President Donald TrumpPresident Donald Trump
President Donald Trump | Getty Images
If we see Trump for what he is and try to understand how he thinks, we will be better prepared for the onslaught, argues Alastair GJ Stewart
The second Trump presidency, now just past its first 100 days, can scarcely be called dull. But obfuscation, dissembling, and post-truth gaslighting are accusations that stalk the administration. Again.
President Donald Trump | Getty Images
There's an irony—what if the president and his team speak the truth about America's naked ambition for global control?
Many Americans find it hard to accept that their country is an empire - it goes against this mythmaking about the gloriousness of the Republic and how the uniqueness of America was better than that of European colonisers who have come and gone.
Even before the Second World War ended, "superpower" was an effective byword for imperialism.
No US president has ever embraced the title of American Caesar. Although they may self-proclaim as "leader of the free world," the ability to obliterate the planet several times over or influence the entire global economy has been accepted reluctantly, even modestly.
Donald Trump is the first US president to accept and behave like an American emperor. Tweets are his diktats, soundbites his decrees.
America's first Eurosceptic president wants to withdraw from theatres where he sees the US as propping up security configurations with little gain to their national interest.
Trump is trading out the pretence of moral leadership for designs on geographically buffering with Canada and Greenland. It's a return to continental isolationism through the hypocritical expansion which defined anti-imperial, non-interventionist American foreign policy into the early 20th century.
Somewhere between the Munro Doctrine of 1823 and President Theodore Roosevelt's Big Stick ideology of the 1900s, American presidents forgot that conquest to achieve peace was their history. Continental and even global predominance were in their bones since the days of the Founding Fathers, notably Alexander Hamilton.
On the first day of his second term as president, Trump stated that the US needed control over Greenland for its national interest. Given its location in the northern and western hemispheres, it is not hard to see why Trump views the territory as his by rights in a historical context.
Historian Michael Burleigh has succinctly remarked that "When they think of Empire, Americans imagine something outside themselves, run by cruel Romans, vicious Redcoats, obscene Nazis, or Darth Vader, these last almost interchangeable, ignoring the considerable benefits that, by any unsentimental calculation, liberal Empire once brought to much of humanity."
Territorial expansion and manifest destiny are in America's DNA. Over 250 years, most states and territories within the Union have been ceded, bought, annexed, or entrusted to the US government.
Their neighbours have been brought to heel to protect that vision, including flirtations over the years with invading Canada, notably during and after the American Civil War, because of Britain's material support for the Confederacy.
As any student of American foreign policy will tell you, the predatory approach is nothing new. The difference with Trump's machinations is that critics no longer need to deal with US leaders who are in denial about their behaviour.
This week, the US delegation's planned visit to the Arctic territory has spotlighted Trump's ambitions. Greenland's outgoing Prime Minister Mute Egede calls the trip a "provocation." Vance visited the US military base at Pituffik in northern Greenland on Friday.
The speed with which Trump has reverted to such a base foreign policy should not be surprising. It's the first wave of strategic environmental imperialism. Ships are getting easier to sail through Arctic waters between Europe, Russia, and North America because ice is melting due to the Earth's surface and ocean warming.
Greenland has rich, untapped mineral resources, oil, and gas, but development has been slow. Trump has repeatedly reiterated that the island was essential for US national security. The US president has not clarified how or when he aims to annex it but has not ruled out using military or economic power.
Trump’s predilection for tariffs and trade wars is matched only by rhetoric designed to discombobulate: the challenge is watching Trump say whatever he pleases with a global diplomatic class that tries to maintain civility.
The "imperial presidency" became popular in the 1960s, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s 1973 book The Imperial Presidency popularised it further as he articulated his concerns that the US presidency was uncontrollable and had exceeded its constitutional limits.
Seventy years of failed imperialist adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan (to name a few) seem more to do with US foreign policy never embracing the fact that it has moved from hegemon to hyperpower and now, finally, flat-out imperialism.
The implications are stark. But it is almost refreshing to deal with the issue without the insufferable, saccharine exercise of delusion that disguises naked power as an effort to bring peace, justice, and the American way to the world. Who can forget, and certainly not forgive, the catastrophic absurdity of the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
Once again, if we see Trump for what he is and try to understand how he thinks, we will be better prepared for the onslaught he intends to bring in the name of American national security.