I keep circling this thought like it’s a bad idea with good lighting: what if Empire is just supply chain management with a flag on it?
Every time the news leans south—another crisis, another headline shaped by intervention—I hear the old language warm up. Stability. Security. Partnership. Words that wear suits and pretend they’re not carrying tools. And somewhere in the margins of those conversations is the unspoken fantasy that the United States could simply absorb Central and South America the way corporations absorb competitors: a merger, a rebrand, a promise of efficiency.
If that happened—if the map were redrawn by power rather than consent—what would the U.S. actually inherit? Not just land and people and history, but products. Commodities. Cocaine, for instance, sits there like the most awkward line item on a balance sheet no one wants to acknowledge.
I can’t help wondering, in my more unhinged moments, whether America would instantly become the world’s largest cocaine producer—and whether it would immediately spin that into a policy white paper. Regulation instead of eradication. Quality control instead of chaos. FDA-grade purity seals stamped on something that has always thrived in the shadows. Sin with standards.
There’s a dark logic to it that makes me uncomfortable precisely because it is logic. Revenue streams rerouted from cartels to treasuries. Violence starved out by market dominance. Mexican cartels collapsing not under the weight of law enforcement but under the brutal efficiency of being cut off from supply. No coke, no kingdom.
Of course, this is where I’m supposed to stop and remind myself—and you—that I’m not advocating anything. This is not a proposal. This is a thought experiment spiraling at 2 a.m., the kind that happens when you stare too long at how capitalism already metabolizes everything it touches. Oil. Data. War. Why not cocaine?
But the part that keeps catching in my throat is what always does: control dressed up as care. The idea that making something “safer” excuses making it ubiquitous. That a government could justify poisoning fewer people more cleanly and call it progress. That empire could look at addiction and see not tragedy, but untapped revenue.
I imagine the slogans already. Taking it out of the hands of criminals. Protecting consumers. Ending cartel violence. All true, maybe. All insufficient.
Because underneath it all is the same old American confidence: if we run it, it will be better. If we own it, it will be cleaner. If we profit from it, it will somehow hurt less.
I don’t know if that’s cynicism or realism talking anymore. I only know that every time the U.S. talks about “taking over” anything—land, markets, narratives—it never starts with cocaine, but it almost always ends with someone else paying the price.
And maybe that’s the real export. Not democracy. Not stability. But the ability to turn even destruction into a line item and call it strategy.