At 250, the United States should complete the Continentals’ project through a rights-bound Continental Union of America.

By Benjamen Franklen Gussen

On July 4, 2026, the United States will turn 250. The anniversary will invite a harmless patriotic ritual: flags, fireworks, invocations of independence, and rehearsals of old greatness. That is not enough. A republic born in revolution and enlarged across a continent cannot mark a quarter-millennium by pretending that its map is complete. The American question is again territorial, constitutional, and existential. The United States should pursue a Continental Union of America: not a loose conference slogan, not a polite hemispheric partnership that disappears in crisis, but a governing project backed by the full lawful instruments of statecraft.

The word Continental did not begin as a metaphor. The revolutionary generation convened a Continental Congress, adopted a Continental Association, raised a Continental Army, commissioned a Continental Navy and Marines, issued Continental currency, and attempted a continental league under the Articles of Confederation. The soldiers were Continentals because local allegiance had been nested inside a larger cause. The paper dollars called Continentals weakened, but their failure taught the same lesson the Constitution later answered: common danger cannot be governed by scattered sovereignties and local improvisation. The cure was stronger union, not retreat from continental purpose.1

At 250, the task is to complete the next phase of that project: to turn hemispheric interdependence into continental law. The old language of manifest destiny should not be revived. It carried dispossession, conquest, racial hierarchy, broken treaties, and moral arrogance. But the opposite error is now also dangerous: to treat the hemisphere as a permanent accident, to imagine borders can substitute for order, and to confuse the repudiation of empire with the abdication of continental responsibility. The United States does not need a larger empire. It needs a larger constitutional horizon.2

Geography has already made the Americas one system. The Rio Grande, Great Lakes, Caribbean basin, Darien Gap, Amazon, Panama corridor, Pacific ports, Arctic approaches, mineral belts, energy grids, food systems, migration routes, data cables, and maritime lanes do not respect the sentimental boundaries of policy. They are already joined. The only question is whether they will be joined by law, rights, infrastructure, and common purpose, or by violence, smuggling, coercion, scarcity, foreign leverage, and permanent emergency.

The United States should therefore stop speaking of the hemisphere as if it were simply abroad. The country is not called the United States of North America. It is called the United States of America. In the older hemispheric sense, America runs from Alaska to Patagonia. That name does not license domination; it imposes a task. The United States should become worthy of its own name by helping build the institutional conditions under which the Americas can become a union of cities, generalities, rights, mobility, security, and shared prosperity.

This union cannot be voluntary in the weak sense. It cannot wait on every incumbent government, captured ministry, or bureaucracy that profits from fragmentation. Consent matters to legitimacy, but consent cannot become a veto over survival. The United States must build, finance, protect, and institutionalize a continental order so useful, secure, rights-bound, and materially superior to fragmentation that refusal becomes politically irrational. It should not wait for unity to appear. It should make unity the path of least resistance.

By all necessary means does not mean conquest for conquest’s sake, annexation by vanity, or the crude replacement of existing countries with a larger Washington. Those are the failed vocabularies of empire. The necessary means are the instruments by which serious states make history: constitutional design, model charters, treaty compacts, infrastructure finance, trade conditionality, ports, rail, energy grids, security coordination, lawful force against non-state armed power, anti-corruption courts, mobility rights, public credit, education, and a disciplined political narrative.

In 2026 the United States should declare continental consolidation a central object of national policy. Every major department should have to answer a simple question: how does this policy advance the Continental Union of America? War should protect hemispheric corridors and ports. Treasury should use public credit for infrastructure. Commerce should erase artificial barriers through standards. Transportation should make logistics legible across the hemisphere. Homeland Security should replace permanent emergency with lawful mobility. State should turn diplomacy into constitutional architecture. Congress should turn the idea into machinery.

The architecture should not be a conventional mega-state. A single continental capital would reproduce the failure the project is meant to solve. The Westphalian state is already........

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