When American newspapers framed President Donald Trump’s September visit to Great Britain as the latest symbolic exchange between a dominant empire and a faded one, they followed the approach generally desired by these exchanges’ operators and missed the bigger empire-building project at play. This new imperial project is hiding in plain sight. It encompasses America’s and Britain’s military, corporate, media, and education complexes—currently collaborating in a major “reinvention” of the Middle East via force, displacement, commerce, and propaganda. Its most influential player locates his...
















