Editor’s Note: This commentary responds to this week’s Letter to the Editor, January 29, 2026, concerning a January 15, 2026, Straight Talk commentary in the Sergeant Bluff Advocate. Disagreement is expected and welcomed. Readers are encouraged to engage the arguments presented here with facts and good-faith discussion rather than slogans or personal attacks.
(SBA) – Lon Zimmerman’s Letter to the Editor in this week’s Advocate raises concerns that deserve a serious response, not because they are new, but because they reflect a familiar way Americans argue about power, borders, and national identity. His letter frames my January 15 commentary as an “editorial rant” against imperialism and suggests that history disproves the argument because former imperial powers still exist today. That framing misunderstands both the point of the original piece and the historical record it relies on.
Imperialism does not make countries disappear overnight. It hollows them out over time. Britain’s imperial project began as early as 1583 with its claim on Newfoundland, but it exited empire economically strained, politically fractured, and still managing the fallout in Northern Ireland, South Asia, and parts of Africa, a chapter that effectively closed in 1997 with the handover of Hong Kong. Germany still exists, but its imperial ambitions fed militarism that led to two catastrophic world wars and brought the nation to the brink of ruin. Japan still exists, but its empire ended in devastation and a forced national reckoning. Russia still exists, but its long history of expansion has locked it into recurring cycles of repression, unrest, and war, most recently in Ukraine. Survival is not proof that imperialism works. Existence is not the same thing as strength. These nations have had decades to recover, reform, and rebuild, and while they remain significant powers, they are smaller and less dominant than before.
The original commentary never claimed imperialism guarantees collapse. It argued something more important, imperial thinking creates long-term instability abroad and corrodes values at home. It teaches powerful nations that they are entitled to dominate weaker ones, reshape institutions, demand assimilation, and erase cultures in the process. That way of thinking rarely stays confined to foreign policy. History shows it always comes home eventually.
That concern is not theoretical. In recent weeks, following public threats of invasion and annexation, our government has floated the idea of paying each of Greenland’s roughly 57,000 residents one hundred thousand dollars as part of a proposal to take control of the country. The United States has also engaged in aggressive foreign interventions and regime-change efforts in places like Venezuela, driven in part by strategic and economic interests. It has used lethal force in international waters, threatened to annex or invade Greenland, Mexico, and Canada, and openly questioned long-standing alliances, including NATO. Whatever label is applied to it, this is imperial-style thinking playing out in real time.
Zimmerman objects to calling the United States a democracy, insisting it is only a representative republic. That distinction creates a false divide. America is both. Political power ultimately comes from the people, exercised primarily through elections under constitutional limits. The most accurate description is a democratic republic in which citizens govern by electing representatives.
Much of Zimmerman’s letter shifts from imperialism abroad to immigration at home, using the language of “invasion.” That pivot reveals a deeper anxiety about cultural change rather than national survival. America has faced this fear before. Irish Catholics were once deemed unassimilable. Germans were accused of divided loyalty. Scandinavians were ridiculed for their language and customs. None of that prevented them from becoming Americans.
Assimilation does not happen instantly. Culture does not flip like a switch. It layers over time. I still make lefsa from a recipe my great-grandmother brought from Scandinavia. That tradition did not prevent my family from becoming American. It enriched what America meant to us. Immigrants cluster into communities because that is how people survive displacement. They share language, food, faith, and familiarity while building new lives. The former publisher of the Advocate proudly displayed a Polish flag in the office and gathered his family every year to make Polish sausage. That was not a rejection of America. It was America.
Zimmerman argues that immigrants ignore laws and bring crime. The evidence does not support that claim. National research consistently shows immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. Data from Texas and analyses by the Migration Policy Institute and American Immigration Council show undocumented immigrants are arrested and incarcerated at significantly lower rates than U.S.-born residents, and no correlation exists between higher immigrant populations and increased crime.
The irony in this debate is timing. While attention is pulled outward toward dominance and control, Americans in 2026 are facing urgent domestic challenges, economic pressure, rising health-care costs, food insecurity, racial inequality, climate impacts, democratic strain, and rapid technological disruption. According to a December 2025 AP-NORC survey, roughly seven in ten Americans cite the economy as the nation’s most pressing issue, followed by immigration and health care. These are kitchen-table realities.
Against that backdrop, talk of annexation, invasion, and coercion abroad does not project strength. It reads as distraction.
This is not what “America First” looks like. From my view in the cheap seats, it feels as though the income taxes I pay for roads, schools, and health care are instead being diverted toward foreign dominance and political theater. A nation confident in its values does not need to bribe, threaten allies, undermine sovereignty, or normalize domination.
The United States was born out of resistance to empire, and that history carries responsibility. Respecting sovereignty abroad does not mean ignoring problems. It means recognizing that force and control rarely solve them and often create new ones. Imperialism promises order and delivers instability. Fear promises safety and delivers division. History has been clear about both. I do believe we need to empty the “chamber pot.” Washington’s is full and overflowing — hopefully not by throwing it out an open window onto the streets the rest of us are forced to walk.
