If you ever suggested Donald Trump is an isolationist (and I have), you have been shown the error of your ways. Trump is not an isolationist. He is an imperialist.
He began his second term announcing bizarre plans for territorial expansion: demanding a return of the Panama Canal, pining for Canada to be the 51st state, and gunning for Greenland. He offered flimsy rationales—America needs to ensure China doesn’t control the Canal, Canada is ripping us off by selling us more than it buys, and we have national security interests in the Arctic Circle—but at least there was an attempt to claim America, and Americans, would benefit from these land grabs.
Reaching new levels of absurdity, Trump now lays claim to Gaza. No one will buy an argument that Americans will benefit from occupying perhaps the most fiercely contested, blood-soaked swath in the world, let alone that the U.S. can peacefully annex Gaza by shoving two million Palestinians into neighboring countries.
Trump is promoting America First-style isolationism where America is not a nation but one of those real estate investment trusts (REITs) that improves its bottom line through acquisitions. That tracks with Trump’s cartoonishly corrupt gambit to turn the federal government into an extension of his oft-fined and convicted Trump Organization. But America is not a REIT. Seizing land is not isolationism. It’s imperialism.
American expansionism from its founding through the 19th century was a bloody affair—the forced removal of Native Americans, the Mexican-American war (a war of choice driven, in large part, by a desire to expand slavery beyond the South), and the jingoistic Spanish-American War in 1898 that gave America control of the Philippines, leading to a new front of violence against an Indigenous people.
Some Americans contemporaneously opposed such expansionism. For example, the Whig Party-controlled House in 1848 passed a resolution, with Representative Abraham Lincoln in the majority, charging President James K. Polk with “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” starting the Mexican-American War. But these wars were popular for reasons that can be understood in historical context. It was an era of imperial powers, chiefly England. A nation with static borders ran the risk of being steamrolled. Theodore Roosevelt, in 1899, made a blunt case for annexing the Philippines: “[T]he nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.”
While T.R. was a driving force in an American era of global imperialism, his cousin Franklin Roosevelt helped end it by instituting the Good Neighbor police in the Western Hemisphere, pushing Winston Churchill towards liberating colonies in the Atlantic Charter, and creating the United Nations. He didn’t quite live to see his Secretary of State Edward Stettinius finish negotiating the UN charter at the 1945 San Francisco Conference weeks after his death. The diplomat forged a compromise promoting “self-government” in conquered territories. Historian Stephen Schlesinger said that language in the charter sparked the “almost total decolonization of the world.”
What replaced rank imperialism in America’s foreign policy toolkit was a greater emphasis on benevolent soft power (as well as less benevolent covert operations). At the top of the list is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which Elon Musk targeted for destruction on Trump’s behalf. President John F. Kennedy created the agency to assist other countries and us—a low-cost way to broaden alliances and contain the Soviet Union, an imperialistic-minded power, during the Cold War. But USAID’s utility outlasted the Cold War.
As recently described by The New York Times, “The scope of USAID’s work is extensive: war relief in Ukraine, peace-building in Somalia, disease surveillance in Cambodia, vaccination efforts in Nigeria, H.I.V. prevention in Uganda and maternal health assistance in Zambia, among a wide range of other programs. The agency has helped to contain major outbreaks of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers in recent years. In some regions, it supplies food, shelter, and access to clean water, which can be the difference between life and death.” It is, as Republican Senator Bill Cassidy has said, America’s answer to China’s aggressive belt-and-road plan to extend economic aid and influence around the globe.
Attacking USAID fits in an America First framework: stop exporting money so we can keep it for ourselves. Democratic political strategist David Axelrod and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel even told Politico that Democrats would be politically foolish to defend USAID because foreign aid is unpopular.
But will you see more dollars in your wallet if Musk crushes USAID? Of course not. It may contribute to higher grocery bills.
The agency’s former global health director, Atul Gawande, the famed physician and bestselling author, has warned that 49 countries have stopped monitoring bird flu. This virus has wreaked havoc on America’s farms and jacked up the price of eggs.
Economists believe the flu’s persistence will continue to kill chickens and keep egg prices high for the foreseeable future, the Washington Post reports. (NPR reports that some believe chickens need to be vaccinated to end the crisis, but I am not expecting the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary to consider such an initiative.) And less bird flu monitoring isn’t going to help matters.
Tariffs won’t lower prices for Americans. Foreign importers pay the tariff to Trump’s America, Inc., then pass the cost on to consumers. While Trump flinched on imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, for now, he followed through on a broad 10 percent on all Chinese imports. His trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said this week, “We are going to structurally shift the American economy from one over-reliant on income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service to one which is also reliant on tariff revenue and the External Revenue Service.” That would require tariffs on a lot more countries than China.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the 10 percent tariff on China will bring into federal coffers about $15 billion a year (again, ultimately paid by American consumers). If Trump dusted off the Canadian and Mexican tariffs, that would total another $130 billion annually. But individual income taxes—not even counting Social Security and Medicare or corporate income taxes—bring in $2.4 trillion. And remember, we have a progressive income tax system where the wealthy pay more, and many working-class Americans don’t pay any net federal income tax at all. A tariff-based revenue system would be far more regressive and increase the average cost of living.
Trump’s tariffs and his assault on foreign aid are actually happening, unlike his musings on land grabs. But even if his musings are impossible to execute, they reflect his worldview and priorities. He obsesses about how to make America—and himself—appear more powerful. He is not obsessing about how to improve the daily lives of Americans.
Trump declares America First. But his imperialist agenda puts Americans last.
