Eurasia Press & News
The Trump administration’s turn to imperialist rhetoric is symptomatic and reflects the process of the United States’ reverse transfer to the great power status, writes Dmitry Novikov. The thoughts expressed in this article can be considered as an invitation to discuss the nature of current American policy, from a rather non-trivial perspective regarding today’s concepts of imperialism.
“Every expansion of a civilised power is a conquest for peace. It means not only the extension of American influence and power, it means the extension of liberty and order, and the bringing nearer by gigantic strides of the day when peace shall come to the whole earth,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Having taken the reins of power over the country in the early 20th century, Roosevelt played a central role in the rise of American expansionism, the emergence of a quasi-colonial empire at the United States’ disposal, and attempts to forcibly stake out spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere and Asia for Washington – all of which would later be sharply condemned in American foreign policy ideology as an attempt to copy European colonial practices. The Wilsonian tradition that replaced isolationism, associated with Roosevelt’s opponent and ideological adversary, President Woodrow Wilson, preferred a more cunning system of exporting ideas, rules, and institutions to brute force. The short era of American imperialism, a term that has become well established in the American historical tradition, was eventually replaced by the era of a global liberal order, which Washington defended by both persuasion and force of arms until recently.
Donald Trump’s second rise to power has brought back interest in both the era of imperialism and the term itself, despite its obvious archaism. In a sense, this can be considered the embodiment of the third law of dialectics – imperialism has returned both as part of the foreign policy lexicon and as an element of practical policy, but in a qualitatively new form. There are several reasons for this.
First, at the ideological level, Donald Trump opposes his liberal predecessors, and seeks to discredit not only their domestic political ideology, but also their ideas about foreign policy interests and values. Already during his first term, he criticised the international liberal order and the idea that its maintenance is the main imperative of US interaction with the outside world. Having returned to power, Donald Trump has returned to criticising Wilsonianism, even more consistently and systematically.
The core of this criticism was precisely an appeal to a pre-existing historical tradition, which at a certain stage competed with liberal Wilsonianism, and, as Trumpists believe, unfairly lost the struggle to define the conceptual and ideological foundations of US foreign policy. Frequent references to William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, two presidents who embody the era of imperialism in American history, largely reflect both the current foreign policy ideas in the White House and the overall trend of rethinking and glorifying that era, clearly visible in American right-wing conservative intellectual circles. In other words, at least some of the “new right” supporters of Trump believe that there is no need to be shy about expansionism and the desire for greatness, and that national interests should be defended directly and crudely, including by forcibly subordinating other nations to the American will, without hypocritical equivocations in favour of values.
However, the ideological return to the era of imperialism should not be considered merely an aspect of the domestic political polemics between Trumpists and their opponents. To some extent, it is a symptom of deeper processes, and these symptoms are determined by the fundamental transformation of the role of the United States in global political and economic processes. The concept of the international liberal order corresponded to America’s superpower status, and its role as the economic and political centre not only of the Western world, but of the world in general, at least of its capitalist part (and after the collapse of the socialist camp, of everything).
The era of imperialism and the ideology of crude military and political expansionism that accompanied it reflected another role for the United States – a great, but not the dominant power. Theodore Roosevelt and his supporters believed that in the conditions of competition with other large powers of comparable strength to the United States, the optimal strategy would be to adopt their foreign policy practices and try to gain the upper hand over them in the competition for spheres of influence, markets, and colonial possessions.
World Majority
Instead of undergoing a transformation from capitalist imperialism to socialism, the European communist states of the late twentieth century, following pressure from the hegemonic West, were politically and economically dismantled by their leaders. The USA became the driver, and winner, of the cold war. Classical imperial capitalism developed into neo-imperialism, David Lane writes.
Opinions
The current return of the United States to the era of imperialism reflects the structural changes that have taken place in its role in the world, where Washington is in a state of transition from superpower status to great power status. The US share of nominal GDP has fallen from more than a third to less than 20% today (PPP calculations yield an even smaller share). The remaining military superiority is largely balanced by a number of large and medium powers, and the crisis of neoliberal ideology has led to the weakening of American “soft power”. In these conditions, the Trump administration’s turn to imperialist rhetoric is symptomatic and reflects this process of the United States’ reverse transfer to the great power status.
Russia, China and a number of other powers pursuing proactive policies are playing the role that the European great powers played in the past: like Roosevelt, Donald Trump criticises them for pursuing cynical and predatory policies, but at the same time, he considers them a role model for the behaviour of the United States itself.
Second, at the level of practical policy, the Trump administration is carrying out many activities that rhyme with the classic imperialist policy of more than a century ago. These practices include:
1) A return to spheres of influence, both at the level of rhetoric and, somewhat more covertly, at the level of practice. The Trump administration has already made several statements about its intention to establish some degree of control over Canada, Greenland and Panama. It remains unclear how the current American leader sees this control and whether he intends to implement these publicly voiced plans.
2) Devaluation of state sovereignty – it cannot be said that previous periods of American foreign policy history were characterised by increased reverence for the sovereignty of independent countries. However, in the context of the liberal order, entire concepts were created and used to devalue this political category (for example, the notorious “Responsibility to Protect”).
3) Segregation of states in terms of their power and technological potential – the Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it is ready to take into account the interests of only strong states that have sufficient military and economic potential to repel American policy. Trump’s mocking remarks about the Ukrainian leadership and imposition of an economic agreement on Kiev that is disadvantageous to Ukraine, which was presented by Washington as beneficial for a country with so many problems, rhymes well with the reasoning of the imperialists of the past – about dividing peoples into strong and progressive and weak and underdeveloped, and about the right and even the duty of the former to dominate the latter.
4) The use of instruments of force to achieve economic expansion is a classic imperialist policy – while, again, it can hardly be said that Washington has not pursued such a policy over the past century. However, as in the case of the devaluation of state sovereignty, this practice has expanded, taking, in particular, the form of a global tariff war. Trump also uses instruments of military force.
However, despite the obvious similarities, in practice the policy pursued by the Trump administration still differs significantly from the practice of classical imperialism.
The fuel that drove American expansionism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was the idea, established in the minds of intellectual and political elites, of the finiteness of markets and spheres of capital investment, from which the need to establish control over new territories was derived. American economist and journalist Charles Conant wrote: “The United States cannot afford to adhere to a policy of isolation while other nations are reaching out for the command of these new markets…. The entry of the United States upon the competition for the world’s markets means some radical changes in their existing policy, but it means an enlarged share in the world’s earnings and in the respect of other civilised states.” These ideas, as it later turned out, were to a certain extent not objective, but speculative, if not chimerical. Thus, John Hobson, a witness and researcher of economic expansionism of that time, pointed out the economic inconsistency of this policy and the colonial systems it formed – at least due to the fact that most of the captured territories did not provide significant benefits, but created visible military and administrative costs. The growth of the latter to a certain extent ultimately led to the collapse of most colonial empires, and to some extent contributed to the limitation (or restructuring) of American expansionist policy.
The current iteration of imperialism – a kind of imperialism 2.0 – has some similarities with the past at the level of rhetoric. As mentioned above, Donald Trump views such classic “imperialist” foreign policy instruments as spheres of influence and the establishment of protectorates as quite functional, not contradicting political logic, but on the contrary, corresponding to it. However, the internal economic logic of the current policy is quite radically different from the past.
Although the rhetoric and many aspects of the Trump administration’s policy – protectionism, expansionism, focus on physical trade – are criticised by opponents as “something from the past,” the nature of Washington’s current actions is fundamentally different. Donald Trump and his advisers are not guided by the logic of the “finiteness of markets” and the struggle for them; moreover, from today’s perspective, these ideas seem quite naive. The current US foreign economic policy is based not only on the idea of occupying markets, but also on the directly declared desire for industrial and technological superiority. The achievement of the latter, as understood by the current administration, can be achieved by concentrating material and intellectual resources in the United States.
Separating the past and the present, we can conditionally talk about “modern imperialism” (classical imperialism, the era American leaders like to refer to today) and “postmodern imperialism” (aka imperialism 2.0). The first was associated with the desire to increase physical exports, primarily industrial goods, as well as the export of capital abroad on the most privileged terms, which could be achieved, including by force. The direct continuation of this policy was the export of industrial capacity abroad and the formation of international value chains, which reached their peak in the era of the global liberal order.
Postmodern imperialism, in essence, is aimed at reversing these processes, reindustrialising the United States by worsening the economic conditions for industrial development in other parts of the world.
In a way, modern policy is thus a mirror image of the past, turning it upside down.
This also determines significant differences in the use of instruments (although on the whole they have remained the same). The imperialists of the past ultimately believed that their expansion should be accompanied by the establishment of order, either via direct military-administrative control, or in the form of establishing spheres of influence, protectorates and other intermediate forms of dependence. The jingoist ideology of Roosevelt and his supporters, Social Darwinist in nature, assumed that imperialism should ultimately bring civilisation and progress, and this policy itself is part of the “white man’s burden” – that is, territories and peoples ultimately need to be seized and brought to some desired state. As Senator Albert Beveridge wrote shortly after the end of the Spanish-American War, “Hawaii is ours; Porto Rico is to be ours; at the prayer of the people Cuba will finally be ours; in the islands of the east, even to the gates of Asia, coaling stations are to be ours; at the very least the flag of a liberal government is to float over the Philippines, and it will be the stars and stripes of glory.” In a sense, these ideas rhymed with the ideas of state-building and the militant expansionism of the neoconservatives of the era of the global war on terrorism of George W. Bush.
Postmodern imperialists, on the contrary, do not want the United States to be involved in protracted military and political-administrative processes, and even more so, they do not intend to take control or guardianship over any territories or peoples, to engage in issues of political governance and state-building. In the words of Vice President J.D. Vance, in the event of external conflicts the United States should “strike with superior military power and then quickly spring back.”
Paradoxically, the main target of postmodern imperialism is not the periphery of the “global majority” that is entering (or has already entered) the state of modernity, but the postmodern societies of Europe and American-allied countries in Asia. These countries, included in the American-centric security system and, accordingly, finding themselves in the tight, institutionalised military-force grip of Washington, are today forced to conclude unfavourable trade deals, which, in essence, represent a system of neo-tributariness. In relation to the “global majority,” the Trump administration prefers to pursue not an expansionist policy, but a “steamroller” policy aimed at increasing chaos and entropy. Such a dual policy fully reflects the task of concentrating resources in the United States to strengthen industrial and technological leadership.
To what extent “postmodern imperialism” can be called a new paradigm of American foreign policy is a difficult question. The era of imperialism of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, to which current American leaders refer, turned out to be quite short. Having first encountered the costs of colonial governance and then the horrors of World War I, the United States preferred the expansion of values and institutions to the expansion of the flag, which turned out to be a more effective tool for the long-term consolidation and increase of American leadership and the extraction of economic rent from it. It is quite possible that the current imperialism 2.0, as performed by Trump, will become only a transition to some new forms of foreign policy practices.
The author certainly does not claim to provide an exhaustive analytical picture of the complex concepts and processes raised in the text. However, the thoughts expressed above can be considered as an invitation to discuss the nature of current American policy, from a rather non-trivial perspective regarding today’s concepts of imperialism.
