Phyllis Bennis
Even as Donald
Trump and his MAGA movement have seized virtually complete control of the
Republican Party, there remain at least two factions competing for dominance of
foreign policy: an isolationist gang and a warmongering interventionist cabal.
The strains between them seemingly remain unresolved, and there are real
strategic debates and disagreements about what direction Trump’s foreign policy
should take.
U.S. President Donald Trump (looks on as
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks about the mid-air crash
between American Airlines and a military helicopter, at the White House
on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
But what Trump
himself is signaling as most important—more than which side wins any particular
debate—is the proud (re)commitment to an expansionist (and expanding) U.S.
empire dominating the world. That commitment to imperialism, more explicit than
we’ve seen for a while, remains a crucial unifying point among his supporters.
Disagreements over whether to prioritize economic power and pressure vs.
military threats and direct engagement—along with reliance on presidential fiat
in either situation—matter far less than the strategic agreement on the
ultimate goal.
Empire, after
all, is not a new idea—Trump’s version is simply to be much more publicly
embraced, indeed celebrated.
It started a few
days before Christmas, less than a month before he would be sworn in as
president. In a Phoenix speech and later in social media holiday greetings,
Trump named the presents he was hoping for: Canada, Greenland, and the Panama
Canal. (Soon he would add the Gulf of America and Denali, the “Tall One” in the
local Indigenous language, now to be called Mt. McKinley once again, as it was
before Biden officially recognized the name that the Koyukon people have called
it for centuries.)
As is so often
the case with Trump, inconvenient facts—that Canada had no interest in becoming
the 51st state, Greenland was not for sale, and the Panama Canal belonged to,
well, Panama—had no bearing on his holiday wish list. And for a while it seemed
that even in the context of his extremist plans (not to mention the Heritage
Foundation’s 900-page opus of implementation instructions for those plans),
Trump’s global aspirations seemed just a bit too far over the top to have to
take them seriously.
The last time
the Panama Canal was a U.S. electoral issue was almost 50 years ago, about
three-quarters of a century after France began building the Canal in the 1880s.
The U.S. had taken over the project in 1904, and the so-called “Canal
Zone”—actually a piece of Panama’s own territory—remained a U.S. colony.
Negotiations over ending U.S. control sputtered on and off for decades, and in
1976 Reagan tried to bolster his presidential campaign by loudly rejecting
anything that smacked of “giving away” the canal. In language taken directly
from the playbooks of far-right racist southern senators Strom Thurmond and
Jesse Helms, Reagan thundered “we built it, we bought it, and we’re going to
keep it.” It didn’t work. Treaties to end U.S. control of the Canal were signed
a year later. And Reagan lost.
Trump had tried
to buy Greenland during his first term, but the Greenlanders’ immediate “we’re
open for business, not for sale” put an eventual stop to that campaign. And
Canadian officials shrugged off the idea of a U.S.-Canadian union as a joke,
something Trump had raised numerous times during his first term, only to be
consistently rebuffed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
But then came
Trump’s inaugural speech. Far from the traditional anodyne calls for
post-electoral unity, and even going significantly beyond the “American
carnage” themes of his first term, his 2025 speech included not only a
full-throated proclamation of U.S. grievances and a glowing image of those
problems disappearing under his presidency, but a clear checklist of what he
planned to do to get there. It may have seemed laughable to hear Trump lusting
after Canada and Greenland, but his vision of U.S. domination—global, not
limited to the Arctic and our northern border—as laid out in his inauguration
speech, indicates we need to take him and his imperial threats very seriously.
Trump described
a set of multi-faceted, interconnected crises. At home, the U.S. government
fails to protect its own citizens “but provides sanctuary and protection for
dangerous criminals” that have illegally entered the United States. Our health
care system doesn’t deliver for people but is the most expensive in the world.
Our education system teaches children “to be ashamed of themselves … to hate
our country.”
And
internationally, the United States has allegedly been so feeble that other
nations have taken advantage of our weakness.
But now, Trump
went on, “America’s decline is over.” With him in the White House, a “golden
age of America begins right now.”
“From this day
forward,” he said, “our country will flourish and be respected again all over
the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves
to be taken advantage of any longer.” In that golden age, the quests of empire
will concurrently solve the domestic crises and make the U.S. “the envy of
every nation.”
U.S. citizens,
now emerging from both personal/national and global carnage, will soon see the
simultaneous end to those crises as the country rebuilds its strength at home
and reclaims its rightful hegemonic place in the world. “So as we liberate our
nation, we will lead it to new heights of victory and success. We will not be
deterred. Together, we will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our
children safe, healthy and disease free. The United States will once again
consider itself a growing nation.”
And this homage
to future growth was very direct—the kind of enlargement “that increases our
wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and
carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” All the language of 19th
century empire was there: “the spirit of the frontier is written into our
hearts.” Americans are “explorers” and “pioneers.”
Despite the
claimed long decline, Trump continues to weave U.S. exceptionalism through his
rhetoric. “Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge
of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens
on Earth. No one comes close.”
Oh yes, Manifest
Destiny and racist western expansion make explicit appearances, as “Americans
pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They
crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West…”
Indigenous peoples who were slaughtered to “tame” the land were not mentioned.
Seizing half of what was then Mexico was ignored. “We are going to be changing
the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf America,” he said. Because it’s
ours. Renaming the Alaska peak Mt. McKinley was not only an attack on the
Indigenous communities who had long fought for Denali—it was also designed to
honor the U.S. president responsible for expanding the U.S. empire across the
oceans, claiming Cuba, Guam, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
And bringing his
19th century-style imperial dreams into the 21st century, Trump promised to
“pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to
plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” The moon isn’t good enough
anymore. (Of course, at that mention the cameras all swiveled away from Trump
to his tech-bro Elon Musk, ensconced with the rest of the billionaire boys club
just behind the president.)
Those astronauts
almost certainly won’t be sent by NASA, it will be Musk’s SpaceX or another
private company that will plant the U.S. flag in space. Neo-colonial resource
extractivism isn’t really as “neo” as it sometimes appears; the privatization
of colonial exploration and land-seizures is actually an old story. Europe’s
royals, in particular, often outsourced their colonial campaigns to private
companies—Britain gave key rights to the British East India Company to claim
India and encouraged the Jamestown settlement by the Virginia Company, the
Dutch East India Company managed the colonization of Indonesia.
It was all done
with the approval and collusion of the Roman Catholic church, whose 15th
century Doctrine of Discovery assured Europe’s would-be explorers that any land
inhabited by non-Christians—no exception for other planets—was fair game for
colonial theft. It would not be until March 2023 that Pope Francis formally
repudiated the doctrine—but apparently Trump never got the memo.
So while old and
new forms of colonialism are a longstanding part of U.S. history, the public
pronouncement of a plan not only to carry the U.S. flag to new horizons, but
actually to “expand our territory” is new for the 21st century. So while
Trump’s calls for absorbing Canada, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, buying
Greenland and/or reclaiming Panama’s canal may seem performative (and as
specific examples do not seem like serious threats), they do reflect an
eagerness to assert global as well as domestic power. And these broad
commitments to a future of global domination do not even include the immediate
international crises and challenges (Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan) that Trump has
pledged to “solve on day one” (or at least quickly), often at the expense of
the peoples most impacted.
Certainly
Trump’s long-threatened tariffs will be imposed as part of that power policy,
supposedly to replace higher taxes on corporations and billionaires. In his
inauguration speech, he bragged that “instead of taxing our citizens to enrich
other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our
citizens. … It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury
coming from foreign sources.” Not quite the way tariffs work, of course.
But that doesn’t
mean tariffs will replace the military. Trump’s plan, once he reverses all
efforts to desegregate and build equity into the armed forces, is to “build the
strongest military the world has ever seen.” Within 24 hours of his speech, he
had issued an executive order to halt all foreign aid—leaving refugees who had
gone through and passed exhaustive vetting by United Nations and United States
agencies, and were in many cases en route to airports to catch flights to the
U.S. to start their already-approved new lives, stuck in limbo with nowhere to
turn for safety. But an exception was made to continue billions of dollars of
military aid to Israel and to Egypt, and Trump made sure to reverse Biden’s May
2024 temporary hold on a shipment of additional 2,000-pound bombs Israel used
to destroy homes and neighborhoods in Gaza and Lebanon.
And with the
Senate’s confirmation of Pete Hegseth to head the Pentagon, the angry veteran
accused of sexual assault and known for financial mismanagement and an utter
lack of managerial experience is now empowered to oversee 3.2 million employees
and overrule or get rid of any generals he finds annoying. This is the same man
who called the rules of war “burdensome” and claimed they “make it impossible
for us to win these wars.” Hegseth said he “thought very deeply about the
balance between legality and lethality,” and clearly lethality won out. His
job, as he understands it, is to ensure that the troops “have the opportunity
to destroy…the enemy, and that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way.”
Between that understanding, the power to dismiss officers who follow the laws
of war, and Hegseth’s commitment to follow whatever Trump demands, the world
may soon face a potentially out-of-control military, bolstered by 750+ military
bases scattered across the globe and a budget approaching a trillion dollars.
With a secretary
of defense beholden to a president driven only by personal wealth and power,
and unaccountable to any faction of the U.S. ruling class, the danger of a new
military escalation looms. At some rather random point in his speech Trump
claimed that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.” But in his
drive for empire, he will be describing an imperial scenario much closer to
that passed down by the great historian Tacitus: “the Romans brought
devastation, and they called it peace.”
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