Orwell’s slogans, Asimov’s predictions, and America’s imperial present

It is often said that George Orwell’s aphorism from 1984—“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”—was a mirror held up to the totalitarian Soviet Union. Yet history, with its taste for irony, has turned the mirror around. 

In the decades since the USSR’s collapse, it is the United States that has come to resemble an Orwellian empire—waging wars in the name of peace, orchestrating coups and “color revolutions” to install compliant dictators in the name of freedom, and manufacturing ignorance as if it were the highest civic virtue.

In the Western world, Washington can tolerate democracy, for there it is contained within familiar cultural and ideological boundaries. But in the non-Western world, democracy is tolerated only if it bends to the American will. It is an uncomfortable truth that the U.S. establishment has often looked askance at India precisely because it is a democracy—one that insists on making its own choices. 

By contrast, it has long embraced Pakistan, a theocratic-militaristic state where democracy is an occasional visitor, swiftly ushered out by generals and clerics. American policy has often ensured that Pakistan’s fragile shoots of popular governance are uprooted before they can take hold, leaving the army and the mullahs in unchallenged command.

The contradictions deepen in the realm of trade and sanctions. Under the banner of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed tariffs on India, even as other major economies—China, Japan, and the European Union—continue to import Russian energy with impunity. The rules of the American game, it seems, are written in disappearing ink: visible only to those meant to obey them, vanishing for those meant to escape them.

This dissonance calls to mind not only Orwell but also Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, where a vast Galactic Empire rules the stars with the complacency of those who believe their reign eternal. In Asimov’s tale, the mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the inevitable decline of the empire—not through rebellion, but through the slow corrosion of its own contradictions. The empire falls, not because it is defeated from without, but because it collapses from within.

Both Orwell and Asimov were writing in the 1940s, worlds apart from today’s geopolitics, and neither could have witnessed America’s imperial overreach firsthand. Yet from the vantage point of the third decade of the 21st century, their visions appear eerily prescient. 

Orwell gave us the moral language to name the inversion of values; Asimov gave us the long view of the empire's decay. Together, they seem to be whispering across time that Trump’s America is less the shining city on a hill than the Galactic Empire in its autumn—still grand, still powerful, yet already shadowed by the mathematics of its own decline.

In the end, the fate of all empires is written in the very logic of their ambition. They teach the world that might is right, only to discover, too late, that history has a deeper arithmetic.