The beginnings: The United States was born in 1776 looking toward the Atlantic, as if one still did not dare to let go of Europe, yet already dreamed of a different future. It all started 250 years ago, in the hands of thirteen colonies raised by Protestant souls and minds, conservative, persecuted by an England that imposed taxes and dogmas, so high in some ways and so strict in others. In their lands of origin — first in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, and later in England — Protestants were harassed and persecuted, and for that very reason they set sail across the sea in search of a place where they could proclaim themselves free. Yes, freedom: a concept so American, but which today already begins to sound like utopia.
In the beginning, England, of course, did not recognize them as independent, as sovereign. It taxed them to the core, as empires tended to do. Faced with that situation, the new Americans, fed up, like all the oppressed, rebelled and, by force, decided to become independent. George Washington, with his solemn gesture, became the symbol of that emancipation, of a country that thought itself different, that felt new, that believed itself free. But freedom, as often happens, was more a promise than a reality: behind those proclamations as romantic as they were utopian, there were slaves and marginalization, there were broken dreams, there was looting and abuse, and there was, above all, a modern territory expanding at the expense of the usual poor.
“The country that had been born fleeing a tyrant began to show the world that it could be one too”
And then came the first civil war: its first cracked mirror. It happened between 1861 and 1865. It was an era in which, both in Europe and in the new American republics, the new States were built on blood and ashes. And the United States was no exception. The war pitted the slaveholding South, attached to its economy of chains and lashes, against the liberal North, more European than American, which, under Abraham Lincoln, tried to reconcile the idea of freedom by abolishing the praxis of keeping millions of men and women reduced to mere merchandise. Not long after, Lincoln ended up leading a union that could only sustain itself and defend itself through blood. And thus, the country that had been born fleeing a tyrant began to show the world that it could become one too.
And that, also called the Civil War, ended with the triumph of the North. At least, that was the official version. The Confederate states of the South surrendered four years after the first shot was fired, but under the resentment of that defeat, they forged an identity that, to this day, is hardly renounced.
Then came territorial expansion. The United States took over
“The social fracture felt in the urban belts of many cities, social resentment, or socioeconomic differences had its seed in that convulsive nineteenth century”
It is worth noting that many of today’s unresolved wounds, that social rift felt in the belts of urban life in many cities, social resentment or socioeconomic differences, had its seed in that convulsive nineteenth century. In addition to what was stated above, which of those fractures, never closed, have endured?
From “Sleeping Giant” to a hegemonic power
Then came the twentieth century and, much like Argentina or Mexico, the United States fed off the great migratory waves from Europe. And that changed everything forever. As the interior and the West filled with gold-seekers, dream-chasers, the Atlantic coastal cities filled with Europeans fleeing famine and the desolation that prevailed in the Old World. Little by little—or rather, gradually—the country became a sleeping giant that woke up—or was awakened—after the two world wars: first, tentatively, with the First World War; then, with the Second. It then rose as the center of the geopolitical map. The rest of the world remained far more traditional, for a country that was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan.
Since then, the United States has proclaimed itself the guarantor of democracy and freedom across the planet. Repeated endlessly, defended on rivers of blood and ashes from others, those words have worn thin. The Cold War became its stage of legitimation: a world divided into two blocs. Washington positioned itself as the guardian of an order said to protect, but it profited by turning its military-industrial and production—and consumption—machinery in mass.
“The American paradox is more evident than ever. The country that was born fleeing a tyrant has become, in plain sight, the global tyrant”
And today? At 250 years since the Declaration of Independence of those thirteen colonies, on the other side of the Atlantic, the American paradox is more evident than ever. The country that fled tyranny has become, to all appearances, the global tyrant. Yet, the word freedom still carries the halo of names that elevated it far beyond North American borders: Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, among others. In other words, people who faced the statu quo to show the world that this was a land where not only Euro-descendant elites dictated the rules.
Delving into a comprehensive analysis of the United States in the twentieth century would deserve an independent piece. During the forty-four years of the Cold War, the United States put the first man on the Moon, became the first country to televise the horrors of war —during the Vietnam War—, consolidated itself as the global center of hyper-consumption and hyper-production and became the new epicenter of the world’s export-driven culture. In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it undeniably became the “policeman” and guarantor of two concepts it had appropriated and that have served to justify its interests anywhere in the world: freedom and democracy.
In short, the United States showcased two faces during the last century: the first, that of the sleeping giant growing by leaps and bounds; the second, that of the guardian of global security and the new power of cultural colonization.
The turbulent twenty-first century: Afghanistan, Iraq and Trump
The United States entered the twenty-first century with a clumsy, almost adolescent gesture: it believed that, thanks to its economic and military might, it could impose its will by muscle power. And it paid dearly: only a few months after the new millennium began, the Twin Towers fell in an unprecedented terrorist attack on American soil and, with them, much of the illusion about the country’s invulnerability also collapsed.
The 9/11 attacks, that tragedy on September 11, 2001, not only redrew the geopolitical map, but also reconfigured relations among States, pushing Europe toward a protectionist stance that seemed an oasis, a refuge in the face of global chaos. George W. Bush, with his war in Iraq, personified the swagger that dimmed all legitimacy and placed the United States in a position that was increasingly unpopular around much of the world.
The paradox is that, while that country presented itself as the guarantor of freedom, its foreign policy seemed more a manual of imposition and conquest than a code of democracy. Afghanistan, Iraq: names that became synonymous with occupation, unfulfilled promises, exorbitant costs, global arbitrary actions and devastating abuses. Indeed, paradoxically, while Saddam Hussein was captured under Bush Jr. and Osama bin Laden was killed years later under Obama, the United States appeared more and more, in the eyes of the global public, as an inexorable hitman acting in the name of democracy and freedom.
“While that country presented itself as the guarantor of freedom, its foreign policy seemed more a manual of imposition and conquest than a code of democracy”
During the Obama era, the waters calmed a little, for the international financial crisis of that time touched everything, rotting all it touched. The first African American president of the United States was elected amid the global economic collapse that recalled 1929. Those were difficult years, but, sooner or later, the recovery arrived.
Later, in 2016, Trump arrived at the White House and opened the path for global populism to seize power wherever it could. His first term was not entirely radical, but his return to government has changed the course of politics, diplomacy and international relations as perhaps anyone had done in recent history.
The war with Iran —the one of those hundred days, which began early this year, just after the Epstein papers scandal surfaced, and which exposed secret accords between Washington and Tel Aviv— cost the United States more than 40,000 million dollars in military expenditure and, to its taxpayers and consumers, at least 132,000 million dollars. Those are exorbitant figures, especially when one talks about a war vanity, a secret commitment to an ally, but that was only the first bill; the tougher costs to pay are the policy and social ones.
At the same time, Trump, the grotesque epilogue of the swaggering narrative, has established his ties on the global map through tariff and military threats, as he has done with Venezuela, and, as everything indicates, will do with Cuba. No one has ended up dismantling the idea that the United States was, without question, the champion of democracy, of people’s free self-determination, of liberties, as much as he has. His authoritarianism and pedantry, his lapses of pathological narcissism, have turned him into a solitary predator who is only managing to isolate himself from the world. His alliance with Israel, far from consolidating a united front, has opened internal cracks in the MAGA movement and left significant fissures within the Republican Party.
“Democracy, that word invoked so many times, has become an empty decor: a ritual that cloaks inequality and fury”
And what about the social realm? The United States has ceased to be seen as that idyllic land that embodied the American Dream. Today, thanks to the effects of Trump’s politics, American families live in a piercing crisis due to housing costs, the rise in the price of staple goods, and general runaway inflation. Today, the belts of misery are increasingly visible. Democracy, that repeatedly invoked word, has become a hollow ritual: a display that masks inequality and anger. Trump, of course, did not invent or create this fracture, but he has deepened it with his confrontational style, his tariff whims and his insistence on dividing to govern.
We are talking about a country that looks in the mirror and discovers that the freedom it proclaims looks more like a caricature than the immaculate and moral example it wishes to present to the world. And so, the twenty-first-century United States appears as a tale of paradoxes, something akin to the stories of the British writer Roald Dahl, where the impossible, the most far-fetched, seems to be the norm.
“The United States, which was once the center, today resembles more a satellite orbiting around itself”
Finally, in 2026, we speak of a giant that, after waking from dormancy, rose and dominated the world for more than half a century, but today resembles more of an isolated giant, distrustful, locked in its own contradictions. The initial swagger of the second Trump Administration is turning into a pathology worthy of terminal narcissism. And, in all this process, the world is learning to live without that guarantor of freedom, to build other blocs, other bridges, other paths, other defenses. The United States, which once was the center, today resembles more a satellite that orbits around itself. It is, in other words, the irony of a country that was born fleeing oppression and that has now become the dictator who imposes, with bombs and tariffs, how the rest of the world should function.
