Five days before his Inauguration, Donald Trump had a tense phone call with the Prime Minister of Denmark and made clear that he wanted to take possession of the self-governing Danish island of Greenland. In his Inauguration speech, Trump declared, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” Meanwhile, he’s said repeatedly that he intends to take back control of the Panama Canal, and that Canada should become a U.S. state. Over the weekend, he announced tariffs and sanctions on Colombia after the close American ally said that it would not accept American planes full of deported migrants. (The Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, backed down on Sunday night, agreeing to accept the planes.)
Often considered an inward-looking nationalist or even isolationist in his first term, Trump has been sounding these notes of aggression and expansion quite a bit lately. It’s still too early to decipher exactly what Trump intends for his second term, but his increasingly militaristic comments have concerned foreign allies and led to questions about what the next four years could look like in terms of how America exerts power abroad.
To talk about Trump’s approach to foreign policy, I recently spoke by phone with Greg Grandin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Yale, and the author of the forthcoming book “America, América: A New History of the New World.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump should never have been seen as an isolationist, whether he has a consistent vision of the national interest, and how his remarks about Panama are part of a long historical tradition.
I don’t want to fall into the trap of reading Trump’s speeches too closely, but is there anything different about the way Trump has been talking about foreign policy, and about foreign affairs, compared to how he did in 2016, and throughout his first term?
Well, obviously there are a lot of continuities, such as the threats of using tariffs in order to advance national interests, and his focus on China. But I think what’s different, and what we saw clearly in the Inaugural Address, was that, while there were still plenty of notes of aggrieved nationalism and talk of betrayal, there were moments where it seemed like he was searching for a more rousing, or more invigorating, vision of the nation. And what that often means in the United States is some kind of invocation of the frontier. In Trump’s case, he clearly linked it not just to new frontiers in, say, science or space. He explicitly linked it to a return to territorial expansionism. And there’s not that much territory left to divvy up. But I think he’s looking for more of a rallying cry, and he thinks he’s found it in the well-worn image of the frontier.
When was the last time an American President spoke this way?
I would distinguish between the frontier as a general metaphor, and a frontier of actual territory. The last time a President actually spoke of the frontier as actual territory—I mean, I don’t even think William McKinley, before going to war with Spain, and taking Cuba and the Philippines, talked about Manifest Destiny as the taking of actual territory. I think you’d have to go back to James Polk, and Mexico, and Texas; he identified the future acquisition of new territory as a key to American prosperity, welfare, and destiny. Certainly after the Civil War, as the United States was wrapping up the conquest of the West, Presidents would reference filling out our nation in that way.
Trump is an admirer of Andrew Jackson, and was often talked about as a Jacksonian in his first term. Did that make sense to you?
Yeah, they made a big deal about Andrew Jackson, and there was much invocation of Jackson in the sense that he was the first populist President, the first anti-élite President. He swung open the doors to the White House, and he let the people in, and he expanded the franchise to all white men. But now it seems we hear more about McKinley. Trump reinstated the name Mount McKinley [the mountain was called Denali], and he likes McKinley’s tariffs. In Jackson, he taps into one variant of U.S. political nationalism that defines freedom as freedom from restraint—that white men define their freedom as freedom from government control. I think Jackson is the avatar of that.
McKinley, I think, is an avatar of other aspects that Trump is now trying to expand into. McKinley was the President who basically presided over the leap from territorial expansion on the continent into the Pacific, and into the Caribbean, with the Spanish-American War of 1898. And, simultaneously, he is most known for building an enormous tariff wall to help U.S. industry by keeping out European and British manufacturers. I think Trump identifies with McKinley more in terms of the tariffs. I don’t know how aware he is of the politics of the War of 1898.
I have a guess.
But, importantly, the War of 1898 was a qualitative leap in the justification of war. It was the first war that was explicitly fought in the name of human rights. Spain was waging such a ruthless counterinsurgency in Cuba and Puerto Rico that the United States invoked human rights as one of the justifications for going in. As the story goes, McKinley fell down on his knees the night before he made his decision to go to war, and he asked God what he should do, and God said, Go in and save Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
This reminds me of George W. Bush in some ways, but not at all of Trump. When you were explaining Trump’s vision earlier, there were ways in which I thought of Bush, but really it’s very distinct, certainly in the rhetoric.
Yeah, I think that’s right. Bush was very careful, despite lapsing occasionally into cowboy talk, of presenting his vision of a global war on terror as an advancement of liberal values, or universal values, and this, I think, was the neoconservative project in full, and I think that that’s why you see so many of the Never Trumpers come out of that movement.
Trump is fusing this use of American power, which the neoconservatives and George W. Bush had no qualms about, to a much more aggressive vision of national interest. You can say what you want about the old liberal order; it at least rested on the presumption that the starting point of diplomacy was that nations had mutual interest, and that coöperation was the way to proceed. Trump is saying the exact opposite. Trump is saying that the international order rests on dominance, on asserting one’s national interests. It’s an older vision of international relations. I think it’s a dangerous vision.
I agree. But does he have a conception of the national interest beyond lining his own pockets?
I agree that it’s likely, on one level, a complete grab bag. Somebody used the image of a plane of drunk billionaires flying into Las Vegas. That’s the Inauguration. Everybody’s getting ready to just grab what they can. The Trump coin, the Melania coin. It’s hard to process everything that’s happening. I think Trump is venal. I think that he is obviously out to enrich himself, and his family. In some ways, it is a vision of a kind of patriarchal capitalism which has now triumphed, and in which Trump is the paterfamilias and the family is the nation.
On the other hand, though, I have to say, if you go back—Trump has a Times op-ed on why he left the Reform Party, in 2000. It’s actually a quite sane op-ed. He has been consistently anti-free trade since the beginning, and he’ll always get that in. He’ll always be, like, Well, Reagan was a great President. I didn’t like some of his trade treaties.
