By Alex S.
October 9, 2026
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with living in a small nation on the peripheral map of the American Empire.
Living in Serbia, or any of the smaller sovereign nations scattered across Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Pacific, foreign policy isn't an abstract debate held in air-conditioned Washington think tanks. It's an everyday survival tactic-watching a global leviathan sway back and forth, holding your breath, and praying it doesn't step on your roof.
For decades, libertarians and old-school anti-interventionists warned what would happen when the U.S. government completely detached itself from constitutional limits. When a state accumulates endless wealth through central bank inflation and backing from a bloated military-industrial complex, it loses the capacity to mind its own business. War and coercion become its chief export.
Small countries learn this lesson fast. They discover that "national sovereignty" is a fiction reserved for power blocs, while everyone else gets a set of diktats from the U.S. State Department or USAID.
Enter Donald Trump.
For a brief, fleeting moment, some naive observers in smaller capitals thought Trump's "America First" rhetoric signaled a retreat from global bullying. They thought, Finally, Washington will stop lecturing us on how to run our internal affairs.
What they got instead was unpredictable chaos-imperialism turned erratic.
Under traditional neoconservative rule, imperial overreach was wrapped in polite, bureaucratized language about "promoting democracy" and "rules-based international order." It was aggressive, but predictable. Under Trump's brand of politics, foreign policy turned into a theatrical reality show driven by whims, sudden tariff threats, and late-night social media rants.
One week, a small country is praised for agreeing to some arbitrary diplomatic trade photo-op; the next week, it is threatened with economic strangulation because its leadership didn't fall in line fast enough on energy corridors or telecommunications contracts.
It laid bare the core reality of the American garrison state: whether the occupant of the White House wears the mask of a polished globalist or a bombastic nationalist, the underlying machinery of empire remains the same. Washington still views small nations not as independent societies populated by individuals seeking peaceful commerce, but as trade chips, military outposts, or mere collateral damage.
When Donald Trump threatens to slap arbitrary tariffs on small trading partners or muses about seizing foreign resources, it isn't an aberration from foreign policy history. It is simply the raw, unpolished logic of the warfare state stripped of its diplomatic manners.
The tragedy for the small nation is that it cannot opt out. It is bound to a global monetary system anchored by the Federal Reserve and a trade network policed by the Pentagon. When Washington inflates its currency to fund its endless budget deficits, small foreign economies suffer the resulting inflation. When Washington decides to play grand geopolitical chess with rival superpowers, small states become the chessboard.
True peace and non-intervention are impossible under a leviathan state. As long as power remains concentrated in the Potomac, small nations will continue to face a tragic dilemma: bow to the bureaucratic empire, or brace for the unpredictable whims of its commanders.
The remedy isn't replacing one imperial ruler with another. The only genuine alternative remains what classic anti-interventionists have argued for generations-the complete dismantling of the interventionist state, a return to non-alignment, and free trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
This video below features Lew Rockwell, the founder and editor of LewRockwell.com, delivering a talk on how American imperialism directly undermines liberty and foreign peace, providing foundational context for the arguments made in the article
Lew Rockwell discusses how imperialism is anathema to Freedom and Liberty