In 2026, regime change has become a leading American export, as Nicolás Maduro and Iran’s leadership can affirm. Cuba could be next and the Trump administration’s threats to Panama and Greenland remain credible.
On the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the US looks very different from the country that then-US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams imagined on 4 July 1821.
“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.”
Adams extolled the foundational principles of that Declaration, not least the idea that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” He encouraged revolutionary leaders elsewhere to throw off their imperial entanglements and assume their own position “among the powers of the earth”—as the US did.
At the time, US intervention was not part of the plan, as the Monroe Doctrine would confirm. But the US relationship with decolonization has long been Janus-faced. National mythology portrays the US as the original nation against empire, one that emerged from a revolt against alleged British tyranny to become a beacon of liberty for oppressed peoples the world over. But a clearer-eyed view of Us history paints a different picture.
In the mid-18th century, land-hungry British colonists yearned to move westward into “Indian country,” with ambitious planters and land speculators like George Washington at their head. They did exactly that. Within a century, the US had repudiated treaties with Indigenous nations and expanded, dispossessing Indigenous people.
The US then went in search of monsters farther abroad, from Hawaii and the Philippines in the late 19th century to Japan, Vietnam and Korea in the 20th century and Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 21st. Now, Central America, West Asia and perhaps even the Arctic are in its sights. The US looks more like the empire that dared not speak its name.
Yet, such adventurism did not necessarily dampen the appeal of the US to those who sought freedom and independence. The Declaration charted a different historical trajectory than the one it pursued.
While the US was gobbling up territory across North America, replacing the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean and Pacific, and intervening around the world, that document inspired imitative movements for self-government from Vermont to Vietnam and from Haiti to Somaliland.
That Declaration of 1776 was the first of its kind. Though it did not have the word ‘independence,’ it concluded with the resounding proclamation that former British colonies were now “Free and Independent States.”
With their Declaration, Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress innovated in two key respects that shaped later freedom movements. First, they expressed independence in the language of statehood, relatively novel at the time. Second, they defined it as interdependence: that is, the ability freely to enter into commercial and diplomatic relations with similar free states.
The Declaration had two sets of rights and promises, one related to individuals—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the right to self-government—and the other to states: the “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Hence, the past 250 years has been a tale of two Declarations, one for domestic consumption and the more statist reading that spread widely abroad.
For more than a decade after 1776, the US remained an isolated case. Great Britain did not formally recognise US freedom until September 1783. Not until 1790, following the French Revolution, did any people outside North America declare their independence, as Flemish rebels against Austrian rule did (taking inspiration from a French translation of the US Declaration).
The subsequent avalanche of similar declarations truly began with Haiti’s on 1 January 1804. This revolution heralded the arrival of the first autonomous republic in the Americas since the US, as well as the emancipation of the enslaved population. It was, and remains, the largest successful slave revolt in world history.
Declarations that trace their lineage to the US original have clustered around the collapse of empires. Each collapse was accompanied by waves of freedom declarations. Most striking of all was Ho Chí Minh’s 1945 Vietnamese one, [which echoed America’s almost literally in outlining rights held to be ‘self-evident’]. The last great wave of such declarations was in 1990-91, when former Soviet republics escaped Moscow’s empire.
Revolutions would surely have occurred had the US never broken from Britain in 1776. But the US Declaration gave later anti-colonial movements inspiration, a template and the language to shape their own aspirations.
Writing in 1944, the great Trinidadian historian and politician Eric Williams acknowledged that, “the emergence of the United States on to the stage [of] the nations of the world was itself only accomplished by an overthrow of the colonial system. The spirit of 1776 is still alive today.” Following Williams, we might say that modern decolonization began in 1776, with declarations of independence among its most conspicuous markers over the centuries.
Moreover, the age of declaring independence is far from over: think of Kosovo in 2008, South Sudan in 2011 or Catalonia in 2017—not to mention the prospect of Scotland or even Taiwan declaring independence at some future date.
As long as there are remnants of empire and the drive for self-determination, the spirit of 1776 will endure. The US, especially its current administration, would do well to remember that the desire for self-government—and an even firmer aversion to external intervention—still animates people around the world. ©2026/Project Syndicate
The author is professor of history, Harvard University, and author of ‘The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.’