How the Trump-Putin summit signals a return to imperial thinking

Boston Globe

2 days ago

The term was first popularized by Gerard Libaridian, an Armenian American historian, who used it in a 2014 speech in England to refer to former empires like Iran, Turkey and Russia as they sought to influence post-Soviet states they had once controlled. In his view, it describes an approach that lingers in many a national psyche, fusing a simplistic nostalgia for greatness to strong beliefs about the right to keep dominating smaller nations and neighbors.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the idea has gained momentum, usually in reference to Putin's Russia. And Trump's assertive second term -- with his threats to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal, make Canada the 51st state and send U.S. troops into Mexico -- has spurred new accusations from historians and world leaders that his demands for deference reflect an imperial mentality.
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Trump has hardly been consistent. He has often condemned foreign intervention and 'stupid wars' while bombing Iran and expressing ambivalence about U.S. alliances and the defense of vulnerable democracies like Taiwan.
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Still, there's perhaps something imperial -- or at least a version of great-power behavior with some additional traits -- in his talk of 'land swaps' to bring peace in Ukraine over the country's own objections.
'There's been a powerful 'countries don't resolve their differences by annexing' norm that's held for a while, and Putin is obviously pushing on that,' said Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University and the author of 'How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.' 'And Trump seems very comfortable with a reversion to the old rules.'
The imperial mindset, of course, has never been confined to real estate. It is a mental framework for policy and the projection of power. It is a belief system with a long menu. And as the Trump-Putin meeting commences, historians and diplomats argue that the Alaska summit has already legitimized at least three imperial ideas that many had thought were buried in the past.
1. Core vs. periphery
This week's summit was announced as an insider's affair: Ukrainian and European leaders were not invited.
That exclusion set off a week of frantic diplomacy, yielding assurances from Trump that he is going to do more listening than deciding. But the two-man meeting remains. The European Union has been relegated to secondary status.
Many still fear another Yalta, when the world's superpowers divvied up Europe in 1945 after the defeat of Nazi Germany, with the most-affected countries kept from the room where it happened. For Poland, it was not the first time, either.
'Between 1792 and 1795, Poland was divided three times by the great powers of the day: Austria, Prussia and Russia,' said Amitav Acharya, the author of a new book 'The Once and Future World Order.'
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In such carving lies the imperial idea of the core vs. the periphery.
Empires are hierarchies of subordination, scholars note. Power stays concentrated at the center, while the edges are forced to accept fewer rights and privileges, purportedly in exchange for 'civilization' or enrichment.
The Romans resisted extending citizenship to conquered peoples. The French rebuffed requests for small measures of self-rule in Vietnam. In Puerto Rico and Guam, which the United States acquired after the Spanish-American War of 1898, residents are still not granted the same democratic representation as mainland Americans.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has already experienced a moment steeped in great-power dynamics -- and subordination -- when Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated him for his lack of gratitude for U.S. military aid during a televised White House visit in February.
'You're not in a good position,' Trump told him. 'You don't have the cards.'
In other words, he suggested, Ukraine is too weak to be anything but an appendage.
Now Ukraine's leaders fear that the summit is strengthening the idea that only a few major powers make decisions for the world. Any attempt to turn their country of nearly 40 million people into a bystander in its own future is especially sensitive, historians say, because Ukrainian identity centers on the principle 'nothing about us without us.'
2. Supremacy and self-aggrandizement
The imperial mindset, from the Crusades onward through Europe's royals and Asia's emperors, frequently involves a strong belief in cultural and often racial supremacy.
European colonizers justified brutal actions and grand larceny of national treasures by claiming they were saving souls or protecting valuables from damage and decay.
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Imperial-minded leaders throughout history have also cast themselves as the embodiment of greatness -- superhumans at the apex of superior nations that must be honored by all.
Putin has become an updated version of that self-aggrandizing, imperial urge.
A few years ago, he directly compared himself to Peter the Great, Russia's first emperor. Former diplomats in Russia have said that he has often fostered ideas of messianic imperialism, seeking to make Ukraine and many other neighboring countries a part of grander Russia.
'The Russian imperial mindset is alive and well in Russia,' said Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and the author of several books on Putin.
Acharya, who teaches international relations at American University in Washington, said the summit, which Putin requested, harks back to a world order when great powers carved up states for 'the personal glory of their rulers.'
Trump appears in some ways to also be headed that way. Although he has still focused his attention more at home than abroad, he has encouraged a blurring of the lines between patriotism and his own cult of personality. He sells coins with his face on the front. Gwenda Blair, who wrote the definitive biography of the Trump family, likened his second inauguration to a king's return. On his 79th birthday, he spent the day soaking up the scene at a military parade that he had personally ordered up -- ostensibly to mark the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, but arguably for his own honor as well.
His family business, meanwhile, is putting the Trump name on real estate projects all over the world, leading some countries to bend their own rules for his favor.
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Europeans see his acceptance of the summit -- on U.S. soil -- as a gift to Russia's leader that validates his viewpoint.
3. Economic empirecraft
The British East India Co., a powerful trading company, was the tip of the spear for British colonialism. America's interventions in Latin America to protect big U.S. companies like United Fruit came later.
Both are examples of the kind of top-down, less market-driven relationship among trade, business and the state that in some ways seems to be making a comeback in Russia and the United States.
Then and now, the melding of power politics and commerce can take on a few forms.
Chinese emperors relied on state monopolies for key products like salt -- not unlike Russia's state-owned energy companies or China's state-owned conglomerates.
The British crown did not typically direct businesses but often took a stake in the companies that were extracting wealth from overseas -- similar to Trump's demand that the United States be given a share in future revenues from Ukraine's mineral reserves in return for its military aid.
Trump's dangling of an offer to lift sanctions on Russia, and his threat to add 'very severe tariffs' to Russia's trading partners if Putin does not agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, also fits an imperial mindset model. In these cases and others, he is merging national and corporate interests and prioritizing wealth as a tool to shape the global order.
Now, in Alaska, the U.S.-Russia relationship has been set up more as a business deal than a contest of philosophies. Both presidents are motivated by their own ideas of past greatness. Trump insists peace is the goal. Territory, for both leaders, is apparently the means.
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Ukraine and the rest of the world now have to wait to hear about whatever the two men discussed.
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