Trump’s New Brand of Imperialism

0:05You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. So many things about Donald Trump's presidency have been without precedent. But the U.S. seizing power over a smaller country, well, there's a very, very long history of that. The American record of military intervention and adventure overseas, it goes back well into the 19th century and forward to Vietnam, Iraq, and beyond.

0:51In Venezuela, Trump has made no secret of his desire for oil revenues and who will be running the show. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. Daniel Imervar is a professor of history at Northwestern and one of our most interesting writers on foreign policy and American imperialism. His most recent book, a bestseller, was called How to Hide an Empire. At The New Yorker, he's covered subjects from 17th century piracy to the seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. I spoke with him last week.

1:33Daniel, let's start with the events of the past week. They're astonishing. In your 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, you wrote of the United States that even when it comes to oil, flare-ups of naked imperialism have been rare and haven't ultimately led to annexations. You wrote this during Trump's first term. Yeah. What's changed? Yes. Exactly that has changed. I described in the book the passage from a desire for annexation as a form of projection of power, so claiming large territories, to a more subtle form of power projection, lots of military bases all over the map, other ways of exerting power.

2:19And it seemed to me at that time that the age of colonial empire was not totally over. There are still some colonies, but, you know, really near extinction. And it is extraordinary to hear Trump talk in a way that not only presidents haven't talked in decades, but I think presidents haven't even thought in decades of his desire to claim territory to annex new places, Greenland, Canada, etc. et cetera. How would you describe the map of contemporary American empire and what is it? Because we do have, we have military bases. I think not everybody's aware of it, just how extensive that map is. So what does American empire look like now?

3:00Okay. So there are five inhabited territories that are still part of the United States and more than 3 million people live in them collectively. Puerto Rico is by far the largest. But then you're exactly right. The United States has, and this is again, they don't quite appear on maps that we're used to seeing. And often these places are secret. So you have to sort of do a covert mapping of them. But we think that the United States has about 750 military bases outside of the mainland, most of which are in foreign countries. That's amazing that you say we think. We think, yeah, we don't know. So the United States does a basing report and does report on hundreds of those bases.

3:36But then there are hundreds more that we're just reliant on journalists to tell us about. And there are a lot of edge cases and a lot of we're not sure cases. You know, in the run-up to the Iraq war, you heard rationales coming from the Bush administration and elsewhere having to do with human rights, right? And you even had former dissident leaders in Eastern Europe supporting Adam Miknick, Václav Havel, they were for this war from a human rights point of view. And then you heard rationales obviously having to do with weapons of mass destruction. It was an arms control situation. You would never hear someone in the Bush administration, whether you like them or not, saying, you know why we're going in?

4:24Oil. Because Iraq's got a whole lot of oil. That was, you know, as the cliche now goes in Washington and elsewhere, it was saying, you know, the quiet part out loud. And it was never said, except by critics. Now you have a press conference on the morning after the invasion of Venezuela, where we've gone in militarily in a huge operation that had been, by the way, been going on for weeks, weeks and weeks. but ends with the president of Venezuela being spirited to a jail cell in Brooklyn. And while the people around Trump are mouthing these other rationales for it, Trump just gets up and says it's oil.

5:07We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. There's no embarrassment about it at all. This seems to me something at least performatively new. Oh, it's totally, that's exactly right. So we on the left during the Iraq war would play this game where we say, okay, the Bush administration, it's saying it's human rights and they have this story about weapons of mass destruction, but we don't believe them. So we'd look for little reports of off the record statements where someone said something about oil and we'd say, aha, that's the real thing.

5:54That's really what you want. And the reason is that the liberal international order for good or ill kind of forced US leaders to say that they were doing things for impartial reasons, for reasons that had the good of the system in mind. Because the whole point is that the United States had claimed to be an umpire in world affairs. And you can't be an umpire if you say, well, I really would prefer that the Dodgers win. You have to pretend that you're sort of above it all. And so the Bush administration would do that. And then its critics would say, I don't really believe you. I think you're actually, you know, you know, this game is rigged.

6:31And yeah, Trump has very little interest in the rhetoric of that. He actually sees it as a constraint and an imposition. And that press conference was incredible because he did start out with a reason, right? It had to do with the importation of drugs into the United States. And you could, I guess, maybe call that an act of war if you really wanted to. But then just so quickly, that pretext just slipped away. And then he started talking about the oil. I don't think he even argued the point that there are other countries who import far more by way of narcotics. Yeah. Yeah. No, he's saying, I mean, because you can pick holes in that pretext very easily.

7:10Is Venezuela really the main concern, and if the concern is the importation of drugs. And it just, you got the sense that Trump just didn't care, like absolutely didn't care. Now, in your book, How to Hide an Empire, you dug into America's interest in Greenland back in the mid-20th century. It's on the cover of the book. Yes. So tell me a little bit about that, because suddenly, just days after the invasion of Venezuela, we have Stephen Miller, one of the closest aides to the president of the United States, talking about how we are going to exercise power the way it was exercised, and Greenland's next, quite possibly.

7:47The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you're asking of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland. I will say that it is rhetorically distinct what the Trump administration has done in Venezuela. But it is not a new thing in the last couple decades. There are other instances where the United States has sought to hunt down a leader or invaded a country, you know, various coup attempts, all that kind of thing. What is really new from the last perspective of the last couple decades is for a presidential administration to say, we would like to claim a colony.

8:34We would like to annex new lands to the United States. And we understand that the people who live there, people who control it, don't want that, but we want it. I think that's just not just a naked rhetoric. I think actually George W. Bush didn't think in those ways. Barack Obama didn't think in those ways. Nixon didn't think in those ways. The United States fought a war in Vietnam. As far as I can tell, there was no talk about annexing Vietnam. In the Iraq War, there was a lot of, you know, hemming and hawing about how the occupation should work. But the Bush administration wanted to get out of Iraq, didn't want to stay in Iraq forever.

9:09This is a different form of power. This is kind of something that had been off the menu for a while and is now back on. What's the history to all this in Greenland? So Greenland had, you know, long been sort of its proximate to North America. So, you know, there had been moments when from the 19th century and then right after World War II, when various U.S. statesmen were eyeing Greenland. It got much more important in the age of aviation when it suddenly seemed less to be an out-of-the-way iceberg and seemed to be right on the route in any air war with Russia. But for the most part, U.S. presidents have been able to feel comfortable with their lack of ownership of Greenland because they have something else.

10:03They have a massive military base, formerly an air base, now a Space Force base in Greenland, that has allowed them to do whatever they want with their planes. And they've been, basically have had the run of the space for their purposes. And it was actually very bizarre when in his first term, Trump started talking about Greenland. He's been talking about it for years. It almost seemed like a joke when you first heard it. It did. It seemed like a joke. I mean, it was sort of, is he just testing us? Is he just trying to say, you know, transgressive things? but it also seems frustrating because you think, Trump, what do you want?

10:34You want to land some planes in Greenland? Fine, the United States has been doing that for a long time. You want to buy minerals from Greenland? You can do that. It's open for business. What do you need to actually colonize this space for? No, you thought it was a trolling situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. But after Venezuela, how can you possibly think that's a trolling situation? And it seems to me, though, the cost of what's going on, there are many costs to it. Here's one. if I'm China, I look at what's going on and I say, oh, okay, my sphere of influence is obvious. 90 miles off my coast, I have Taiwan.

11:08And if I'm Russia, well, I've already exercised my quote unquote right to invade Ukraine for historical reasons. And now you're going to tell me to end the war before I want to? Why should I do that? That's right. And on and on and on. And at the same time, when it comes to Greenland, the desire to take Greenland, which Trump is threatening to do, which Stephen Miller is threatening to do although Marco Rubio says, well, no, maybe we'll buy it, is that you crack up NATO. That you're in essence invading a NATO territory. Yeah. Something that Trump seems very willing to do. I'm sure that he's surrounded by people he has been for years, been surrounded by people who tell him that there's a cost to breaking up NATO.

11:56Trump has very little patience for NATO. And what tradition does that come out of? I mean, so we sometimes call that isolationism. I don't think that was ever a good word for it then. It was a sort of pejorative word by supporters of liberal international order for their opponents. And sometimes you'll see people still call Trump that. You see why it's inaccurate, because Trump is clearly not an isolationist. He really likes bombing other countries. The United States has done what it's done in Venezuela and is now threatening to do it in Greenland. What tensions will that produce about oil supply or anything else with Russia and China?

12:38That's a great question. On the one hand, you might think any move by the United States, especially where China and Russia have interest, is an incursion against them. So the United States gets the oil, China doesn't get the oil. The United States gets the rare minerals. China doesn't get the rare minerals. On the other hand, every time this happens, it's a little more possible for China and Russia to lock down mineral and oil supplies in other places, wherever they want them. So if we are going to tilt from a world where goods are sourced on the market and the market is kept open and the peace is kept by an international system to a world of power blocks, that might not be a bad thing for Russia and China, even if they lose a little in particular countries.

13:36I'm speaking with Daniel Imivar, a contributing writer for The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue in just a moment.

13:58Come see Critics at Large live. On February 19th, we're going to be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a conversation about Wuthering Heights. There's a new adaptation coming up starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and we will certainly be getting into that. but we'll also do what we, humbly I'll say, what we do best. Returning to the text, we're going to go deep on the gothic and Emily Bronte. Join me, Vincent Cunningham, and my co-hosts, Alex Schwartz and Nomi Frye, for the discussion. And crucially, if you buy a VIP ticket, you'll join us for an after party too. Go to 92ny.org for more information.

14:41That's 92ny.org. Hope to see you there.

14:52This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about the United States and the world, the seizure of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, threats against nations from Cuba to Denmark, and the way that Donald Trump uses history to justify his view of the world order. My guest today is the historian Daniel Imovar, who writes in The New Yorker about what the Venezuela operation tells us about Trumpism. Imivar is the author of the book How to Hide an Empire, a best-selling account of the U.S. and its overseas possessions.

15:29Now, I think we need a history lesson. We need to be reminded of the specifics of what were the basic tenets of the Monroe Doctrine, which Trump keeps invoking after seizing Maduro and invading Venezuela. Well, we're now calling it the Donro Doctrine. The Donro Doctrine. That is what he's seeking. Which is, by the way, you know, Trump has some talent for nicknames and things like this. This is a bad one. This is not. Well, I actually love it. You do? Because the Monro Doctrine, as he is interpreting it, we can get to the various incarnations of it. But the version of it that he likes is an imperial version.

16:07And then he's actually sort of colonized the name itself. Mm-hmm. You know, so it's just so on brand. He's landed a plane on that. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So the Monroe Doctrine, I mean, we talk about it as if it was some great and binding thing. The Monroe Doctrine was a series of non-sequential paragraphs that Monroe delivered in his annual message in 1823 that was non-binding. It didn't have any kind of enforcement mechanism, and it wasn't particularly different from the kinds of things that U.S. statesmen had been saying for a long time. But the idea of it was to try to urge European powers not to invade in Spanish America, which might be a kind of security threat to the United States, by declaring a sort of separate spheres.

16:58that it wasn't to say that Europe should have no presence in the Western Hemisphere because Europe had colonies in the Western Hemisphere, and those were allowed by the Monroe Doctrine. It was just to say, no further European expansion in the Western Hemisphere, please, and also will lay off Europe. Well, in the press conference after they seized Maduro, Trump said this, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. This language that he He's referring to the West and our hemisphere multiple times. What does that say to you? I think it's yet another example of him reaching back to older traditions in U.S.

17:38foreign policymaking. It is interesting. I mean, A, the sort of naked force that is being appealed to. But B, it's also interesting that his thought is hemispheric, right? He's not saying our place in the world will never be challenged again. He's saying our place in the Western Hemisphere will never be challenged again. In some ways, it's a more modest understanding of U.S. domain than other presidents have had. How much of this is systematic and how much of this is chaotic? I mean, I think the way I see it is that right after 1945, the United States was just producing most of the world's goods.

18:17It had a majority of the world's oil and a majority of the world's gold. It was just in such a staggering position of power that building a world system where it was the center made sense, at least to people in Washington. And that's why the UN is located in New York, the headquarters is. Um, but I think we've just seen a sort of gradual erosion of the basis for U.S. power, and it is not surprising that that is expressing itself in a kind of temper tantrum from a U.S. leader who just, you know, really no longer thinks that the thing holds together. What's your political sense of who's actually for this?

18:58that's what's so interesting um is that there are a lot of things that trump threatens to do or has done where i think wow this would really be a departure in an alarming one and yet the maga base is for it i mean greenland particularly you think who in maga wanted this who was talking about this who in the republican establishment wanted this you can maybe say that there's been some sort of Silicon Valley bros who have this vision of Greenland as like the laboratory for a space exploration. But I just don't see the constituency for a lot of these things other than the sort of machismo that Trump offers, right?

19:37We are just going to - That's it. I mean, in old imperial days, there was a sense that the leadership of the country, there came a time when they wanted to hide our imperial presence in the world. Now it seems it's almost advertisements for myself that Trump wants to advertise and amplify imperial ambitions and aggression. Yeah. So, I mean, the moment of most stark imperialism in US history is around the end of the 19th century, which is when the United States went on a sort of colonization spree. And the usual take on that is, this is the generation that was too young to fight the Civil War. They feel a sense of heroism.

20:22They want to feel a sense of heroism that their fathers had that they haven't got. And so much of the imperial expansion of the United States was not just rendered in the sort of cool calculations of, well, this will help our balance sheets and our business might expand. It was, this will psychologically redeem us. This will feel good. This will be a kind of state, you know, an arena for masculinity. And Trump is offering that. I mean, and that part of it seems to sell. I mean, a lot of MAGA is about gender roles and about particularly about masculinity and about sort of men who've been constrained and oppressed and, you know, become effeminate.

21:02It finally gets to be men again. Well, we'll see what Joe Rogan has to say when the time comes. But I don't know that it's getting unanimous MAGA applause. I mean, you look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, who obviously has become a kind of dissident within that movement. She's not alone. There's a lot of people in the movement who are very, very loyal to Trump who find this a betrayal of America first and a sense that there are plenty of problems at home that need attending to. and we don't need to be invading Venezuela, threatening Colombia, threatening Greenland, and on and on. And I think the more, so there's this slippery slope between a threat, an airstrike, abducting the president, and then, as Trump has pondered, running the country.

21:56And I think the further you slide down that slippery slope, the less it looks like America first, and the more it looks like nation building, all the things that Trump ran against. So you can see this as very quickly becoming a sharp portrayal of Trump's base. In the piece about McKinley and tariffs that you wrote for The New Yorker, you wrote tariffs did lead to colonization. The depression of the 1890s, exacerbated by McKinley's tariffs, stirred American support for taking colonies in order to right the economy. Do you think something similar in cause and effect is going on now? I do not. I'm not sure that I see Trump sort of connecting those dots.

22:42But there is clearly a political crisis that has been caused in part by Trump's tariffs. So he's kind of a self-inflicted economic crisis or at least an amplification of the inflation problem that we were dealing with before. and this seems like a way to politically square the circle. I'm not sure that it will economically square the circle. I'm not sure it will resolve the issue. But Trump has sort of painted himself into a corner politically, and I think he regards this as a way out. This is the first good news day he's had, at least vis-a-vis parts of his base, in a long time. You think that was a good news day for him?

23:18I think it was. I mean, he's clearly taken great pleasure in it, and it's a show of strength, which has been an important part of who he is. You're right that not everyone is on board with this, but I think for a certain kind of Trump supporter, this looks good. This is the kind of thing that the United States hasn't done in a while. The invasion, well, this is exactly my next question. The invasion of Venezuela was 36 years after the invasion of Panama. How would you compare these two operations? Yeah, we'll see. So a huge difference is that with the Panama invasion, that was clearly sort of a rogue yes man.

23:57So Noriega was someone who had worked with the United States. It came out during Iran-Contra. With the CIA. Yeah, with the CIA. He'd been on the CIA payroll, which was very awkward for George H.W. Bush, who'd been in charge of the CIA. That's right. And in fact, one of the reasons that the Reagan administration held off on opposing Noriega was that it would just be too embarrassing for Bush. So he's a kind of classic case of like someone who'd been really useful to the United States and then becomes less useful and then gets taken out by the United States. So that's one difference. A big question, a big possible difference is where this ends.

24:38right now it looks from the U.S. perspective as if potentially it could just be a single operation. An unpopular leader was taken into custody, will be tried. And I don't want to suggest that there were no more ongoing consequences for Panama for that. We can talk about what that looked like in Panama after. But from the U.S. perspective, it was more like the Gulf War than the Iraq War. I don't know if that's going to be true here. Because what could happen in Venezuela? I mean, prediction is lousy journalism and even worse history. But give it a shot. Yeah. Okay. So let's just, okay. So first of all, it is, it is always the fantasy of like post nineties us presidents that they can solve all their problems with airstrikes and with surgical strikes.

25:29They can just go into exactly what they want to like precisely the people they want, and then they'll be out. And that has not always happened. That was George W. Bush's fantasy with Iraq and Afghanistan. And it famously, you know, uh, it was dashed against the rocks of reality. I think a huge structural problem is that who's next? What's next? So if the administration of Venezuela is compliant enough with Trump that Trump sees no need to do as he threatened a second wave of attacks, then that's a massive legitimacy problem within Venezuela. And so often these sort of people who are potentially supported, potentially opposed by the United States, these leaders are in a really unstable position because if they comply with the United States, they have a huge problem with their base.

26:22And if they pander to their base, then they might have a coup attempt. So I think Venezuela was already in that position, but I think it is much more so now. And so the odds that things spill really out of control, I think, have gone way up. Daniel, from your political point of view, which is informed by obviously years and years of studying history, is foreign intervention, American intervention, ever justified? So I think there are two questions. One is, is it justified? Meaning, you know, is the target a suitable target? Is this someone who the world would be better off if this person weren't in power?

27:02And I think the answer is sure. but then there's another question what's an example of that? okay so I mean I think with Maduro you know stolen election wildly unpopular I think there's a great argument to be made that Venezuela in the abstract is better off without him being in power and I think a lot of Venezuelans feel that way and you can make a longer list and it would include Saddam Hussein etc but the problem is you have you cannot just think of this as a sort of deus ex machina operation where one person is sort of taken out of power. You actually have to think about what happens when the United States intervenes.