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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
You have heard of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Now welcome to the age of neoimperialism.
The most striking moment in Donald Trump’s inaugural address last month was his pledge that the US “will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory”.
Hopes that Trump’s talk of territorial expansion was an empty rhetorical flourish have faded. The president’s references to foreign territories that he would like to acquire are too frequent to be ignored or dismissed.
Trump has confidently asserted that America will “get Greenland”. He has vowed to “take back” the Panama Canal. He frequently says that Canada should become America’s 51st state. Last week, he even laid claim to Gaza.
His fascination with acquiring territory has startled even some of his supporters. But Trump’s expansionist ambitions are easier to understand, if seen as part of a global trend. The two other world leaders that he seems to view as genuine peers — Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — also see territorial expansion as a key national goal and part of their personal claim to greatness.
Russian spokesmen often cite national security as a justification for the war on Ukraine. But Putin himself has obsessively returned to the idea that Ukraine is not a proper country but part of the “Russian world”.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, once told a confidant that before invading Ukraine, Putin had listened to three advisers: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.” These rulers presided over vast expansions of Russian territory, with Catherine advancing deep into Ukraine.
Putin would clearly love to leave the historical stage having re-established Russian control over the heart of its old empire — Ukraine — and perhaps further west as well.
Xi similarly sees gaining control of Taiwan as key to China’s national destiny and to his own historical legacy. In a recent speech, he asserted: “Taiwan is China’s sacred territory.”
Xi has said that the issue of Taiwan can no longer be passed from generation to generation. Completing the “reunification” of China would be a signature achievement that could allow him to claim a status similar to that of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic.
Trump’s interest in empire has emerged more recently. His advisers are struggling to retrospectively rationalise his statements on Greenland, Panama and even Gaza — a process that has become known as “sanewashing”.
As with Putin, the initial recourse of the sanewashers is to reach for an explanation rooted in national security. Greenland has critical minerals; the Chinese are sniffing around the Panama Canal. But Canada? Gaza? Here the rational explanations give way to shrugs — or even sniggers.
With no convincing strategic rationale for Trump’s territorial ambitions, the obvious alternative explanation is that this is about personal grandeur. If the Nobel Peace Prize is inexplicably unavailable, Trump could at least get his face carved on the side of Mount Rushmore by expanding American territory.
The notion that the president simply wants to enlarge America’s square footage became more plausible after his now notorious phone call with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. She is believed to have offered Trump more or less anything he might want, short of sovereignty over Greenland. The US could have more military bases or rights over minerals. But he was not placated. He wanted Greenland itself.
Trump’s hopes to take over Canada or Gaza still seem implausible. But the Panama Canal and Greenland are more vulnerable: American military force would be overwhelming if deployed against the Panamanians or the Danes.
With the US, Russia and China led by men with expansionist ambitions, the implications are bleak for the current international system. The world may be moving from an era where smaller countries could claim the protection of international law to one in which, as Thucydides put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
Such a world might be compatible with an uneasy peace between the great powers, based around spheres of influence — with the US concentrating on the western hemisphere, Russia on eastern Europe and China on east Asia. During the 19th century, the great powers even held conferences to divide up the world — such as the 1884-1885 gathering in Berlin, which took place at the height of the “scramble for Africa”.
But any such carve-up would be inherently unstable. The great power understandings of the 19th century eventually crumbled away into the world wars of the 20th century.
The rise of imperialist ideologies also has implications for domestic politics. Empires tend to have emperors. Putin and Xi’s expansionist foreign policies go hand in hand with a cult of personality at home and political repression. Trump’s overseas ambitions are combined with an intense focus on crushing “the enemy within”.
Elon Musk, who is doing much of the crushing, has said that he thinks about the fate of the Roman empire every day and suggested that America might need a “modern-day Sulla” — a Roman dictator who murdered hundreds of his opponents, while reforming the state. You have been warned.
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