In this, its semiquincentennial year, let’s give America its due. By the turn of the 20th century, it was a leading industrial power and achieved global primacy after the two world wars. It built the post-1945global governance system—the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which became the World Trade Organization)—that helped prevent a third world war and advanced decolonization across Africa and Asia.
Despite representing only 4% of the global population, the US leads much of the world’s technological innovation and has been generous in supporting UN-led humanitarian causes. America’s ‘soft power’ is further evidence of the country’s dynamism, producing music, movies, literature, sports, food and more that the world has embraced. One could easily argue that the US has done more than any other country to shape the world we inhabit.
But, across much of the Global South, recent celebrations have served as bitter reminders of how the US has often failed to live up to its lofty founding principles.
The Declaration of Independence may proclaim that “all men are created equal,” but the many sins committed by the US since then make it hard not to view this promise with a cynical eye. America’s two great ‘original sins’ were genocide and slavery.
An estimated 15 million Native American people inhabited North America in 1492. By 1900, fewer than 300,000 remained. The annihilation of the continent’s indigenous population mostly occurred after 1776, with the bloody expansion westward in the name of ‘Manifest Destiny.’
The US stole land from the Sioux, Cherokee, Creek and other nations, and starved and spread disease among them. After finally being granted citizenship in 1924, Native Americans were shunted to desolate, impoverished reservations.
Moreover, the US was built on African slavery, weaving a virulent form of racism into its social fabric. Five of the first seven presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slave owners.
Even US President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, sought federal funds to repatriate African Americans to other countries; as he told a delegation visiting the White House in 1862: “Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence…. If this is admitted, it affords a reason... why we should be separated.”
To be sure, Lincoln denounced the US Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that African-American men were not citizens and that the Fifth Amendment protected the rights of slave owners because the enslaved were property. But support for slavery was difficult to dislodge because it was the foundational institution of US capitalism. By 1860, cotton exports produced on slave plantations accounted for nearly 60% of US exports.
Perhaps it was African-Americans who mostly taught the country how to live up to its 1776 ideals. Following centuries of revolts, about 500,000 slaves risked their lives to escape southern plantations to the north during the Civil War (1861–65). An estimated 179,000 African-American men joined the Union army to fight for their liberation and around 40,000 died. African-American women also contributed to the war effort. Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery in 1849, led an all-African-American battalion to liberate over 700 slaves in South Carolina.
Even after Civil War, it would take another century for African-Americans to win their basic legal rights. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King Jr and others, resulted in the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, although structural inequalities remain.
The idea that some groups are entitled to the land and labour of others has also underpinned US imperialism. Its 1846-48 war against Mexico resulted in the latter ceding 55% of its territory, including California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, as well as most of Arizona and Colorado.
This expansionist project grew to include ‘gunboat diplomacy’, with the US seizing Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and Puerto Rico, and occupying Cuba, the Philippines, Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The dark underbelly of 20th-century Pax Americana was that the US backed often vicious military caudillos across Latin America. In 1953, the CIA helped topple Iran’s elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh.
The US exposed its imperial hubris after the 9/11 attacks by waging war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the immense resources committed to these wars, the world’s largest military power failed to achieve its goals.
President Donald Trump now seems hell-bent on destroying the aid system and the multilateral institutions that underpinned US global leadership and soft power, while his actions at home have left the country more divided than ever. One consolation is that his nativist measures are doomed to fail: America’s non-Hispanic Caucasian population is projected to fall from 199 million in 2020 to 179 million by 2060.
America’s motto, e pluribus unum (‘out of many, one’), is being tested. It offers a glimmer of hope that gaps between its noble ideals and uglier realities can be bridged. ©2026/Project Syndicate
The author is a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.