How Anya Parampil Gets It Wrong on the Decline of the US Empire
Via a border paradigm change, our empire is expanding not declining.
Over the years, analysts have argued that the United States’s empire is in decline; it possibly is even on the verge of collapse. They have various starting points: geopolitics, military capability, culture, morés, population, environment, and others. Among the most recent has been journalist Anya Parampil, an anti-imperialist reporter. Her just-published book, Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire, is a meticulous look at a failed U.S.-backed coup, i.e. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Juan Gaidó who attempted to displace Venezuela’s elected president, Nicolás Maduro. The attempted corporate coup was a spectacular failure.1 Parampil concludes that its failure signals the rise of a new multipolar world which in turn heralds the end of the U.S. empire.
I agree that a new multipolar world seems to be emerging. BRICS, the intergovernmental organization consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates, is evidence of that. However, that does not translate into the decline of the United States’s empire. Far from it. Parampil, like others, does not take into account the highly lucrative U.S. border expansion program which is thriving. Via the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. empire is expanding, not declining. Its expansion is largely unseen by the U.S. public and unexplored by journalists. An exception is journalist Todd Miller whose area of expertise is the U.S. and borders. From his framing to his research to his writing, Miller’s book, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World, is brilliant.2
In the introduction, Miller writes that there has been a “massive paradigm change” when it comes to national borders.3 To illustrate his point, he tells an anecdote. He and Jeff Abbott, a researcher and photojournalist, had gone to a Guatemalan military base in Zacapa, an outpost on Guatemala’s eastern border with Honduras. Miller writes that if you wanted to GO TO the US border from Zacapa, you’d need to travel some 1,440 miles mostly via Mexico’s Gulf Coast highway. However, if you wanted TO SEE the US border, you could just stay put. The U.S. border was already in Zacapa.
Out of the blue, a soldier there asked Miller, “Are you with BORTAC?” He was surprised that a Guatemalan soldier would have even heard of BORTAC—the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit—much less have thought Miller and Abbott might be agents. Logic dictated he must have encountered BORTAC agents in Zacapa.
BORTAC is the U.S.’s globally operating “swat team.” Its mission is to provide training not only in the U.S. but in other countries, too. Its mission statement makes it clear that the purpose of BORTAC is "to respond to terrorist threats of all types anywhere in the world in order to protect our nation's homeland." In other words, its purpose is not to assist other countries’ border objectives; its purpose is to further the U.S.’s border objective. That objective is to “externalize” the U.S. border.
This means, writes Miller, that externalization is not only about the U.S.’s “power and influence but also in actual physical presence.” Let me emphasize his point: the U.S.’s border patrol apparatus has a physical presence well beyond our borders with Canada and Mexico. In Empire of Borders, Miller focuses on its physical presence in Central America, Israel/Palestine, Kenya, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Jordan, Morocco, and Kenya. He notes that BORTAC’s operations are also in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti, Peru, Panama, Belize, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ukraine, Kosovo, Argentina, Honduras, Ecuador, Armenia, Tajikistan, as well as Guatemala. To highlight why we are in these countries, Miller quotes former Department of Homeland Security secretary, John Kelly, “I believe the defense of the Southwest border starts 1,500 miles to the south, with Peru.”
Miller’s chilling but accurate conclusion? He quotes a sentence from the 1,000-page 9/11 Commission Report published in 2003: “The American homeland, after all, [is] the planet.” If that statement and the sentiment behind it don’t point to an expansionist ideology, I don’t know what would.
The new imperialism doesn’t look like the old imperialism which focused on extraction and the imposition of export-oriented economies. The new imperialism is characterized by globally expanding the U.S. border, by the hardening of national borders, and by limiting vast populations’ rights to movement. As Miller observes, “borders are being fortified against the poor and made porous or simply erased for the wealthy and powerful.” This is in the context of widespread displacements of peoples in large part because of climate change but also because of such things as illegal coups d’etat, e.g. Honduras in 2009, the implementation of free trade agreements, e.g. the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, signed in 1993, and wars, e.g. NATO and Russia in Ukraine.
The hardening of borders is advertised as born of a devotion to the principle of “national sovereignty” but, of course, protecting other countries’s national sovereignty is the polar opposite of what is actually going on.
Who benefits? The answer is: the people and agencies meant to benefit. The most obvious is Border Patrol itself. In 1978, BP’s yearly budget in terms of budget, personnel, and geography was $287 million. In 2018, the total was $23 billion and funded such things as expansion into cyberspace. Other beneficiaries are the contractors, e.g. Raytheon Corporation, such private companies as those founded by former DHS higher-ups like Michael Chertoff who sells homeland security consultation around the world, and the vendors at multiple global security expos held around the world.
Among the results of this “paradigm change” is that the U.S. has more than one border. There is the border circling the U.S. proper. But there are now what Miller calls “border sets” making for multiple U. S. borders. There is the U.S./Guatemala-Honduras border set. There is the U.S./Caribbean border set, the U.S./Philippines border set, the U.S./Syria border set, and the U.S./Kenya border set, among others.
Anya Parampil is a fine journalist. But she is wrong in concluding that the U.S. empire is declining. Without question, it is expanding and hardening.
Anya Parampil, Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire, OR Books, 2024.
Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World, Verso, 2019.
I want to emphasize that this article is a summary of Miller’s Empire of Borders, especially the Introduction. I have eliminated endless quotation marks for the sake of readability. The conclusion about Anya Parampil is mine as are a few interjections.
I had NO idea whatsoever about any of this. Thank you for well-researched reporting that I can trust!