Donald Trump, for reasons no one fully apprehends, is preparing for his looming second term by talking like a 19th-century imperialist. At a press conference this week, he pointedly declined to rule out the use of military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal. He has also insisted on renaming the Gulf of Mexico and repeatedly alluded to a takeover of Canada, including using his social-media platform to share an imagined map of the United States consuming its neighbor to the north.
Rationalizing these statements in either moral or strategic terms is challenging. But the conservative columnist Dan McLaughlin is up to the task. “In fact, Trump is sending a message to the world and America’s enemies: We’re serious about protecting the Western Hemisphere—again,” he writes. Trump, he explains, is shrewdly analyzing the strategic importance of the Panama Canal and Greenland and seeking to ward off Chinese influence, and is belittling the sovereign rights of American neighbors in order to scare them into cooperation. It’s all quite strategic. If Metternich had had a social-media account, he probably would have been binge-posting fake images of a European map with a gigantic Austrian empire.
This is a now-familiar ritual in the Trump era. First, Trump says or does something so outrageous that any critic who dreamed it up beforehand would have been mocked as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then his defenders either pretend it didn’t happen, accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, or reimagine Trump’s position as something defensible.
Trump’s cascade of threats has been too loud and insistent for No. 1. Even the most strained historical reading yields little suitable material for a whataboutist defense, making No. 2 a heavy lift. (Joe Biden’s litany of gaffes lacks any military threats against American allies.) This leaves conservatives with no choice but door No. 3: casting Trump’s trolling as a clever geopolitical stratagem.
Trump “starts a negotiation on his terms, starting with the most outlandish demands but with designs on a deal,” McLaughlin writes admiringly. During the first Trump term, some conservatives likewise insisted that his threats to obliterate North Korea were the prelude to some tough dealmaking. The deal turned out to be that North Korea was permitted to continue developing its missile program, but Trump got a prized collection of flattering personalized letters from Kim Jong Un.
McLaughlin is a longtime hawk, so his current stance is unsurprising. More remarkable is the support that Trump’s bout of unprovoked threats has gained from conservative thinkers who otherwise cast themselves as anti-interventionist. Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has written extensively about the failures of the Republican Party’s hawkish faction, notes that the case for invading Greenland is not “sufficient” to outweigh its moral and diplomatic costs. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to reject the notion. “I’m not a war-hawk expansionist,” he said recently on a National Review podcast. “But I don’t think it’s a totally insane idea.” Yes, he granted, “it would be an unjust, aggressive war.” However, “it would be far less costly or dangerous than regime-changing Iran.”
This is an interesting method for evaluating policy ideas: think of a much worse policy idea that is not an alternative, and ask whether it would be worse than that. Repealing the First Amendment might sound risky, but in comparison with, say, blowing up the moon, it seems downright prudent. (You may also recognize this form of reasoning from the periodic conservative argument that “Trump is less dangerous than Hitler.”)
The journal Compact is one of those magazines that have popped up during the Trump era with an apparent, if unstated, mission of reverse-engineering an intellectual superstructure for his populist impulses. Compact’s proprietary formula combines statist left-wing economic policy with social conservatism. And, although its authors don’t agree on everything, it has been fairly insistent about noninterventionism as a foundational principle. The bread and butter of Compact’s foreign-policy line is articles with headlines such as “No to Neoconservatism” and lamenting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave new life to American foreign-policy hawks. (You knew there had to be a downside somewhere.) Matthew Schmitz, one of the magazine’s editors, has called for social conservatives to “cast off the ideology” of interventionism.
And yet, yesterday Compact published an essay celebrating Trump’s imperialist ideology. (Headline: “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland.”) “Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Chris Cutrone writes. “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative.” Greenland, he explains, is strategically valuable, so we should take it. Canada is “the most European part of the Western Hemisphere,” and therefore deserving of geopolitical annihilation. The essay ends on this rousing note: “Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”
It seems paradoxical that anti-interventionist conservatives (and horseshoe-theory Marxists, in Cutrone’s case) would be enthusiastic about naked imperialism, while even ultra-hawks such as John Bolton consider it bellicose and irresponsible. (“It shows Trump, again, not understanding the broader context that his remarks are made in, and the harmful consequences that this is having all across NATO right now,” he told CNN.) The ideological through line appears to be that intervention is wrong when it’s done to spread democracy (Iraq) or protect a democracy (Ukraine), but launching a war against a peaceful democratic ally is somehow reasonable.
The more likely explanation for this paradox is simply that the neoconservatives are the least loyal to Trump of all the conservative factions, and the anti-interventionists the most. And so if loyalty to Trump means developing reasons to favor threats against Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland—none of which poses the slightest danger or was considered even vaguely hostile by Trump’s allies until Trump thought to target them—then, by jingo, reasons will be found.
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Publish date : 2025-01-10 06:15:00
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