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Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
How the Trump-Putin summit signals a return to imperial thinking
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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement Ukraine and the rest of the world now have to wait to hear about whatever the two men discussed. This article originally appeared in
The Guardian
06-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump might want to revive America's imperial heyday – but does his base?
Donald Trump's proposal that the US take ownership of the Gaza Strip, expel and resettle the people there, and turn Gaza into a 'Riviera of the Middle East' has outraged Palestinians, shocked the international community and even confused many of his own conservative voters. Yet the announcement seems like yet another sign that the president, while sometimes distancing himself from the neoconservative foreign policies that entangled the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, is willing to pursue – or at least entertain pursuing – an undisguised US imperialism that has more in common with the expansionism of Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, the 19th and early-20th century presidents associated with some of American's most brazen and violent conquests. 'Trump seems to have a scorn for the subtler forms of power projection that post-1945 US presidents have used, and seems to be very interested in naked displays of force or economic might,' Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern and the author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, said. Trump's proposal – which administration officials attempted to walk back on Wednesday – comes on the heels of a tumultuous couple of weeks in which he also demanded that Denmark sell Greenland to the US, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, started abortive tariff wars with Mexico and Canada, and suggested that Canada should become 'our 51st state'. As is common with Trump, commentators have often been unsure whether to interpret his saber-rattling as serious policy proposals, trolling, attempts to stake out outrageous negotiating positions that he will then walk back, or undisciplined off-the-wall musings. But with Gaza in ruins after 16 months of Israeli bombardment, and Benjamin Netanyahu – who was recently charged with war crimes by the international criminal court – present for the announcement, Trump's Gaza proposal seems gravely serious. Members of the Israeli right have talked about cleansing Gaza of Palestinians for years, said Peter Beinart, the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. 'And now Trump … is taking this idea from the Israeli right but adding his own strange and ugly return to the kind of naked imperialism of the 19th and early 20th century, when the United States was in a business of basically seizing territories.' Palestinians in Gaza are vehemently opposed to leaving. Displacing them against their will would violate international laws and could constitute a war crime. It would also require neighboring Arab and Muslim states to accept millions of new Palestinian refugees, an idea they immediately and sharply rejected. During his press conference, Trump said that the US 'will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too'. He went on: 'I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East,' adding: 'Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.' The idea seemed to echo comments from March last year, when Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, said: 'Gaza's waterfront property could be very valuable.' 'It's infuriating to listen to President Trump talk about the removal of Palestinians from Palestine and the ownership over their land, the acquisition of their territory by force, as if it was a business transaction and not a violation of very core principles of international law,' said Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American human rights attorney and professor at Rutgers. Trump's expansionist designs would seem to flout the America First isolationism that much of his base supports. But Immerwahr noted that Trump has never really been strictly isolationist. Immerwahr added that he doubted many of Trump's voters support these kinds of aggressive foreign policy moves, even when they concern what Trump might call the US's backyard: 'Even with Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal Zone, it is just far from clear to me how much autonomous support there has been from the Maga base.' While the Israeli right has been thrilled about Trump's proposal, US conservatives seemed divided or unsure of how to react – perhaps reflective of wider ideological splits between traditional Republican hawks and Republican voters tired of US adventurism overseas. Some Republican members of Congress refused to rule out the idea, while Senator Rand Paul wrote online: 'The pursuit for peace should be that of the Israelis and the Palestinians. I thought we voted for America First.' Occupying Gaza 'sounds like a terrible idea for a number of reasons', someone wrote more plainly on a conservative forum on Reddit, 'chiefly that it has zero value and [sounds like] a huge expense and I want my money in my pocket, not in the Middle East'. Immerwahr thinks that Trump is attracted to territories he believes are blank slates or can be folded into a larger white America. During his first term, Trump mused about the US divesting of Puerto Rico or trading it for Greenland. 'If you were to ask what links the Panama Canal Zone, Canada, Greenland, and a Gaza that has been emptied of Palestinians and rendered into a 'Riviera', I think you could say that in Trump's fantasies these places are all symbolically white, or could be symbolically white … either because the Indigenous population seems sparse and there seems to be a lot of land for settlement or other kind of infrastructure projects, or because, in the case of the Panama Canal, that is historically a zone that was controlled by the United States and dominated by [white Americans].' Meanwhile, some elements of the so-called new right, a formerly fringe conservative intellectual movement with ties to Silicon Valley, have praised Trump's expansionist tendencies. A recent Politico piece noted that some new right theorists believe that buying Greenland would revitalize the US 'frontier spirit' that they believe spiritually fueled the US in previous centuries. 'In terms of Trump's bluster, Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson are the obvious parallels who kind of delight in the capabilities that come with US military might,' Immerwahr said. A better parallel might be the 19th century, however, when the US continually seized territory, but focused its colonialism on areas where white settlement seemed viable. Until as late as the 1950s, 'the logic is that white settlement is the magic dust that would be sprinkled on a territory that would make it eligible for inclusion in the union.' Beinart feels that Trump's indifference to precedents and norms, combined with a 'complete lack of any moral compass', mean that he doesn't even see any problems with the idea of rebuilding Gaza as a US colony. 'It just doesn't occur to him that there's something monstrous about the idea of sending US weapons to utterly destroy a territory,' Beinart said, 'and then saying: 'Oh gosh, it looks like it really sucks there now, people should have to leave.''
