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The president-elect—who pushed for an invasion of Mexico during his first term—has spent the month leading up to next week’s inauguration posting about inviting Canada to join the United States, refusing to rule out using military force to coerce Denmark into selling (or giving away) Greenland, and pledging to take back the Panama Canal Zone—which the United States gave back as part of a 1979 treaty. Republicans and their allies have quickly fallen in line. Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. recently took a day trip to Greenland. Some conservatives have likened the threatened acquisitions to the Alaska and the Louisiana Purchase.
Is this just a tired throwback to the country’s empire-building past, or a recognition of something new? To understand Trump’s recent rhetoric, I spoke with Daniel Immerwahr, a professor of history at Northwestern University, whose 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States told the story of America’s imperial past and present.
What did you think when you saw President-elect Trump announce that he was thinking of trying to acquire—somehow—Greenland?
Here we go again. We’ve literally gone through all of this. We’ve gone through it in the US—presidents used to be quite interested in acquiring strategically relevant bits of land, and there’s a long history of that. We’ve also gone through it with Donald Trump, because he did that during his first term: He threatened to acquire Greenland. Historians were consulted: “Has this happened? When was the last time this happened?” It was a lot of bluster then, or at least I think it was a lot of bluster; I didn’t get the sense that the US military was poised to do anything dramatic, and I didn’t get the sense that the Danish government was interested in selling. So the question remains right now: Is this a new historical moment where new things are possible? (And there’s some reasons to think that perhaps, yes it is.) Or is this Trump doing what Trump does so well, which is winding up liberals by proposing outrageous things.
Before Trump, was Greenland on the radar of American imperialists?
Greenland got much more interesting to the United States in the age of aviation, because if you draw the shortest plane routes from the continental United States to, for example, the Soviet Union, you’ll find that some of them passed near or over Greenland. So Greenland was an important Cold War site.
The United States stored nuclear weapons there. It also overflew weapons over Greenland:What that means is that planes would be kept aloft and ready to scramble into action in case the alarm was sounded. The film Dr. Strangelove has footage of such planes over Greenland.
There’s also a history of nuclear accidents on Greenland.
Nuclear accidents?
Three planes in the 1950s made emergency landings on Greenland while carrying hydrogen bombs. Something went wrong and the planes sort of skidded into a stop. In 1968 a B-52 flying over Greenland with four Mk-22 hydrogen bombs, didn’t land, it just crashed at more than 500 miles an hour, leaving a trail of debris five miles long. Jet fuel ignited and all of the bombs exploded. What happened in these cases is the bombs were destroyed in the process, but did not detonate. However, it was a near miss, and it is thinkable, given how bombs were constructed, that crashing into the ice at 500 miles an hour would have detonated bombs. You can see why [having nuclear weapons on the island] was a dangerous proposition for Europeans, and particularly for people in Greenland.
One of the other big announcements recently was Trump promising to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” You wrote in your book that the term America only really came into vogue as a shorthand around the time of Theodore Roosevelt. What’s the connection between that name and this sense of empire?
There was some—not a huge amount, but some—discussion in the early republic of what should the shorthand be. Columbia was a literary term that people used and showed up in a lot of 19th century anthems. Freedonia was tried out, as “the land of free,” but what’s interesting is that, from our perspective, the obvious shorthand—“America”—was not the dominant shorthand to refer to the United States throughout the 19th century. One reason for that is that leaders in the United States were fully aware that they were occupying a part of America and that there were other parts of America too. There were other republics in the Americas.
It’s not until the very end of the 19th century that you start seeing “America” as the dominant shorthand. A big reason for that is that right at the end of the 19th century, the United States started acquiring large, populous overseas territories, such that a lot of the previous shorthand—the Union, the Republic, the United States—seemed inaccurate descriptions of the political character in the country.
So “America” is an imperialist turn in two senses. One is that it suggests that this one country in the Americas is somehow the whole of the Americas—as if Germans decided that they were going to be henceforth “Europeans” and that everyone was going to have to be an English-European or French-European or Polish-European, and only Germans were “Europeans.” It’s also imperialist in a sense that it arose at a time when people were questioning what the political character of the United States would be, and were questioning whether the addition of colonies made the United States no longer really a republic, a union, or a set of states.
Trump said recently he was going to “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.” How does what he’s doing—and the way that he talks about what he’s doing—compare to what William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were saying and doing in the late 19th century?
In one way, it compares cleanly, because there was a long era in US history—and it wasn’t just McKinley and Roosevelt; it was up until them and a little bit after—where, when the United States got more powerful, it got larger. Power expressed itself in the acquisition of territory. The United States annexed lands—contiguous lands from the Louisiana Purchase, and overseas lands; the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and so forth. That’s the history that Trump is invoking, and he’s imagining himself participating in.
The age of US overseas colonization was also a time when other “Great Powers” were colonizing overseas territories in Africa and Asia. It’s just not clear to me that we are in the kind of moment where we’re going to start seeing the most powerful countries snapping up colonies, as they used to do. Trump is pointing to that moment, but it’s not clear to me, for example, how many in his base are really strongly motivated by this. It’s not clear how many other Republicans care about this beyond caring about loyalty to Trump’s whims. So it’s not obvious that this is a social movement so much as a way to wind up Trump’s opponents and possibly distract them.
Is there a lesson for Trump and the Trump administration in how that era of expansionism wound down, and the backlash to it?
There’s two things that made empire of that colonial nature much rarer by the later 20th century. One was a global anti-colonial revolt that started in the 19th century but climaxed after World War II, and just made it much harder for would-be colonizers to hold or take new colonies. The other is that powerful countries, including the United States, sought to find new pathways for the projection of power that would not involve the annexation of territories—in part because they realized that a world where every country in order to guarantee its security and express its power by annexing territories would create a situation where large countries would clash with each other.
So the two lessons, I would say, from the Age of Empire are that it’s extremely cruel to those who are colonized because they’re subject to a foreign government which usually doesn’t have their interests in mind. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous because it sets large powers against each other in a way that can quickly lead to war. And if the wars in the early first half of the 20th century were extraordinarily bloody wars, at least, they did not involve both sides’ nuclear exchanges as 21st-century versions of those wars might involve.
The Trump administration in the first go-around seemed to run up against another piece of this, which was that it didn’t really like having to deal with Puerto Rico. It didn’t like having to fund the reconstruction of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In fact, you had people referring to Puerto Rico as a different country. Is that part of this turn away from empire—not wanting to have to deal with the people you’ve colonized?
There’s always been an argument, even among imperialists, about whether the burdens of empire are worth the advantages. Racism has sometimes acted as a break on empire. You’ll find moments, including in US history, where expansionists would like to, for example, end a war between the United States and Mexico by taking a huge part of Mexico, and then racists will say, “Oh no, no, no; if we take more of Mexico, we will therefore take more Mexicans.” And that kind of debate happened again and again in the 19th century in the United States, and in the early 20th century.
You can see it playing out in Trump’s mind, because on the one hand, he is at least dispositionally an expansionist, and he threatens to march US borders over various other places in the Western Hemisphere. On the other hand, Trump clearly imagines the United States as a contiguous place that you can build a high wall around. And he is quite hostile to foreigners.
When he talks about Puerto Rico during the first administration, we have reports from within the Trump administration saying that Trump wanted to sell Puerto Rico off. So those are, in some ways, the two warring impulses in Trump’s minds, and they actually match pretty well some of the dominant impulses in the 19th and early 20th century US leaders: On the one hand, a desire to create more territory; on the other hand, a deep worry about incorporating more people, particularly non-white people, within the United States.
I would love to say that that is a past predicament, and that we are far beyond it, because we no longer have the annexation desires nor the exclusionary racism that drove it. But Trump seems to be at least instinctively resurrecting both.
Did you see the map that he shared on Truth Social?
I’m looking at it now. So let’s talk about this map. This is a map of the United States that imagines that its borders extend to Canada and encompass Canada, but also imagines that the United States’ borders do not include Puerto Rico. So it’s a vision of a larger United States and a whiter United States. And it gets at the contradiction of empire—both a desire among imperialists to expand territory, but also a desire to curate populations within that territory. And you can see this as the ambition of Trump to have a larger United States, but also a smaller United States.
You’ve used the term “pointillist” to describe what the US empire looks like now—with a series of military bases and small territories spread across the world. There’s been an acceptance within the US government of the convenience of that arrangement. How much of this is just a way of talking about strength, separate from an actual plan to do anything?
Trump has often terrible political judgment, but he has interesting political instincts, and he’s often able to see possibilities that other politicians have rejected—to see things that seem outrageous but actually might secure a voting base. A huge question about all of this jingoism that Trump has been delivering is whether it’s just another one of his provocations and just another one of his idiosyncrasies, or whether he’s responding to something real.
If you were making the case that Trump is responding to something real—that the actual conditions and possibility have changed, and we might indeed be entering a new age of territorial empire, where power is expressed through annexing large swaths of lands, not even just controlling small dots—you would point to Ukraine, and you would point to China’s ambitions to seize Taiwan. You might say that we are entering a new age of annexations, and that Trump senses this and often admires the kind of strength that expresses itself in semi-colonial annexations, and sees that as a potential future for the United States.
I’m struck by that, because politicians in both parties like to say that we’re not an empire, which means, at least, that we don’t like to think of ourselves as an empire. And Trump’s sort of saying, actually, maybe we do, and there’s this undercurrent where people do want to think of themselves as such.
Basically, since William McKinley, nearly every President has said some version of “the United States is not an empire; we have no territorial ambitions, we do not covet other people’s territory.” President after president, Democrat and Republican—they all say some version of that. Except for Trump. That’s a liberal piety held not just by Democrats, but Republicans as well, that Trump seems to have no investment in. And I think on that score, he’s correct, because when presidents have said that we’re not an empire, they have always been speaking from a country that has colonies and has territories. So Trump is correct in not going down that pathway, although I think it’s quite dangerous that he sees the denial of empire as not just something to be scoffed at, but something to be rejected defiantly by the pursuit of territorial ambitions.
