Trump’s Foreign Policy: Resurrecting Empire
“President Trump’s foreign policy, characterized by aggressive actions and reliance on force, is seen as a revival of imperialistic ambitions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference emphasized the importance of Western civilization and its history of expansion, sparking concerns about the implications for international relations, particularly in the Global South. Critics argue that this celebration of empire is out of place in a decolonized world and could have significant consequences.
President Trump’s approach is a revival of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples.
By Edward Wong
Edward Wong has reported on the Iraq War, the rise of China and U.S. foreign policy. He covered Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to Europe this month.
President Trump’s foreign policy has veered wildly across the globe, but has remained consistent in its aggressive nature and reliance on the use of force.
He has seized the leader of Venezuela while claiming the country’s oil and attacking nearby civilian boats. He has pushed Cuba into a humanitarian crisisthrough a blockade, and asserted a right to control Canada and Greenland. And he has amassed the largest U.S. military force in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, threatening a new war against Iran after attacks last June.
Mr. Trump calls his policy “America First” — a stated focus on U.S. interests as he defines them. But it is not isolationism or a retreat from the world, as some analysts have argued. Nor has it manifested yet in a push to create “spheres of influence,” where the administration would be content to dominate only the Western Hemisphere and leave other regions to rival powers.
From one perspective, it is a resurrection of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples — that animated European and other well-armed powers up to the 20th century. It is also an embrace, and even a celebration, of Western imperial histories.
In his inauguration speech last year, Mr. Trump praised President William McKinley, who transformed the United States into an overseas empire during the Spanish-American War by acquiring the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.
Mr. Trump’s form of American primacy was most clearly articulated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month in a speech at the Munich Security Conference.
“For five centuries, before the end of the second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Mr. Rubio told an audience of mostly European officials.
Then, after 1945, when World War II ended and Europe was in ruins, “the West” was “contracting,” Mr. Rubio said.
He condemned anticolonial independence movements, linking them to Communist ideology and blaming them for eroding Western power. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anticolonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map,” he said.
Mr. Rubio then said the Trump administration did not want allies “shackled by guilt and shame,” using the same language as Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the German hard-right party.
“We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it,” he said.
Later in the speech, he warned of “civilizational erasure.”
Mr. Rubio got a standing ovation. His speech, while brimming with harsh criticism of European nations, evoked the shared history of the United States and Europe. For some historians and American conservatives, the speech also encapsulated ideas about liberalism and the decline of the West that were expressed decades earlier by the right-wing writers James Burnham and Pat Buchanan.
As Mr. Trump pushes bellicose actions — he threatens war against Iran almost daily, and spoke of Greenland again last weekend — some analysts have looked to Mr. Rubio’s speech as a sign of things to come.
“Rubio accurately reflected where Trump’s foreign policy stands today,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian of American power at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Despite widespread fears that Trump might pull back from the world, he is working to reinvigorate U.S. military dominance across the board. It’s America First globalism. Far from exiting alliances, Trump is weaponizing them as platforms for coercion.”
The celebration of empire would have been normal in Europe in the early 20th century, “but it is out of place in a world that has decolonized and democratized,” Mr. Wertheim said.
Nader Hashemi, a scholar of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, said that as Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio push their imperial policies, “the consequences for international relations will be enormous, especially in the Global South, where the political identity of most nation-states was formed in the context of a decolonization struggle against Western imperialism.”
“In the Arab-Islamic world,” he added, “extremist forces will exploit this development to attract new recruits.” And Russia and China could benefit, after decades of trying to rally other countries to their side by criticizing what they have called American imperialism.
The State Department did not reply to an email with questions.
Speaking about his homeland, Mr. Rubio waxed rhapsodic about American and European colonialists working hand-in-hand to claim territory: “German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse” in the Midwest, and “French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley.”
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, also hailed his ancestors from Italy and Spain.
The “empty plains” are, of course, a myth: Native Americans lived there for millennia before they were killed and subjugated by settler colonialists. Not once did Mr. Rubio mention the many millions murdered, tortured and imprisoned in the wars waged around the world in the name of empire.
Nor did he nod to the imperial institution of slavery and the role of enslaved Africans in building the United States, from the colonial era to the Civil War. He also avoided discussing the living legacies of empire in the West, including the many immigrants from former colonized nations and descendants of slaves who have shaped their countries.
Some historians said Mr. Rubio was perhaps the only top U.S. official in recent decades to celebrate empire in such an explicit manner.
“Celebrating the U.S. as heir to Western civilization is nothing new, but at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt, presidents and diplomats speak of the United States as an enemy of empire and imperialism,” said John Delury, a historian who has written about U.S. and East Asian foreign policies.
“Textbooks have been updated to acknowledge how ‘explorers’ enslaved people as chattel labor, ‘missionaries’ erased Indigenous cultures and religions, and ‘pioneers’ dispossessed native peoples of their homes and livelihoods,” he added.
Constanze Stelzenmüller, the director of the Center on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said the paean to empire was particularly striking to officials and analysts at the Munich conference who came from former colonized nations. “They were saying, ‘This is astounding,’” she said. At the same time, she added, some officials took the attitude of: “OK, the U.S. is reverting to type, and at least you’re being honest.”
Ms. Stelzenmüller said that celebrating empire has not been central to discourse on the European hard-right, which is often appealed to by top Trump aides. So it was puzzling, she added, why Mr. Rubio used those lines. The aim might have been to normalize the idea of unstoppable American power and expansion, including over Greenland, she said.
“I think this language may be part of an attempt to condition Europeans into acceptance — that they’re powerless to resist whatever expansionist designs the administration might have,” Ms. Stelzenmüller argued.
Michael Kimmage, the director of the Kennan Institute, a center for research on Eurasia, said that Mr. Rubio was activating a counter-tradition of foreign policy that arose on the American right during the 1950s and 1960s.
The ideas were most vividly expressed by National Review and one of its columnists, Mr. Burnham, who wrote a book, “The Suicide of the West,” that was a critique of modern liberalism and a “lament for the loss of empire,” as Mr. Kimmage put it.
Mr. Rubio’s evocation of a “contracting” West echoed Mr. Burnham.
“He identified immigration and loss of civilizational self-confidence as the core problems of a post-imperial West,” Mr. Kimmage said. “Rubio is clearly reworking these ideas. The ideas themselves are not new. What’s new is that they’re now being espoused from the State Department and the White House, as they had not been for the past seven decades.”
Andrew Day, a writer for The American Conservative, which advocates non-interventionism, said he thought Mr. Rubio was underscoring the Trump administration’s policy of bolstering pride in Western civilization — an admirable project with poor execution, in his view — rather than endorsing empire.
“I sincerely doubt that Rubio was promoting a return to imperialism and colonialism,” he said. “Rather, he was pointing to a certain cultural malaise and lack of self-confidence that Westerners suffer from.”
But Mr. Day noted that conservative restrainers remained skeptical of Mr. Rubio, whom they see as a hawkish advocate of American global hegemony. The secretary of state has recently pushed for actions against Venezuela, Cuba and Iran.
“They believed Rubio was putting civilizational lipstick on a neoconservative pig, so to speak,” Mr. Day said.
That crowd is also suspicious of Europe, he added, and believes the administration’s “‘Western civilizational’ framework is grandiose and internationalist, and thus incompatible with a sharp focus on America’s national interests.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.“
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