Donald Trump won the White House twice on a promise to close the border. Now he waxes poetic about reopening the frontier — whose “spirit,” he said yesterday in his second Inaugural Address, “is written into our hearts.” This month, he talked about buying Greenland from Denmark, annexing Canada, retaking the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. “What a beautiful name,” Mr. Trump said, pronouncing the phrase with a decided stress on its last syllable: A-mer-i-CA, not A-MER-i-ca.
This expansionist turn is surprising for a politician best known for wanting the nation to hunker down behind a border wall. But Mr. Trump is smart. He knows, it seems, that the angry, inward-looking nationalism that first won him office can be self-destructive, as it was during his besieged first term. These calls, then — to make America not just great but also greater in size — tap into a more invigorating strain of patriotism: a vision of a United States that is forever growing, forever moving outward.
Mr. Trump’s recent remarks have electrified his base, with MAGA enthusiasts using social media to circulate battle plans to seize Canada and maps of a United States that stretches from the Arctic to Panama. But Mr. Trump is also harking back to the founders, many of whom similarly thought the United States had to expand to thrive. “Extend the sphere,” wrote James Madison in 1787; increase the “extent of territory,” and you’ll diffuse political extremism and stave off class warfare. “The larger our association,” said Thomas Jefferson in 1805, speaking of his Louisiana Purchase, “the less will it be shaken by local passions.”
In the years that followed, the United States moved across the continent with dizzying speed, citing the doctrine of conquest as it took Indian and Mexican land, reaching the Pacific and then seizing Hawaii, Puerto Rico and other islands.
And later, in the 20th century, even after the United States, along with much of the world, renounced the doctrine of conquest, our leaders still conjured up a sense of potentially limitlessness expansion, in the opening of markets for U.S. exports, in wars to rid the world of evils, in upward mobility and a growing middle class and in science and technology, which offered what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner once said the American West promised: “perennial rebirth.”
Mr. Trump is tapping into this social and intellectual history, promising to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars” — even “to Mars.” But he does so in that witchy style he has perfected, which makes conventional ideas sound outlandish.
His detractors may scoff at the idea of annexing Greenland. But as it turns out, such annexation has long been a goal of U.S. politicians, at least since 1867, when Secretary of State William Seward, shortly after purchasing Alaska, considered buying the island — and Iceland — from Denmark. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his eye on the island, and after his death, the Truman administration, in 1946, offered Copenhagen $100 million for Greenland. The Danes declined. Later, Gerald Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, proposed obtaining Greenland for its mineral wealth. In these pages, C.L. Sulzberger in 1975, citing national interest, wrote that “Greenland must be regarded as covered by” the Monroe Doctrine, that is, fully within the United States’ security perimeter.
As for Mr. Trump’s idea of adding more stars to the flag, William Kristol, a vocal Never Trump conservative, agrees with the idea, having suggested that Cuba could also become a state. He tweeted shortly after Mr. Trump gave up the White House in 2021, “60 years at 50 states is enough.” If the United States was to leave Trumpism behind, it had to grow — a sentiment Madison would agree with.
And now here’s Mr. Trump himself, triumphant in his return and grandstanding for growth.
But he is operating in a vastly different world from past expansionists’. In the decades since Bill Clinton said in 1993 that the “global economy is our new frontier,” this country has witnessed a constriction in its sense of what is possible. Traumatizing wars, a culled middle class, crippling personal debt, dystopian tech, serial climate catastrophes, Gilded Age levels of concentrated wealth, stalled life expectancy, with young people dying at alarmingly high rates — all this has combined to create political paralysis.
Mr. Trump’s imperial gambit seems a bid to break out of the deadlock, to say there are no limits, that the country does have a future. Do we want Greenland? We’ll take Greenland. Do we want Canada?
According to Politico, a number of wealthy Trump supporters, especially in tech, see Greenland as valuable not for its minerals or strategic position but as a spiritual solution to our current malaise, a way of restoring a sense of purpose to a country adrift.
But the challenges this country confronts will not be solved by fleeing to an imagined frontier and hoping its harsh climate, as one Trump supporter put it, will forge a “new people.”
And this is where Mr. Trump’s fumbling around for a rallying cry becomes dangerous, for in treating international politics as if it were a game of Risk, he’s signaling that the world is governed by new rules, which are really old rules: The powerful do what they will; the weak suffer what they must. For all its shortcomings and hypocrisies, the global order that emerged at the end of World War II promoted the idea that cooperation, not aggression, should be the presumed starting point of diplomacy.
Mr. Trump’s aggressive annexation fantasies — his threats to expand “our territory,” as he said Monday, to use punitive tariffs or military force to rearrange the world’s borders — say otherwise. Despite the soaring tone of his Inaugural Address, there was still plenty of aggrieved menace: “We will not be conquered,” he said, “We will not be intimidated.” He is sending a clear signal that dominance, not mutualism, is the world’s new organizing principle and that the doctrine of conquest, thought to have expired, is still valid.
Indeed, the world is plagued by savage wars. Today’s grand strategists, including those who guided the Biden administration, see wars not as things to be ended but as opportunities to create realms of influence.
On China, Joe Biden largely followed Mr. Trump’s lead on trade, and their various efforts to contain Beijing have increased the likelihood of conflict, particularly over Taiwan or the South China Sea. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Israel’s assault not just on Gaza but also on Lebanon and Syria and with our own “military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere,” the legal theorist Eric Posner wrote, the “ruins of international law are all around us.”
Mr. Trump’s imperialist musings, then, aren’t so much setting the pace but legitimating something that already exists: a new world order where aggression is expected.
Still, his uninhibited language (his willingness to provoke allies and force them to engage in childish games of dominance, as he is doing with Canada, Denmark and Panama) adds to the volatility of an already volatile world. One lesson the past teaches, especially the imperialist past Mr. Trump is invoking, is that opening the kind of belligerent, multifront balance of power that is in operation today — with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for advantage — will lead to more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war.
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