economic and military muscle.”
Draper’s arbiter framework challenges the conventional left critique of American power, which tends to focus on direct coercion, military interventions, economic sanctions, coups. These were essential tools, but they were also symptoms of a deeper role. The United States, he argued, was not merely imposing its will on an unwilling world but managing the internal contradictions of capitalism itself. After the war, with the European empires weakened and the Soviet Union standing as a competing pole of power, the U.S. stepped into the vacuum, not simply as a dominant state but as the organiser of a new world system.
Vietnam
For Draper, the Vietnam War marked an inflection point in that system’s decay. A war that could not be won, against an enemy that barely posed an immediate threat to U.S. capital, revealed the limits of America’s capacity to enforce its rule. “Its ability to defend capitalism and its dependents from social revolution was being called into question,” he writes, making clear that Vietnam was not simply a Cold War battlefield but a crisis for the structure of global imperialism itself.
Draper does not see the war as a blunder or a tragic mistake but as a structural necessity for a system under strain. As the tide of anti-colonial movements surged through the 1950s and 60s, Washington found itself locked into an increasingly costly role. It had to prop up faltering client states in the name of stability, even when doing so risked embroiling it in unwinnable wars. Vietnam was not an aberration but a logical consequence of the U.S.’s role as enforcer:
“The most brutal and characteristic acts of American aggression in this period were in defense of the common interests of the ‘free world’… The protracted, politically and economically exhausting war in Vietnam cannot be explained by any immediate U.S. interest.”
This has obvious implications for today. The United States no longer fights large-scale ground wars in the same way, but the underlying logic remains. The Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine, cutting military aid and intelligence support while making overtures to Putin, follows a different script, one that suggests not continuity but rupture. The attempt to maintain Western bloc coherence under Biden has given way to something more erratic, more obviously shaped by factional interests within the Republican Party, more willing to question America’s role as the arbiter of capitalism. Where past administrations sought at least the appearance of upholding international norms, Trump’s second term is making it clear that his presidency is, above all else, an exercise in transactionalism.
Deals
What follows in Draper’s book is an anti-imperialist history without illusions, written at a time when the left had not yet fully abandoned the notion that its struggle must be internationalist. Draper moves across the geography of American aggression with a precise and unsentimental eye: the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, the bulldozers of Okinawa, the repression of the Cuban Revolution, and, always, the periphery’s growing resistance.
He is at his sharpest in his discussion of Yalta, where he dismantles the Cold War mythologies surrounding the famous conference. The liberal fantasy of Yalta is that it was a tragic moment of misplaced trust, that Roosevelt, naïve and ill, was deceived by Stalin, who promptly betrayed his commitments to democracy in Eastern Europe. The right-wing version of this same story, given new life in McCarthyite paranoia, is that Yalta was an outright act of treason, a sellout of America’s rightful global position to Soviet expansionism. Draper dismisses both interpretations:
“There were no personal devils around the Yalta table—also no heroes, no saints, no knights, and no men of honor. There were only three earthy imperialists, who, temporarily united for a military victory against the Axis, knew that the agenda read: Who will get what?”
This ruthless imperial calculus, he shows, was not limited to Yalta. It has structured every era of U.S. power since. But today’s imperial realignments do not map neatly onto the patterns of the past. The old Cold War rivalries are not simply gone; they have been rearranged, their ideological frames abandoned in favour of rawer assertions of interest. Under Trump, support for Israel has shifted from the rhetoric of diplomatic necessity to something closer to an ideological litmus test for the Republican/religious right. His position on Russia, too, is not one of old-fashioned great-power bargaining but of personal alignment with Putin’s authoritarian nationalism. Where previous administrations sought to manage contradictions in the global system, Trump’s is more openly embracing them.
Chaos
But what happens when the imperial centre loses its coherence? President Trump’s second term has made this a pressing question, as the United States swings wildly between transactional isolationism and military escalation. Trump may speak the language of withdrawal, but his administration has deepened American support for Israeli apartheid while simultaneously undercutting long-standing commitments to NATO. The illusion of a break from imperial policy is sustained by the haphazard nature of his rule, this time against the backdrop of a U.S. military budget that has swelled to Cold War levels. The line between order and chaos is thinner than it appears.
Trump’s erratic approach to foreign policy, alternately aggressive and indifferent, exposes a deeper contradiction in America’s global role. Draper argued that the United States did not dictate terms to its allies purely through military force, but through its ability to manage the system as a whole. If Trump’s presidency represents anything, it is a loss of that managerial capacity. He governs by instinct, grievance, and transaction. If this term destabilises NATO, provokes conflicts with China, and inflames the Middle East, these contradictions may push the system further toward disarray.
Left
Draper was always a socialist of the “third camp”neither Washington nor Moscow, insisting on a revolutionary alternative to American empire without collapsing into uncritical support for its rivals. In today’s world, that position is harder to maintain. If much of the left has slipped into “campism,” cheering on any state that opposes the U.S., it is in part because a genuinely internationalist politics has failed to take root.
I have argued elsewhere that the resurgent campist left, whether rallying behind China, Russia, or lesser geopolitical challengers to U.S. hegemony, repeats the mistakes Draper warned against. In America as Overlord, he cautioned against mistaking a rival imperial force for a liberatory alternative:
“If the U.S. was the regulator of world capitalism then who regulated the U.S. itself?”
The logic still holds. If America’s global role continues to unravel, it is not enough to celebrate its decline, something must be ready to replace it. Without a socialist alternative, the world risks not the end of imperialism but its mutation into new forms. Draper’s lessons remain urgent. The left cannot afford to retreat into nostalgia for a past that never existed, nor into a politics of passive opposition. As the imperial order shifts, what matters is not just resistance but what comes after.
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