The Empire We Don’t Put on Trial
There’s something strange about how the modern world decides what counts as “unforgivable.”
We’re taught to recognize certain historical regimes as the peak of human evil. That judgment is repeated so often it feels like a moral law of nature. But what interests me is not whether those judgments are wrong it’s what happens when we compare them to how we treat other powerful states with far longer records of violence.
Because when you step back from the narratives, you start noticing a pattern.
Violence is not judged equally. It is filtered.
The United States is often presented as a defender of order and stability in the modern world. At the same time, its history contains episodes of mass displacement, industrial warfare, prolonged foreign interventions, and structural systems that produced large scale human suffering.
The removal and destruction of Indigenous societies across North America unfolded over centuries through war, forced relocation, and systemic collapse. Combined with disease and conflict, the scale of death is widely understood by historians to reach into the millions.
Also the transatlantic slave trade forcibly transported an estimated 12.5 million Africans, with many dying during capture, transport, and enslavement conditions.
We see this pattern more clearly especially in the 20th century, the Vietnam War produced an estimated 2 to 3 million deaths, while the Iraq war after 2003 produced over a million in human casualties making it one of the most destructive modern conflicts in terms of human cost.
This does not even include other conflicts where the USA played indirect or supporting roles.
And yet these numbers do not occupy the same symbolic space in global moral memory as other historical atrocities of comparable or smaller scale. They are treated as separate events, spread across time, context, and justification rather than as part of a continuous pattern of state power producing mass human cost.
Even modern forms of coercion have evolved beyond direct warfare.
Economic sanctions, for example, are often described as a non violent tool of diplomacy. In practice, they can reshape entire economies, restrict access to food and medicine, and contribute to severe humanitarian crises. Their impact is massive with It estimates about 564,000 excess deaths per year globally in sanctioned countries according to the lancet .
This is where the real contradiction appears.
If mass civilian suffering is morally unacceptable in war, why is it more tolerable when it is produced indirectly through blockades, economic pressure, or systemic collapse?
From here, the question is unavoidable:
Why does one system become the universal reference point for ultimate historical evil, while others with extensive records of large-scale violence are treated as complex or context-dependent?
The answer is not simple.
Part of it is defeat. History is written most aggressively about those who lose. Part of it is narrative control powerful states are not just actors in history, they are editors of it. And part of it is psychological: societies prefer clear symbols of evil rather than uncomfortable continuums of responsibility.
The United States is not unique in this. It is simply one of the clearest examples of a modern power whose history contains both foundational ideals and repeated episodes of large scale violence, while still maintaining a central position in defining global moral language.
The question is not whether the United States has done good or bad throughout its history .
The question is whether any state should be powerful enough to shape the rules of accountability while remaining largely beyond their reach.
That is the empire we do not put on trial.