When Vladimir Putin daydreams, he imagines himself saluting a phalanx as it goose-steps across central Kyiv. In Donald Trump’s version of the fantasy, he is triumphantly floating through the Panama Canal on a battleship. Both men see themselves recovering lost empires, asserting their place in history by reversing it.
During his first term, Trump set about dismantling the architecture of postwar internationalism by trash-talking and bullying the institutional implements of global cooperation, the likes of NATO and the World Health Organization. This assault on the old order was waged in the name of populism, an attack on elites in foreign capitals who siphoned off taxpayers’ dollars. But what Trump hoped to achieve with these rhetorical fusillades was sometimes unclear, other than pleasing his political base, which adored them.
As Trump enters his second term, those attacks now seem more purposeful. In retrospect, he may have been laying tracks for a more ambitious plan, weakening those institutions so that he could eventually exploit their weakness.
Over the past weeks, he’s declared himself the tribune of a new era of American imperialism, which abandons any pretext of promoting liberal values to the world. In Trump’s newly hatched vision of empire, America stands poised to expand—not just into Panama but into Greenland and outer space—simply because its raw power entitles it to expand. To use the phrase he invoked in his inaugural address, a callback to the 19th-century vision of American imperialism, it is his “manifest destiny.”
This new policy represents a twist in his evolution that makes some of his most ardent supporters look like suckers. MAGA intellectuals and mouthpieces—Tucker Carlson is the paragon—portrayed Trump as a devoted isolationist, a fierce critic of militarism, a leader who would never indulge in foreign adventures. (Writing in Compact, the journalist Christian Parenti exclaimed that Trump “has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”) It turns out that Trump isn’t really a member of the peace party after all.
At a glance, Panama is an odd centerpiece for this vision. Before Trump started wailing about it, there wasn’t any apparent issue with American access to the canal. But Trump has focused on it because of its historic resonance. Reclaiming the Panama Canal is an old obsession of the American right.
In its nostalgic quest to return to a prelapsarian era of the America past, the right used to incessantly harp on the canal. It was, by any ideological measure, a defining symbol of national prowess. In The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough’s epic history of its construction, the author called it “the first grandiose and assertive show of American power at the dawn of the new century … the resolution of a dream as old as the voyages of Columbus.”
But, as McCullough also documents, that triumph came at an immense human cost. By dredging a notch in the earth, many laborers were digging their own grave; they perished in landslides, of rampant heatstroke and malaria and yellow fever. The death toll stoked enduring hatred of the yanqui.
Beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson, American presidents of both parties understood the strategic necessity of handing the canal back. Johnson appreciated this lesson only after dispatching troops to quell anti-American riots in 1964. Presidents knew that if the canal remained an American possession, they would have to repeat Johnson’s intervention; the anger over America’s presence would never subside.
Henry Kissinger poured himself into negotiating an agreement relinquishing the waterway. But only Jimmy Carter had the political courage to push a pair of treaties through the U.S. Senate. In classic Carter fashion, his painstaking efforts brought little domestic political benefit. Indeed, by mobilizing moderate Republicans to support the treaties, he helped doom their careers.
That’s because the insurgent New Right, the faction of the Republican Party that evolved into the modern conservative establishment, appreciated the political upside of demagoguing the issue. As Richard Viguerie, an architect of the right’s emerging infrastructure, put it, “We’re going to ride this hard. It’s a sexy issue. It’s a populist issue.” Running for president in 1976, Ronald Reagan bellowed, “We built it; we paid for it; and we’re going to keep it.” This was a lament for what George Will called America’s “vanished mastery.”
These attacks were highly effective. The New Right bludgeoned the 68 senators who voted to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which helped unseat 20 of them in 1978 and 1980. Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, crowed, “The Panama Canal treaties put us on the map.”
For Ronald Reagan, however, the treaties were merely a campaign talking point. As president, he never sought to reverse Carter’s course. He backed away from the raw nostalgia for empire that he had espoused in the campaign and joined a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, which tended to distance itself from America’s imperial history.
During the Cold War and the era that followed, American presidents justified intervention in foreign conflicts as a means toward the end of defending liberal values, the promotion of democracy, the squelching of communism, and the prevention of genocide. Sometimes this was hypocrisy. Sometimes it was dangerously misguided. But it was also a genuine evolution in values. America no longer used its military might to acquire territories or to blatantly protect its corporations or to acquire precious resources. Interventions were justified in the moral vocabulary of international law.
Donald Trump is abandoning this tradition by describing a Hobbesian world in which the most powerful are given free reign to dominate. If the U.S. wants Greenland’s resources, it has a divine right to them. If it wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico, to suggest the subservience of a neighbor, it can. This type of imperial spirit rarely restricts itself to the rhetorical. Martial threats manifest themselves in martial action. After demolishing the global order, Trump intends to plant his flag on the rubble.
