Episode 49- America At 250, Part 1

America is turning 250, and the timing could not be more intense. While celebrations ramp up, the world is broiling under record heat waves, conflict flashpoints keep multiplying, and the AI revolution is accelerating faster than our politics can absorb. So we step back and ask the bigger question: is this anniversary a global crisis moment, or a real opportunity to reset what democracy is supposed to deliver?

Henry R. Greenfield walks through the last 250 years with a deliberately global perspective, starting with the uncomfortable basics of the U.S. founding: property power, slavery, and a Constitution that hard-coded compromises like the three-fifths clause and long-running distortions like the Electoral College. We connect those early design choices to today’s fights over rights, courts, and who gets to “write the rules,” then widen the lens to immigration policy, the myth and violence of manifest destiny, and the environmental price of turning a continent into an engine of growth.

From there, the story pivots to the true accelerants of American power: World War I and World War II, industrial dominance, and the postwar choice to shape a new order through tools like the Marshall Plan and global human rights norms. We end on the 1990s unipolar high when “the end of history” sounded believable amid the early internet, GPS, and dot-com optimism and then we land on the question that sets up Part 2: what could possibly go wrong?

If you care about U.S. history, geopolitics, climate change, democracy, and the future of global order, listen now, then subscribe, share the show, and leave a review so more people can find these conversations.

Transcript

Welcome And Global Lens

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Welcome to the Greenfield Report with Henry R. Greenfield, your gateway to understanding today's geopolitical landscape. With 50 years of experience across 10 countries, Henry shares expert insights on world affairs, offering practical solutions, and engaging guest perspectives. Dive into the Greenfield Report for lively discussions on the issues that matter.

Series Setup America At 250

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Welcome to the Greenfield Report's special two-part series. America at 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Is it a global crisis or an opportunity for the future? Followers of the Greenfield Report know that we specialize in a global, not just a U.S. perspective. While the U.S. remains the most powerful country in the world, under the so-called leadership of Donald J. Trump, the United States has taken several giant steps backwards, sideways, and rarely forward in recent years. While the world has looked on with a mixture of delight, horror, shock, the superlatives and criticism has been nonstop. In this two-part series, we will begin by exploring the last 250 years. Yes, a very big task. Move it quickly to the present in its crisis mode where it seems to be have rested every moment since Trump came down the famous escalator in 2015 and announced his candidacy for president. We will spend some time on the changes that he has brought, and in the second episode, number fifty, if you are counting in the Greenfield Report, we will look at the future. The future for the United States and for the democratic countries in the

Heat Waves Hotspots And AI Fears

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world. The future in climate change, as much as the world at this very moment sits broiling in a series of heat waves, ranging from the entire continent of Europe under the infamous heat dome, plus experiencing the highest temperatures on record, going on now two weeks, to the United States, which is also going into a heat wave just as the 4th of July, 250 years celebrations kick in. Of course, Europe and the United States are not the world. There are other exciting hotspots, ranging from Iran and the war with the United States and Israel, to South Africa, which has joined the party on kicking out immigrants by threatening them with death. Yes, the removalist and anti-immigrationists in South Africa have come in the middle of the night, according to the Malawi immigrants saying leave or face death. Then there are the natural disasters on top of human disasters, including poor Venezuela, where nothing seems to have gone right for this resource, rich nation for many, many years. There is then the AI revolution to consider and its global implications and the variety of solutions to protect humans, including what the New York Times touts as an innovative solution in China. Or is it really innovative or just another patch to keep the masses from revolting, as it seems almost inevitable around the world, as the fears surrounding AI and its megabillionaires is far more pressing than anyone would have imagined if you were watching the run-up by the magnificent Tech 7 on the United States stock market indices of the New York Stock Exchange, the always volatile NASDAQ, and the SP 500, which is where I live with my safe or perhaps not so safe ETFs. Yes, it is an acronym world of ATI ETFs, and of course, as the Americans lead in this category, as usual, the now overnight formidable presence of the DSA or the Democratic Socialists of America. Yes, dear listeners, they are winning, albeit in deep blue districts and targeting mostly progressives, but there is no denying their presence. Led by young elite women in particular, with degrees in law and sociology and all of those disciplines that you thought were dying, the DSA has plans for you, which strangely seem to mimic and have been copied from, oh my god, the rest of the democratic world. So let's get started.

Founding Myths And Constitutional Fault Lines

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In the beginning, that is what the MAGAs would like to start with, and as an approach to the US founding, in the beginning, the Lord made the United States, and it was Christian, and it better be that forever. The Lord, of course, did not create the United States. It was created by white male property owners, mostly Protestant, most of whom owned slaves. They fought a war with lofty sentiments on we the people will form a more perfect union. They put e plurbis unum on the currency, out of many one, to show the world that the American experiment would be like no other. Those property owners put even in property clause or two in the Constitution, including the infamous three-fifths clause for every slave owned in the United States would be counted in the census to give the slave states more say and more representatives and more support from the nascent federal government. But it also provided a path for the growth of the Republic. Not a democracy, yes we know, a republic. A republic with built-in provisions so that there would be no tyranny of the majority. The bottom line, the Electoral College, another twist that would combine with gerrymandering, would give rural and southern states outsized influence to this very day. A constitution was written that was revolutionary in its time, but creaky and out of date almost instantly. A document that has required amending 28 times to end slavery, for instance, to provide for human rights, birthright citizenships just barely upheld by the now infamous far right Supreme Court under Trump just yesterday. Of course, it literally began with the Bill of Rights, ten core principles ranging from freedom of the press to the right to bear arms, expanded, of course, by that right wing court to include just about any kind of arms, even though it pertained and said directly to a well-trained militia. Such is the U.S. Constitution. Whoever is in charge gets to write the rules, and never more so than today in the year 2026. Eventually women got the right to vote, but that was not until the 20th century, 1920, to be exact. Along the way there were every type of huckster known to man, trying to bring in millions and millions of immigrants, definitely siding with white immigrants from Europe. France even gave the United States a statue, the Statue of Liberty, where it is inscribed to give us your poor, your huddle masses yearning to be free. That door was open to Europeans, but shut to Chinese, for instance, with draconian laws to limit Asian immigration for decades. The entire immigration exercise was shut in 1925 and not reopened until 1965 by Lyndon Johnson to just about everyone, and the United States became insular after participating in its great coming out party in World War I, where afterwards it began to rule the world. As we reported, in the end of Europe's American century in the early days of Trump 2.0 in the Greenfield Report,

Immigration And Manifest Destiny’s Dark Cost

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the United States from its beginning to 2020 seemed on an inexorable path of glory. In World War II, it was the arsenal of democracy, it created the Lenleys program, then in post-World War II it was the Marshall Plan. The matchup and beating communism, which with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in the following years, the end of the Soviet Union, it led Fukiyama to declare the end of history. But history never ends. Nothing ever ends. As in Europe, where age old rivalries led to two ruinous wars ending the imperial empires of the Europeans, where they had ruled the world and the greatest of all, the British Empire, were a woman sitting in London, the Queen of England, was simultaneously the Empress of India, and was at least nominally the most powerful person in the history of the world. That is, of course, until Donald J. Trump declared himself that role just recently. Dictators, kings, queens have come and gone in America's 250 years. Slavery was ended in the U.S. most bloody war, the Civil War, where over 600,000 people lay dead and dying in four years of a continental and somewhat pre-world war. In some ways, this was fitting, as the United States was part of that European tradition of global wars, participating, in fact, and coming out of what the Americans called the French and Indian War, which was a subset of the Seven Years Global War between France and England. Yes, always the English, the world's greatest warriors for centuries, and they have passed that tradition on to the U.S., along with common law and common sense by an expat named Thomas Paine, setting the stage for the new republic to have its very own special values. As we have noted in our mini history, it was the cries of manifest destiny, or go west, young man, go west, fill up that continent with people, drive back the Native Americans, and if necessary, heap genocide upon them along with smallpox laden blankets, as they had to be eliminated, as they were simply in the way of what was known as progress. Just like the bison, or as they call it, the American buffalo, they were eliminated in thirty short years, over a billion of them shot just to get them out of the way. Just like in my state of Michigan, it was literally clear-cut from the bottom to the top. All of the soaring native pine trees cut for whatever was needed. Furniture, houses, to the point where essays had been written on man's only progress for thousands of years, dating back to the Cypress of Lebanon, had been based on simply cutting trees and making ships, forts, bows and arrows, and implements. Until that is the Industrial Revolution. In the United States was way behind the British, who else, of course, and the French, and in a short period, however, they leapfrogged them all. But they were helped by stupid, useless, genocidal wars, which the Europeans seem to have specialized in, along with taking their languages and civilizations around the world. To this day, look around you, and what language do you speak and why? English, of course, is a legacy of the British and now American empires, or maybe it is French, in Africa in particular, in dotted places around the world. And of course there is Spanish, one of the real growth languages everywhere, especially in the United States. All compliments of empire builders. But what of America? Was it really all inevitable? Did the Constitution really give it enough of an impetus in laws so that a country as powerful as the United States is today, or was until 2024, could actually be built? No. The answer is a resounding no. It had to be helped. But if you listen to anything in this Greenfield report, it is something I learned firsthand in the United States and also in Australia. It is the value of owning your own continent. It is a big deal, trust me. You get to control the resources, and in the case of the United States, a fertile land that pretty much you can grow anything anywhere, even in the desert, due to canals and aqueducts and dams and all sorts of projects to move water around. Precious water, squandered, ancient water, but it matters not in America. It was there to exploit and exploit it, we shall, and exploit it, we did. So the United States grew. It wiped out its native inhabitants and replaced them with black slaves and then European peasants. Similarly, in South America, which not enough people follow that history, the conquistadors wiped out the native peoples, and they too were replaced by, of all things, Italians in particular, but also Germans and even Japanese in places like Peru, and of course the Spaniards themselves. The Spaniards and their descendants, grabbing all of the resources from the indigenous in places as remote as the Philippines, paved the way for all Europeans. How crazy did it get in these imperial times and even United States history as it pretended to be perfect and holy and exceptional. My favorite is the King Leopold of Belgium. He actually personally owned what is today the Congo, which is around 77 times the size of Belgium, a country that many say is not even a country, rather one created by the cast-offs of the Netherlands and the French. Yes, Euro imperialism was out of control as pre-World War I, one guy, one man, owned his very own massive personal country. Such was the imperial age, and who knows how long it would have lasted if it was not for the first, then the second ruinous world war, that the Europeans, then with some help from the Japanese imperialists, boy, those imperialist dreams seem to have come with a human species. Hey China, hey India, hey Persia, hey Ottoman Empire that threatened Europe for 1300 years, yes, you all get it. Not to mention the empires of Central and South America and the marauding Maoris, who literally ate their rivals and now claim indigenous status. Why not? Arriving only shortly before the other imperialist British in New Zealand. But we digress.

World Wars Make A Superpower

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What led the United States to the top of the heap? Were World War I and World War II. Without it there would be no US dollar as a global currency. There would still be a British pound, a French franc, and a Spanish pesos to run the world. The United States' rise to the top was meteoric, and like all rises in the history of humanity such as this, it was precipitated by the stupidity and arrogance of the reigning hegemonists at the time. Overextended, overspent, out of control, and no money. And there are great books such as Jared Diamond's Collapse, where he details how empires have collapsed and made his predictions for the world's current empire, the United States, to befall the same self-imposed fate in the coming decades. As the United States rose and the rest fell behind, as the United States capitalized on its abundant continent, as the United States property owners ditched their slaves for human capital from Europe, especially those lovely starving Irish in the 1840s and beyond, and later the Central Europeans, and always, always, always the Italians. You wonder whatever happened to that demographically stretched country today, where there are tens of millions of Italians, not just in the United States, but of course in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, all over South America, and as far away as Australia, which we absolutely thank you for coming and teaching us how to make coffee. Oh yeah, we love those guys as they created a coffee culture away from that brown British water that was somehow an afterthought from tea time, yet another British legacy. The U.S. rose and rose and rose. And at the end of World War II, there it was, with over 90% of the world's intact industrial capacity. It could do whatever the hell it wanted, as Trump would say. Should it control the world? Should it become yet another empire? How about keeping segregation and keeping those black folks down and scared to be lynched? Should the US companies now, without government contracts to fill their coffers, should they just go in and set up and take all the resources like the Brits, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, and even little Belgium and Portugal had done. Why not? Why not just take over?

The Postwar Choice Against Empire

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And there, dear listeners, is where the story takes a turn that was totally unexpected, and one which the entire world holds an incredible debt to the greatest generation of the United States. The US decided it would not be an imperial power. Sure, they would initially take advantage and sell everything that everyone needed, as no one was making anything. But more importantly, the US, first under Wilson, yes, the League of Nations, ended the empires in Europe, such as the German and Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, though the Soviet Empire rose even larger in its wake. The US changed, or let's say, applied its principles, its values, to the world, if not always to its own people, such as the blacks who suffered under the racist Woodrow Wilson, who talked about freedom for the people of Europe in particular, but not the under segregation and the oppression of black people in the United States. That spark in Europe led to new countries. Peoples had their own country, some for the first time in centuries, like the Poles, whose country had disappeared literally under the German and Russian empires. Others in the Balkans countries were slapped together, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, while the losers, especially Hungary, were completely dismantled. Empires disappeared overnight, as the Ottomans, really the Turks, were finally thrown out not just of Europe, but also of the Middle East, North Africa, and became their own democracy, under the amazing visionary Kamal Ataturk. The Euro Empires, however, carried on until the end of World War II, and even then, after the Americans rescued them, attempted to reassert their authority, but the American values of exceptionalism came forth and said a resoundingly no. There will be freedom everywhere in the world. The empires will be dismantled, so there would be the sole exception, unfortunately, of the Soviet Empire, though even it was to be short-lived. There were proclamations such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was proclaimed by Eleanor Roosevelt and passed by the United Nations. For American values, up to the proclamation of the end of history was just that, triumphant over the world.

The 1990s Peak And Blind Spots

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You can imagine in 1989 and later when the Soviet Union disappeared, under what a glorious moment, what an amazing century the 20th century had been. It began for the US as an upcoming country, with, let us say, potential, but no real power. It ended with the total dominance of the United States in every part of the globe. Not just economically, not just militarily, but in the essence of the human spirit. In democracy, democracy had won. In the words of John F. Kennedy, who had proclaimed Ekbene Berlin, I am with you, I am one of you, we are with you. And like some kind of miracle, as the 20th century and the millennium came to a close, it appeared Fukiyama was right. The history of major conflicts, of superpower rivalry, of an extraordinary waste of resources, on useless military spending, and the threat of a nuclear annihilation. On global wars, all of it had ended. America was triumphant, the sole superpower in the world, with no discernible rival on the horizon. There was a new dawn. The internet, GPS was replacing maps. We were all getting our first email addresses, but still printing off our emails, using the system as a faster, more efficient way of sending mail, though not touching the infinite possibilities that we know today. The dot-com revolution was in full bloom. You could buy dog food online, don't you know? And there were more and more instances of search engines and personal websites abounded. The mobile phone was maturing. You could easily send text messages, and small startups like Nokia and a Canadian outfit called Blackberry that could take pictures and send them were appearing on the scene. What a glorious moment. China was still a minor player. The Soviet Union, the evil empire, was vanished, vanquished, gone. The US democracy, the almighty US dollar, everyone bought in dollars. The new US national budget actually showed a surplus for the first time in forever, it seemed. The most popular song as the 90s rolled on was Don't worry, be happy. And we were happy, and the world was happy, and America was number one, and the 21st century would easily be dominated by the U.S., even more so than in the past 20th century. What could possibly go wrong?

Part Two Teaser And Signoff

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This is Henry R. Greenfield, concluding part one of America at 250 years. Part two will be a look back and a look forward on what happened to that glorious moment in the tumultuous quarter century since, and what does the future hold for the United States and the world.

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Thank you for joining us on the Greenfield Report with Henry A. Greenfield. We hope today's insights into the ever shifting geopolitical landscape have sparked your curiosity and broadened your perspective. Stay connected with us for more in depth discussions and expert solutions. Until next time, keep exploring the world beyond the headlines.