by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
July 7, 2026
My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Key points addressed:
Nationalism vs. Imperialism: their diametrical opposition
Is America an empire?
Hegemony and the Trump alliance architecture
Why hegemony is not empire
The U.S.-Israeli relationship
Venezuela, Iran, and Lebanon
The “Red-Green Alliance” working to destroy America
It’s a full 47 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!
Here’s our full discussion:
Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Securing America with me, Frank Gaffney. The program is a kind of owner’s manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and His kingdom.
And what a glory it is that we live in the United States of America, and we are celebrating its 250th anniversary, the birth of the greatest experiment in mankind’s history, certainly when it comes to governance.
It is a time in which we are facing challenges, to be sure. We are facing enemies, both foreign and domestic, to be sure. And yet it is a moment in which we can hopefully take time to reflect on what has been accomplished over these 250 years, and, more to the point, as we did on the Washington Mall a month or so ago, to rededicate ourselves to the purpose of freedom and equality for everyone who has been endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator.
That, it seems to me, extends not just to the people who have the privilege to live in this country and to be its citizens, but to people everywhere. And we’re going to talk with one of our most thoughtful, most knowledgeable, most articulate contributors for this full hour about these and related issues.
I couldn’t be more excited to be ushering in this new phase of America with our friend Rod Martin, the chairman of the board of the Institute for the American Future, which makes this program possible. Your donations to the Institute’s website, USFuture.org, can help assure the future of this program as well.
Rod Martin, in addition to having been Governor Mike Huckabee’s policy director when he was governor of Arkansas, has also been a serial entrepreneur, going back to the founding of PayPal, among other things. These days, he is the founder of an extraordinarily important new platform called The Rod Martin Report. You can find it at RodMartin.org.
One of the exceptionally impressive pieces he featured there recently caught my eye, and we agreed when he was last on the show that we would devote a full hour to exploring its many interesting elements. It’s a piece about nationalism, imperialism, and hegemony, all of which have been, at various stages, alleged to be what this country is about.
We’re going to deeply dive into what each of those terms actually means in practice, and why this exceptional nation is correctly described in some ways by one of those terms and not so much by the others.
For that purpose, welcome back, Rod Martin. It’s great to have you with us, as always.
Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.
Frank Gaffney: Thank you for generously giving of your time for this very important conversation at a very important moment. Give us, if you would, quickly, an introduction to your thesis in this essay, particularly on the issue of nationalism. Is that a dirty word, do you think?
Nationalism and Imperialism
Rod D. Martin: Joseph Stalin wanted you to think so. And all of our leftist college professors lapped that up like some kind of ambrosia or something.
This has been the position in the United States now for a very long time, largely as a result of the postwar settlement: that nationalism is a dirty word, that it’s equated to national socialism or Nazism. That’s just absurdly wrong. That’s not actually what it is.
Hitler was not a nationalist. He was a socialist, but he wasn’t a nationalist. He was for the German nation and only the German nation, and he wanted to rule the rest. That’s called imperialism. It actually has a term, and it was in common use all over the world when he was trying to carve out his empire.
The British Empire was still a going concern. The French Empire was still a going concern. The Japanese Empire was a going concern. This was normal.
I mean, Hitler was evil. Hitler murdered a lot of people. But in that one respect — wanting to rule an empire — is he really that different from Queen Victoria? She believed the world would be better if it was ruled from London. Hitler believed the world would be better if it was ruled from Berlin.
That is a fundamental concept that Americans rejected 250 years ago. We do not believe that anybody should be ruled by people in some distant foreign capital over whom they have no say, no accountability, no control.
America has always been premised on the idea that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The rest of that document goes on to show that the king had abridged his covenantal duties to his subjects, and therefore his subjects had the right to form a new government that was responsible to the sovereign people.
And by the way, we lived it out. It’s easy to say, “Oh, well, America has an empire that stretches all the way to California.” No, not really. We built a federalist system in which every state is sovereign and only delegates certain powers to Washington. Jefferson called this “an empire of liberty”, by which he meant imperial in extent but not in nature.
“Well, the Civil War changed that.” Well, yeah, it did a little bit — the 14th Amendment is an example — but not that much. The truth is, for the last more-than-a-century, America has been the primary proponent in the world of, here’s that dirty word again, nationalism.
Just ask Woodrow Wilson, with whom we normally wouldn’t agree on much. The whole idea of the Fourteen Points was that individual sovereign nation-states would be able to make their own decisions for themselves. They wouldn’t be ruled from a distant capital. That’s how you get Poland. That’s how you get Czechia and Slovakia and an independent Hungary, and eventually an independent India and an independent Kenya.
All these things come from an idea that was born here: that empires are fundamentally wrong.
Now, I would add one point. An empire does not have to be ruled by an emperor. An empire can be ruled by a Führer. An empire can be ruled by a General Secretary of a Communist Party. Moreover, an empire can be ruled by a foreign elite somewhere else that simply isn’t accountable to anybody, such as what we’re increasingly seeing in Brussels.
Frank Gaffney: And New York, unfortunately, as well, in the United Nations form.
Rod, we’re going to have to take a break here in just a moment, but I think what you’ve laid out is a very distinct difference between nationalism and imperialism. The first is one to which we are proud to subscribe. The second is one that we are endlessly accused of having become.
When we come back from this very short break, I want you to walk us through why what we have done — not perhaps with respect to Manifest Destiny, to get to the Pacific Ocean and populate every piece of territory in between — but with respect to overseas, I guess what Washington would call entangling engagements, is not, in fact, imperial and abhorrent.
We’ll talk about that with Rod Martin of The Rod Martin Report right after this.
Is America an Empire?
Frank Gaffney: Welcome back, and welcome once again to Rod Martin, one of our great contributors to this program, a man whose intellect, as well as his optimism, is very much valued here in an outfit that generally focuses on the gloomy and the doomy.
Rod brings, if not Little Miss Sunshine qualities to our conversation, certainly an insight into why the glass often is at least half full. That’s part of what we’re going to be talking about in the course of this program, a special hour dedicated to America in its first 250 years and what’s coming next, please God, another even more successful 250 years, with a man who I know will make an outsized contribution to those years.
Rod, we’ve been talking about an essay that appears at The Rod Martin Report at RodMartin.org. You’ve talked a bit about nationalism. You’ve talked about imperialism. But I wanted to give you a chance to respond specifically to the insistent assertion, often from those left-wing professors you spoke of a moment ago, that the United States is just an empire. It’s colonizing the world, and it’s reprehensible for doing so.
Rod D. Martin: The left does nothing but invert and project.
