Trump and the return of spheres of influence

Aggression against allies and a free hand to America's enemies

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Donald Trump has had a week that would be the envy of any 19th century imperialist. He refused to rule out using military force to seize Panama and Greenland, said he would use economic coercion to force Canada to become the 51st U.S. state, and called for the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America. This kind of talk is supposed to be anathema to American policymakers in the era of the “liberal international order”, and it has been met by derision and concern from U.S. allies.

All of this talk is giving us greater insight into what a second term Trump foreign policy might look like. Trump has frequently presented himself as the “anti-war” candidate, saying that he will somehow end the war in Ukraine and refuse to deploy American troops to troubled areas around the globe. The way he talks about foreign entanglements has even convinced some people to regard him as an “isolationist”, although the use of this label has always been overblown. But now Trump seems to be suggesting that he will combine an anti-interventionist posture in most of the world with a type of muscular expansionism in America’s home region, the western hemisphere.

One of the reasons that this stance is dangerous is because of the signal that it sends to America’s adversaries. Implicit in Trump’s recent threats is the idea that the United States ought to enjoy an exclusive sphere of influence in the western hemisphere, one in which it is free to take whatever territory it wishes and to set the terms of the international order.

Some commentators have compared this to the Monroe Doctrine. But that doctrine was usually understood as just meaning that the U.S. would not tolerate foreign powers establishing a presence in Latin America, not that it could grab whatever territory it wanted for itself. Trump’s position is closer to the so-called Olney Declaration advanced by Secretary of State Richard Olney in 1895, which stated that “today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition”.

In other words: we can do whatever the hell we want, and you just have to accept it.

Trump’s claim to this sort of hegemony is music to the ears of Russia and China, who also want to enjoy spheres of influence in their own regions. Trump has always been sympathetic to such claims in the past, as you can hear in his repeated endorsement of Russia’s narrative of the Ukraine war and his lack of concern over the future of Taiwan. Trump seems to envisage a world in which superpowers have a free hand in their own backyards while leaving one another mostly alone.

Although this sort of foreign policy has been mostly anathema to modern American presidents, it is actually something like the norm in the country’s history. We remember much of pre-1945 U.S. foreign policy as “isolationist”, but the U.S. was heavily involved in territorial expansion and imperialism in the western hemisphere for most of its history.

The nineteenth century might have been a time when the U.S. mostly stayed out of conflicts in Europe and Asia, but it was also a time when it expanded across the North American continent, fought a war of territorial aggression against Mexico, and started to occupy outlying islands. The period between the first and second world wars is likewise often remembered as one of “isolation”, but the U.S. intervened in Latin America dozens of times during this period.

This kind of approach - sometimes called “continentalism” - has had particular appeal, even in more modern times, to the nationalist-populist forces who constitute Trump’s political forebears. Just as I find it illuminating when these forces admit the debt they owe to the Confederacy, I find it interesting that Trump - a person operating without much historical knowledge - realizes the compatibility of continental expansion with non-intervention outside the hemisphere. Here he really is channelling the “America First” tradition of people like Charles Lindbergh, who didn’t want to fight the Nazis but recognized the importance of U.S. interests in Latin America.

But just because a country has done something before doesn’t mean that it should do it again. There are many problems with Trump’s vision.