In 2016, when most of the political press was casting Donald Trump as a dual opponent of Hillary ClintonI wrote a story arguing that people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Trump’s approach to foreign policy. While Trump was certainly not a neoconservative, I argued, he was a different and older nationalist hawk — “an ardent militarist who has been proposing a de facto colonial war of conquest for years.”
Trump’s actual policy while in office defied this prediction. And as he prepares for a second term, Trump is raising his offensive passion to new heights. A few weeks before the inauguration, he and his team suggested:
- using “economic powerTo push for Canada to become the 51st state.
- Imposing duties on designed Danish goods Force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States.
- Used by the US military Regain control of the Panama Canal and the occupation of Greenland.
- Issue an executive order that would allow Sending American troops to Mexico To fight drug cartels.
These ideas vary reasonably. There is no chance that Canada will become part of the United States, but it is possible that Trump is trying to bully Canada (or Denmark or Panama) with economically devastating tariffs. And as strange as Trump’s war on Mexico may sound, he was Been seriously talking about it for years. Most of his team is already on board.
But the question I’m interested in now is less what’s going to happen, which is ultimately unknown, why Trump seems so enamored with the idea of American expansion. What does this tell us about the once-and-future president and the implications he will bring to the world when he returns to power on January 20?
The answer is simple: Trump is an old-school American imperialist.
Trump has reached his imperialism for his own varied reasons. But his view is consistent with a long tradition of American nationalist imperialism, which has historically been quite influential in shaping US foreign policy. It is often confused with isolationism, as it is hostile to trans-oceanic alliances, but is actually willing to use force to get its way – especially in America.
Trump’s imperialist foreign policy is certainly a break with the neoconservatism of the modern Republican Party. But America has older traditions, many of which can be meaningfully described as right-wing, into which it fits like a glove.
Trump’s Jacksonian Imperialism
The temptation is always there to overanalyze Trump — to portray him as acting from some deep-seated ideological impulse when, in fact, there’s no evidence that he’s ever thought that much. Trump doesn’t read history books or care about conservative philosophy; He works on a collection of emotions.
So when I say Trump is an “imperialist,” I don’t mean that Trump subscribes to anything like that Civilization Mission which shaped European colonialism in Africa and the Americas. Rather, I’m saying that he has a series of innately held beliefs that lead him to think like an old-school imperialist: proposing the use of coercive political power to seize formal control over territories and resources currently controlled by others.
Trump, at heart, remains a real estate developer who believes that owning more physical things is better. He constantly talks about “winning,” which Trump seems to see as the greatest and best of all. Trump believes that deals are zero-sum: there is always a winner and a loser. And Trump also believes, at least judging by his behavior, that rules suck and are for little people.
These emotions help explain why Trump’s skepticism about American alliances does not extend to a skepticism about foreign engagement altogether. They also help explain why he is suspicious of the benefits of trade with foreign nations but positively leery of seizing control over their territories.
But while Trump’s own approach to foreign affairs may not be ideological in the traditional sense, it fits with a 200-year-old trend in American foreign policy thinking—what scholar Walter Russell Mead calls “JacksonianTradition after President Andrew Jackson.
Jacksonians, in Mead’s terms, do not share the liberal or neoconservative belief that America has a special obligation to make the world a better place. But neither are isolationists who want to keep the United States out of the conflict at all costs. Rather, they are animated in large part by national sentiment the pride – A deep, innate belief that America is a great country that deserves due respect and is entitled to protect itself by any means it deems necessary.
Jacksonians are hostile to international treaties and multilateral organizations, seeing them as constraints on America’s freedom of action. In war, Jacksonians believed that Americans should relentlessly pursue victory without much regard for the cost of civilian life.
And when it comes to territory, Jacksonians believe that the United States has every right to dominate the Americas—to expand its borders as a display of American greatness.
If you visit the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, there is an exhibit of treaties that draws a sharp break between the pre-Jackson and post-Jackson eras. Before Jackson, the American government had a reasonable (though imperfect) record of good faith bargaining with Native tribes. Under Jackson, however, the U.S. government shifted toward a full colonial policy—primarily displacing tribes and seizing their lands for American settlers. To this end, Jackson pushed for and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830: a bill that would begin the ethnic cleansing of southern tribes along what we now call the Trail of Tears.
Jacksonian expansionism goes beyond Andrew Jackson. It played a major role in sparking the Mexican-American War in 1846. It animated the desire to claim at the same time. which is now part of British Columbia (including the land on which the city of Vancouver now sits). It pressured America to annex Hawaii in 1898 and seized control of many of Spain’s colonial possessions during the Spanish-American War.
Overt expansionism gradually fell out of favor for several reasons. But one of the most important was the immediate legacy of World War II—and, in particular, the Truman administration’s efforts to build the postwar system around the principle of national sovereignty. With America positioning itself as the champion of a new rules-based international order, and our greatest national enemy the territorially acquisitive Nazi and later Soviet empires, expansionism became a tough sell politically and ideologically.
However, the desire did not go away. In the 1970s, L. A man named Craig Schoonmaker – who claimOddly enough, the term “gay pride” coined the — Established an obscure political party Canada is dedicated to American attachment.
In 1990, Pat Buchanan—a Republican strategist and politician often seen as a precursor to Trump— Schoonmaker wrote a column celebrating his vision. But Buchanan went further and proposed to include Canada And Greenland so that “the twenty-first century cannot then be the second American century.”
Buchanan was not alone in this. Jeet Heer of the nation Note That others like him, such as the white nationalist writer Peter Brimelo, dreamed of a 21st-century renewal of American expansionism. It is true that these Jacksonian expansionists were marginalized in the post-Reagan GOP, dominated as it was by neoconservatives who believed that American energy was better spent fighting tyrants and Islamists.
Yet Jacksonianism, Mead perceptively notes, is more of an attitude than an ideology. It lives less in books and magazines than in some ingrained folk beliefs among the American public about honor and national pride. Such passions do not die when they fall out of favor among the chattering classes; They simply lay dormant, waiting for someone or something to revive them.
Trump, who hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office during his first term, was that force. When it comes to expansionism, he’s pushing an open door — not just because he controls the Republican Party, but because the idea of a greater America is so compatible with the passions that animate the MAGA movement. So why you Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee is endorsing Trump’s expansionism in unmistakably Jacksonian terms:
Let’s be clear: Trump is not going to take over Canada. The acquisition of Greenland will only happen if the stars are perfectly aligned, and certainly not by military force. American warships will not occupy the Panama Canal.
But the idea that America has the right to impose its will on the continent has deep roots in both Trump’s psyche and broader American policy. Even if outright annexationism seems unlikely, lesser expressions of the same passion to demonstrate American greatness by ruthlessly bashing our neighbors are especially possible.
It’s not crazy to imagine Trump taking steps like the designed tariffs coercion Neighbors make gestures of submission, even if they don’t go as far as waving an American flag in Ottawa. And it’s trivially easy — terrifyingly easy, in fact — to see how Jacksonian resurgence could lead to more than 100 years of American soldiers fighting on Mexican soil.
