U.S. President Donald Trump has steadily talked about taking up Greenland and Canada, but it surely’s unclear if he was really critical about it. In accordance with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a fantasy of a limitless frontier—the concept fixed enlargement might remedy inner issues. However limitlessness feels much less doable at this time than it did two centuries in the past. What does that then imply for Trump’s “America First” mannequin?
On the newest episode of FP Dwell, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale College and the writer of books resembling America, América: A New Historical past of the New World. Subscribers can watch the complete interview on the video field atop this web page or comply with the FP Dwell podcast. What follows here’s a frivolously edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: We’re all accustomed to MAGA, or Make America Nice Once more. The unusual factor is it has begun to evoke making America not simply nice, however better in measurement.
Greg Grandin: This got here out of nowhere throughout Trump’s second inaugural tackle, when he talked about Canada, Greenland, and probably taking up the Panama Canal Zone. Like many issues with Trump, it’s laborious to determine. It looks like he rummages by way of the trash bin of U.S. historical past and pulls out no matter fits him.
I don’t suppose he’s an expansionist president in the way in which that I’d use the time period, however he’s in some ways the primary “batten down the hatches” president. Throughout his first time period, he substituted the parable of the frontier for a brand new image: the border and the wall that turned the articulating middle of his many constituencies. He invokes “America First,” regardless of sometimes speaking about taking up Greenland or annexing Canada because the 51st state. All these issues appear to have fallen by the wayside, though we did get the symbolic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico because the Gulf of America.
RA: Properly, let’s speak about that trash bin of historical past. James Madison wrote in 1787 about “extending the sphere.” There’s a lengthy historical past of the American frontier as being one thing that one can and may broaden.
GG: American exceptionalism means plenty of issues to totally different individuals, however I don’t suppose every other self-proclaimed nation had the promise of enlargement constructed into its very fundamentals—the founders believed that the US was going to achieve the Pacific.
Once we speak in regards to the frontier, we’re speaking in regards to the land frontier, [Native American] elimination, and wars towards Mexico to get to the Pacific. However we’re additionally simply speaking in regards to the supreme of limitlessness and the usage of limitlessness to prepare home politics. The best of a frontier is infinitely helpful as a result of it may be projected into infinity.
RA: You’ve written that when nationalism is inward-looking, it may be harmful. So, the potential for trying exterior permits you to not self-destruct, because it have been, and as an alternative to maintain increasing each the frontiers and the parable that issues are OK internally.
GG: Each the truth and the best of enlargement do plenty of work. The land frontier was an unlimited financial institution of wealth for the brand new nation when it comes to land, minerals, and plant cultivation. However the promise of limitlessness was a approach of venting social discontent. Different nations needed to take care of labor events organizing, however the US by no means had a Labor Social gathering, so it might continually use the promise of limitlessness with a purpose to reconcile inner contradictions. The entire violence and brutality related to Western enlargement may very well be stored on the margins, and the US might think about itself within the twentieth century, rising as a bastion of liberalism and internationalism, so long as the frontier was maintained.
That’s why Trump is a turning level. Despite the fact that he denies local weather change, he’s the primary local weather change politician, as a result of he comes at a second when limitlessness is not doable. The Iraq Conflict, the monetary disaster of 2008, and the truth of local weather change have made that promise of limitlessness untenable. So, Trump is the shortage president.
RA: I take your level about geography right here. However there are different new frontiers: financial conquests, technological conquests, and the race for vital minerals.
GG: However discover that for the Trump administration, the imaginative and prescient isn’t a liberal worldwide order superintended by the US. There’s a way that the worldwide order has fractured into competing superpowers, and it’s a scramble for sources and benefit. Underneath the previous liberal order—what individuals appreciated to name the rules-based order—there was a way that every one boats might and would rise. Everyone might sit on the desk if they simply adopted sure guidelines.
Trump is the president who says that not everyone can sit on the desk. Not all boats will rise. It’s a contest. And the world order ought to be organized round competitors and strategic development.
RA: I used to be struck by your description in your final ebook of how, greater than a century in the past, Latin American diplomats tried to push Washington to simply accept a imaginative and prescient of cooperative worldwide legislation. America got here reluctantly to the rules-based order.
GG: America got here into the world as a lone nation on what the founders imagined to be an empty-enough continent. There was little question the US was going to achieve the Pacific. America’ concept of sovereignty was conquest; [Native American] elimination pushing west. They used the doctrine of conquest to justify taking half of Mexico.
Latin America got here into the world already as a league of countries: seven unbiased republics and Brazil, which had an unbiased monarchy. Eight polities needed to be taught to dwell with one another. What would have occurred if Argentina abided by the identical conquering logic as the US? It will’ve led to infinite wars. So Latin America’s leaders got here up with a set of authorized ideas that insisted that the world ought to be ordered round cooperation, that aggressive wars ought to be outlawed, that the doctrines of conquest and discovery have been null and void, and that we must always settle for the borders as they got here to us. That’s the other of the US, the place a border wasn’t one thing to cease at, however one thing to cross over. The entire beliefs that have been debated within the 1830s and 1840s in Latin America have been ultimately put into place in San Francisco in 1945, with the founding of the United Nations.
RA: I’m struck by the self-discipline you’ve in saying the US, whereas I immediately began utilizing the shorthand “America” to talk for the US of America. Discuss that nomenclature.
GG: America referred to the entire Americas, and Spanish People considered themselves as People. However this turned weaponized throughout Texas secession and the conflict of Mexico, when Mexicans and People turned a really racialized division. And after the time period “Latin America” was adopted, Spanish People started to establish themselves as Latin People: extra religious, humanist, and common, beholding to a more true set of American beliefs, whereas Saxon America was understood as instrumental, grubbing, expansionist, and enslaving—the strain of two Americas.
It wasn’t simply an elite conceit. Los Tigres del Norte, a Mexican norteño band, has an amazing music titled “Somos Más Americanos”: We’re extra American as a result of we’re extra humanist, extra earthy, as a result of we work the land. In order that division has plenty of cultural weight in Latin America.
RA: To deliver us again to the present day, given “America First” and what Trump has invoked with the Monroe Doctrine, how do you concentrate on the revival of spheres of affect?
GG: Early Spanish American critique was not simply of the US’ revival of the doctrine of conquest; additionally they critiqued Europe’s post-Napoleonic stability of energy. They insisted that any world order that didn’t acknowledge the interdependence of humanity was certain to result in wars. They have been very vital of any sort of worldwide order that didn’t worth extra transcendent beliefs of humanity and cooperation.
However we appear to be again within the period of gunboat diplomacy, hurtled again to the nineteenth century, when the US was sending ships to Nicaragua to destroy Greytown within the 1850s. It’s a really harmful second. Trump’s bombing of boats within the Caribbean speaks to corruption and his want for dominance, but it surely additionally speaks to his bid to prepare the Americas on this imaginative and prescient of a fractured world order of polycentric hegemons. This has occurred up to now—after the Seventies, [U.S. President Ronald] Reagan mainly received Latin America to heel below the doctrine of anti-communism. However he additionally articulated native pursuits in that imaginative and prescient on the finish of the Chilly Conflict.
Trumpism undermines itself. There’s definitely a social base in Latin America for Trumpism; Ecuador has seen complaints about wokeism and has plenty of anti-trans activism, and there’s a cult of the Second Modification in Brazil. So, there are plenty of Trumpy actors in Latin America.
RA: Argentina has been within the information as a result of [President] Javier Milei is a chainsaw-wielding libertarian. He needs to slash the forms, and he’s very anti-woke, as nicely. I used to be struck by how Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, prolonged a $20 billion credit score line.
GG: They’re trying to double it. They’re on the lookout for 40 billion. In the end, the peso should actually be in bother. There are overlaps right here. One is simply pure corruption. The New York Occasions ran that article about how Bessent may be very shut with Discovery Capital. And so they positioned massive bets on shopping for Argentine bonds. So this cash is cycled again into U.S. banks as bond funds.
RA: A throughline on this dialog is the trouble to situate Trump’s insurance policies, particularly towards Latin America, in historical past. What does race must do with Trump’s considering round what to do with Latin America?
GG: “America First” has at all times had a powerful racial element. It’s tied to an concept that the US was a white, Anglo Saxon nation. It is usually tied to a really conservative immigration legislation that was handed within the Twenties, which privileged northern European migration into the US and put a restrict on Southern Catholic and Asian migration.
America has by no means been really isolationist. However isolationists have been fearful {that a} mission to type a global legislation would open the door to desegregation, social rights, and financial justice. They didn’t need to signal the Treaty of Japan or the Common Declaration of Human Rights as a result of they have been anti-racist paperwork.
So, there was at all times a way that these reform actions that attempted to liberalize society and socialize the financial system got here from the surface, and that isolationists needed to maintain the road. That’s what’s usually known as “America First,” and why what’s known as isolationism is in the end profoundly racist and classist. It’s a approach of sustaining the social hierarchy. Trump represents that, and he’s articulating it in a extra open approach than any president has accomplished in a very long time.
RA: A few of this dialog can sound like bashing the US. For all of the critiques of a few of U.S. overseas coverage, some may argue that every one nice powers, sooner or later in time, have been this manner. If all the pieces is about realpolitik, then why are we holding the US to a better normal?
GG: Opposition to energy makes energy extra humane. Latin America’s critique of the US compelled the US to socialize itself on a global stage, laying the groundwork for what later turned our allyship with the US towards Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. It’s in that pushback that you just create a extra humane world, even when we perceive that the hegemon remains to be performing out of its personal pursuits.
Even after the US accepted Latin America’s demand to surrender the suitable to intervention, it intervened in Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and the Dominican Republic in 1965. They may have used code phrases, below the quilt of multinationalism with the sanction of the Group of American States, however which may not matter in the end. In case you push again on energy, then you definitely guarantee energy is conscious of its limits.
RA: As the US takes such a distinct method below Trump’s second time period—whether or not it’s expansionist rhetoric, withdrawing U.S. assist, or local weather change values—how will the world reorganize round, or with out, the previous United States? Does historical past have classes for us?
GG: Sure, they usually’re not good. Prior to now, there’s a way of this realpolitik stability of energy at all times resulting in catastrophic wars. The legitimation of competitors and conquest that Trump represents opens the barn door to plenty of dangerous actors. Whether or not Europe opposes the US or whether or not it concedes and subordinates itself to the US, I don’t see something good popping out of the present second, sadly. It’s disastrous.
What’s the tip recreation with China? China is presiding over, as Adam Tooze places it, this huge social experiment and financial modernization. It’s unprecedented and nearly renders Europe as a footnote within the historical past of financial improvement in comparison with what China has accomplished over the past couple of a long time. I don’t think about how the US might put a cease to that, and it may possibly’t result in something however extra battle and extra wars. Basically, conflict isn’t seen as one thing to finish, however one thing to get strategic benefit inside a brand new, reconfigured sphere of affect.
RA: However particularly with Latin America, one might make the case {that a} chief like Lula in Brazil has taken a distinct tack from what every other leaders have accomplished this 12 months, by taking a principled stance and standing as much as Trump. Individually, Brazil has additionally taken a management position within the local weather motion, in making an attempt to create avenues of management inside the world South as a substitute for the US. Do these actions have traction?
GG: Completely. Lula has traction—he’s been elected thrice towards huge setbacks, together with the lawfare marketing campaign that imprisoned him. The left in Latin America sense that democracy means social democracy. Local weather change is the right instance of the best that comes out of Latin American nationalism: that the world ought to be organized round cooperation, not competitors.
There’s plenty of inspiration in Latin America, but it surely’s fragile. Persons are uninterested in crime and violence, and also you see that within the recognition of any individual like Bukele in El Salvador or the current elections in Ecuador. Within the 2000s, the left in Latin America strode the stage with confidence and rhetorical hegemony, whether or not or not it’s Chavez in Venezuela, Kirshner in Argentina, or Lula in Brazil. Now, it’s true that some are standing up, not simply in Brazil, however Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.
It’s a response to the deprivations of financial globalizationism to show to the poisonous, resentful nationalism that you just see in the US, Turkey, the Philippines, and different locations. What’s inspirational about Latin America is that the critique of globalization isn’t in regards to the globalist.
Spanish America was based as a neighborhood of countries, having to be taught to dwell with one another with a purpose to survive. They got here up with this new mind-set in regards to the world order by which nationalism was not seen in opposition to internationalism, however as elementary to a humane, common internationalism. And it nonetheless holds, in Lula’s imaginative and prescient and in Gustavo Petro’s imaginative and prescient. Now it depends on El Salvador and Ecuador.
RA: What would it not take for the Latin American ideas you describe to develop past the Americas to the worldwide South, to create a brand new world order in a second the place the prevailing one feels prefer it’s fraying?
GG: It takes a menace—like Trumpism—by which teams of countries see their pursuits as extra aligned laterally slightly than in relationship to the US. Sadly, the BRICs, from Modi in India to Putin in Russia, are hardly inspirations themselves. Lula is Lula—that speaks to the humanist exception of Latin America. Lula nonetheless takes the promise of radical enlightenment at its phrase. You possibly can’t say the identical for different nations. However in response to an aggressive, dominating United States that’s changing into unhinged internally, I think about that’s forcing new connections.
