The New American Imperialism

The Strong Doing Whatever Dumb Thing They Want

I should be clear up front here that I have nothing substantive to say about the recent ideas floated in Trumpworld to annex the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, and to launch a special military operation to de-cartelize Mexico. They’re all absurdist and defy any measured consideration of their merits. It’s all stupid.

I highly doubt any of these things come to fruition as Trump and his administration are already a shambolic infighting mess before he’s even taken office—wherein this amounts to mere sound and fury, rather than serious policy proposals. It’s not as though we don’t already have a decade of meaningless erratic tweets from Trump.

However, it’s worth noting what it says about something that might be called the central idea illuminating his foreign policy which could be called a New American Imperialism.

His national security team thus far in my opinion has three main traits that he’s been selecting for. First is that they fundamentally have no regard for even maintaining a pretense of international law or America’s adherence to international norms. The idea that America should not be restrained by international systems dates back to his first administration, with his former National Security Advisor John Bolton having once famously proclaimed that all international laws are invalid, meaningless attempts to constrain American power.

People like Pete Hegseth or Elbridge Colby are fundamentally no different from this stance. Hegseth is a notable defender of every war criminal that the United States military has (rightfully) found guilty, and Colby has made his living with vague musing on how the United States should bomb TSMC factories.

The second idea underpinning his national security agenda is that the United States has no actual commitments to other countries themselves. When it comes to bilateral relations built up and formalized through legal treaties, none of it matters. In the model of the German Chancellor who once sneeringly referred to Britain’s obligation to defend Belgium as a mere scrap of paper—Trump’s vision of America is of a country that has no actual formal obligation to anything.

With his views towards tariffs or his seeming interest in unilateral military operations targeting allied countries, he’s clearly signaling that his administration has no regard for legal treaties that have been ratified. The Special Military Operation to Decartelize Mexico for instance would be a blatantly illegal military operation, as would any invasion of the Panama Canal. Setting aside the first point about international law, we have treaties with these countries themselves. Similarly, with tariffs on Canada or Mexico, we have a trade deal with them already that he himself fucking negotiated.

A willingness to not give a shit about American guarantees of security for other treaties we’ve negotiated—for instance NATO—is also a clear aspect of this tendency. To his incoming national security team, things like NATO are seen entirely through a prism of whether or not America can extract concessions to increase our own power, and if they don’t, they have no value.

The third (and possibly most important) part of the qualifiers for his national security team is that all choices have to be weighed in terms of how they would most directly economically benefit the United States in a zero-sum sense. While obviously, all States attempt to engage in economically beneficial behavior—his team sees all economic behavior as a zero-sum activity that either enhances or weakens American power.

I’d put it this way. Most people would say we should defend Taiwan because we have a shared set of ideals around liberal democracy, and the United States should work to protect that. We’d probably also mostly agree that TSMC is a vitally important corporation, and it would be bad if the global supply of semiconductors was interrupted. Both of those things can be true.

However, I think most of us don’t just view the Taiwanese people through a prism of how they can best benefit the American people. We don’t see Taipei in the same way the British saw Capetown. It isn’t an economic colony exporting semiconductors back to the Imperial homeland. For Trump’s team (and I’m thinking of Elbridge Colby here) the defense of Taiwan is mostly a product of defending American economic interests—ideals mean nothing. Taiwan is disposable the second another source of semiconductors becomes available.

It is to reduce the citizenry of non-American countries to little more than rational economic units that are partitioned among Great Powers. It is nothing more than the imperial logic of the 19th Century wherein the United States must exert power so that we control a share of the economic output of the Globe. In my opinion, this also underpins stuff like Greenland—it is merely a piece of real estate to be mined for resources.

Rather than standing by our legal or ideological obligations, everything is now transparently a coercive short-term game of extracting concessions to increase our power. It is—much like Russia under Putin—a return to Imperialism of the old school and a complete repudiation of the international system established in the 20th century.

The national security agenda of the Trump administration is now that the strong can do what they want—and since we’re the strongest—everything is up for sale, renegotiation, or annexation. The weak? Well. Fuck them.