This chapter explores how the Students for a Democratic Society’ (SDS) came to understand the United States as an empire. It discusses how New Leftists saw in U.S. policy the outlines of a great empire protecting itself in Vietnam. Meetings with Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries reinforced the vision that the needs of American empire drove the Vietnam War. Meetings with Third World revolutionaries also gave New Leftists a sense of the “enemy” as profoundly human and as struggling for the positive goal of self-determination.