Trump's Second Term: An Empire, Not a Republic
He remains fixated on the idea of stealing land from other countries.
Trump’s address today was mostly a rehash of the same tired themes from his other speeches. He is obsessed with greatness and boasting about how great everything will be under his presidency, and so he proclaims that we are at the dawn of a golden age. When a politician feels the need to declare that it is a golden age, it is a bad sign for the future. In this case, Trump is either deluding himself or he is trying to distract from the terrible policies he is about to enact.
Foreign policy didn’t receive a lot of attention from Trump in the speech, but what little he did have to say was disturbing. He remains fixated on the idea of stealing land from other countries, and he focused on Panama as the target:
President McKinley made our country very rich, through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States. The United States — I mean, think of this — spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal. We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made. And Panama’s promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated.
American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form. And that includes the United States Navy. And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama. And we’re taking it back.
Trump is wrong about all of this. Panama hasn’t broken any promises, and it hasn’t violated the treaty. American ships aren’t being overcharged, and they aren’t being treated unfairly. China doesn’t control or operate the canal. Panama does. Every grievance Trump lodges against Panama is completely made up. He wraps his territorial revisonism in anti-China rhetoric, but at its core it is just mindless expansionism for its own sake.
The president says that he wants his legacy to be that of a “peacemaker,” but the only specific foreign policy proposal he makes in his speech is a threat to grab another country’s territory in flagrant violation of their sovereignty and international law. The other president Trump made a point of praising was William McKinley, who oversaw the beginning of America’s overseas colonial empire. Trump evidently wishes to emulate McKinley in a few ways, including an expansionist agenda of robbing other nations of their land. If Trump’s second term record is anything like McKinley’s, it will be defined by unnecessary and atrocious warfare.
Trump said that America will “reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth,” and that tells us a lot about what he thinks the U.S. role in the world should be. Like a lot of his detractors in Washington, he takes for granted that the U.S. should dominate the globe, and he thinks that this is our “rightful place” from which it has supposedly fallen. Trump desires above all that the U.S. should lord it over the rest of the world. There are few things more dangerous than a declining great power obsessed with reliving the glory days. This part of the speech is the raving of a deluded hegemonist every bit as alarming as anything that George W. Bush said in his Second Inaugural twenty years ago.
Of all the things that Trump and his advisers could have chosen to include in the speech, it is telling that they wanted to emphasize the insane expansionist talk that Trump indulged in during the transition. This is the occasion when a new president sets the tone for his term and lays out what he intends to do in the coming years, and they decided that threatening to rob Panama should be a big part of it. We should assume that this is their real agenda until proven otherwise. It is a nakedly imperialist agenda, and it should be condemned as such.
If Trump wants to model himself on an old imperialist president, we could do worse than to look to the anti-imperialists of that time for inspiration in how to oppose him. As Mark Twain said in opposition to the conquest of the Philippines, “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” U.S. expansionism was wrong in 1898, and it is still wrong today. Americans should repudiate Trump’s aggressive designs and oppose any attempt to take over the canal.
The best way for the U.S. to become the most respected nation is to treat all other nations with respect. The U.S. should refrain from using American power to intimidate and threaten weaker states. If Trump has his way, the U.S. will hasten its decline and it will come to be seen as a dangerous rogue predator.
It has long been obvious that the United States is an Evil Empire.
The last decade or so has simply been the dropping of any pretense to the contrary.
Mr Larison writes that "The U.S. should refrain from using American power to intimidate and threaten weaker states."
I have fallen into the habit of saying that these actions by the U.S. provide encouragement to various countries to join or to participate even more with BRICS+, in the sense that the more America bullies other countries, the more BRICS+ will succeed.
Instead, I offer, from "Russians with Attitude", what seems to me to be a perceptive analysis of the situation vis-a-vis America's "allies":
https://x.com/RWApodcast/status/1877120997427654660?mx=2
The piece is worth reading in its entirety. Here, as an appetizer, is an excerpt:
"America's vassals WILL have to confront this state of things and make hard decisions about their future. This means reckoning with their geopolitical impotence and either embracing dependency with open eyes or seeking pathways to autonomy that will inevitably involve risk, sacrifice, and a recalibration of their national priorities."
If Trump's goal for America is for it to “reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth,” then we seem to have the Wolfowitz doctrine in full force. Taking this into account, and given the direction BRICS+ is taking, we seem to have a new form of "great power" competition emerging, where one side relies on bullying and violence, and the other on friendly trade relationships and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. One could call this "asymetrical great power competition," although it could lead to something ugly eventually.
Perhaps we'll end up with a world divided between America and its remaining vassal states, and BRICS+ on the other side, with a sort of "cold war" separating the two. Whether America will accept that depends on how much actual power it will have retained and how realistic will be those who govern it.
However things develop, as Mr Larison writes, "There are few things more dangerous than a declining great power obsessed with reliving the glory days." The peaceful world many of us envisioned and thought possible when the Soviet Union lowered its flag for the last time may come in the distant future, but it seems not ready yet to be born.