Violent Domination: Legacies of the American Empire by Tina Al-khersan

As the United States wages wars abroad in Palestine and Iran, the administration has been waging its own war domestically, manufacturing threats to license violence the state typically reserves for exceptional circumstances. Six months before the United States launched its war on Iran, the Trump administration deployed the National Guard to Washington DC to combat what President Trump categorized as “complete and total lawlessness.” (Faguy, 2025) The administration also directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids as it aggressively pursued its deportation goals (Iorfida, 2026). From the abductions of Palestine-solidarity activists, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk (Khalil, 2025), to the deaths of immigrants and bystanders, including Joan Sebastian Durán and Alex Pretti (Barajas, 2026), the administration has affirmed time and time again that the lives and bodies of those deemed threats – be they immigrants, people of color, or those who resist – are collateral, second to securing and affirming the power of the nation state.

While the United States unleashed the power of the state domestically, the administration also carried out increasingly violent attacks abroad. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched an aerial bombardment in Iran, kickstarting the United State’s latest imperial war. Less than one month later, President Trump openly declared his genocidal intentions when he said, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” statements that have been normalized by the administration’s ongoing genocide in Palestine (Jeavans and Murphy, 2026). Since then, an unspecified number of Iranian civilians have been murdered, with many more civilians killed across the region (Jeavans and Murphy, 2026) . As it was with the Iraq war, the exact count may never be known – countless lives and bodies again collateral, caught in the waves of violence the United States continues to inflict globally.

The war the United States has launched on its own citizens is impossible to extract from the war on Iran. Securitisation follows a cyclical effect: As violent tactics become normalized domestically in the name of national security and legal safeguards fail to protect civilians, the administration tacitly understands that increasingly violent tactics abroad will be celebrated at best and tolerated at worst. For if the state can unleash violence on its own civilians, what then can it do to the “others” deemed less worthy, who do not benefit from the same protections? Within this vicious cycle, the state normalizes violence as a response, and it becomes further emboldened by a lack of accountability on the domestic and global stage, leading to the growing levels of violence the world has witnessed since the Trump administration came into power.

As the United States takes what feels like steps towards a more violent future within and outside of its borders, one must look to the past to fully understand the context its decisions are grounded in today. Specifically, the United States’ actions must be viewed in light of its history as an empire, with empire meaning the “social, political, and economic interconnection among sovereign nations but on fundamentally unequal terms that structurally benefit powerful nations, while structurally disadvantaging and exploiting subordinated nations (Achiume and Bali, 2021).” To maintain the structural inequity that upheld colonizing states’ power and wealth, violence was essential in three ways. Not only was violence used to acquire land and expand the nation’s frontiers, it was leveraged to impose authority over those under their control and then threatened to maintain dominance over subjugated populations (Dwyer and Nettelbeck, 2017). In short, violence imbued every point of a colonizing state’s formation and maintenance.

Dominance was the goal of the American empire then, and dominance remains the United States’ essential goal today. Without explicit colonial power to justify violent dominance, a new framework has had to emerge for nation states to assert their power and maintain a structurally disadvantageous world order. This framework was largely influenced by the September 11th attacks, which Makau Mutua explains became “the pretext for the renewal of a world order centered on…domination” where the United States and other European powers drove forward a “new international-security drive order geared toward the elimination of ‘global terrorism (Mutua, 2002).’” Securitisation thus became the means for which the United States was able to continue to use violence as a tool to maintain power and dominance.

In this world order, those who resist dominance, or those who dissent, will naturally be framed as the state’s biggest threat to achieving dominance, be they in the Global South or domestically within the United States, as they represent an unwillingness to be dominated. This is precisely why President Trump issued an executive order known as NSPM-7 (The White House, 2025) early in his term. In this executive order, the administration labeled “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” or dissenting view points, as “violent and terroristic activities.” Although the United States has a long history of categorizing various groups as disloyal and violent to in turn justify state-sanctioned violence and surveillance, the administration is leveraging the “terrorism” label domestically in unprecedented ways to silence activists who refuse to bend to the will and narrative of the government.

While the American empire unleashes the force of the state on civilians worldwide, those who resist imperial violence force the administration to contend with the possibility of a different world, one in which bodies are not collateral in face of the state’s attempt to assert its dominance. Through organizing and movement building, those who refuse to remain silent continue to expose the fallacies the United States is spreading and the hypocrisy behind certain actions, causing the state to lose popular support, a key tactic as, “Without popular support, processes of securitization lose their legitimacy (Noor & The Polis Project, 2026).” Indeed, the anti-war and ICE protestors and the encampments continue to show us that a world of collective care is possible, one in which the foundation of our society is premised on mutual liberation and a belief that none of us are free until all of us are free, from Iran, to Palestine, to the United States. The challenge before us is thus not proving that a world without violent domination can exist, as those who have come before us and those who continue to organize and dissent have already shown us a better world is possible. Rather, the challenge before us is two-fold: to continue building networks that allow us to withstand state violence so long as it endures and to aggressively pursue the vision of the world we want to create.