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foreign policy
Trump Ushers in the Second Coming of McKinley’s Gilded Age Imperialism
Trump’s foreign policy has already proved a surprising throwback to a McKinleyesque version of great-power politics marked by the urge to take territories, impose tariffs, and conclude diplomatic deals.
Mar 06, 2025
In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump.
But nobody expected this. Nobody at all.
“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs,” President Trump announced to a burst of applause during his inaugural address on January 20. Continuing his celebration of a decidedly mediocre president, best known for taking this country on an ill-advised turn towards colonial conquest, Trump added: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent—he was a natural businessman—and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did including the Panama Canal which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.”
Henceforth, all-American nationalism will Trump—yes, that’s the word!—any pretense to internationalism.
Moving on from such fractured facts and scrambled history, Trump suggested the foreign policy principles that would guide his new administration, or to quote that poem, the “rough beast” as it “slouches towards” Mount McKinley “to be born.”
Then, to another round of applause, he added ominously: “We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
In a quick segue, the president then promised to act with a “courage, vigor, and vitality” that would lead the nation “to new heights of victory and success,” presumedly via a McKinleyesque policy of tariffs, territorial conquest, and great-power diplomacy.
Remembering William McKinley
Since President William McKinley’s once-upon-a-time mediocrity was exceeded only by his present-day obscurity, few observers grasped the real significance of Trump’s remarks. To correct such a critical oversight, it’s important to ask two significant questions: Who was William McKinley and how might his legacy influence current American foreign policy? In fact, Trump and his key advisers are planning to use McKinley’s Gilded Age imperialism as their guide, even their inspiration, for overturning the liberal internationalism that has marked American foreign policy for the past 80 years.
After an otherwise undistinguished career in Congress crowned by the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 with record-high import duties, he won the presidency in 1896 thanks to the influence of Mark Hanna, a wealthy industrialist—the 19th-century equivalent of a present-day tech billionaire—who tithed his fellow millionaires to create a war chest that would fund the country’s costliest political campaign up to that time. In doing so, Hanna ushered in the modern era of professional electioneering. That campaign also carried American political satire to new heights as, typically, a withering political cartoon caricatured a monstrously bloated Hanna, reclining on money bags given by millionaires like banker J.P. Morgan, declaring, “I am confident. The Working Men Are with Us.” (Sound familiar?)
As president from 1897 to 1901, McKinley enacted record-high tariffs and used the brief Spanish-American War of 1898 to seize a colonial empire of islands stretching halfway around the world from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Instead of crowning the country with an imperial glory akin to Great Britain’s, those conquests actually plunged it into the bloody Philippine-American War, replete with torture and massacres.
Rather than curtail his ill-fated colonial venture and free the Philippines, McKinley claimed he had gone “down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” As it happened, his God evidently told him to conquer and colonize, something that he arranged in great-power bilateral talks with Spain that determined the fate of millions of Cubans and Filipinos, even though they had been fighting Spanish colonial rule for years to win their freedom.
At the price of several hundred thousand dead Filipinos, those conquests did indeed elevate the United States into the ranks of the great powers whose might made right—a status made manifest (as in destiny) when McKinley’s vice-president and successor Theodore Roosevelt pushed rival European empires out of South America, wrested the Panama Canal Zone from Colombia, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
With surprising speed, however, this country’s leaders came to spurn McKinley’s embrace of a colonial empire with its costly, complicated occupation of overseas territories. Just a year after he seized the Philippine islands, his secretary of state called for an “open door” in China (where the U.S. had no territorial claims) that would, for the next 50 years, allow all powers equal access to that country’s consumer markets.
After 1909, Secretary of State Philander Knox, one of the founders of the United States Steel Corporation, pursued a program of “dollar diplomacy” that promoted American power through overseas investments rather than territorial conquests. According to historian William Appleman Williams, an imperial version of commerce and capital “became the central feature of American foreign policy in the 20th century,” as the country’s economic power “seeped, then trickled, and finally flooded into the more developed nations and their colonies until, by 1939, America’s economic expansion encompassed the globe.”
Emerging from World War II, a conflict against the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—that had seized empires in Europe, Africa, and Asia by military conquest, Washington built a new world order that would be defined in the United Nations Charter of 1945, guaranteeing all nations the right to independence and inviolable sovereignty. As Europe’s colonial empires collapsed amid rebellions and revolutions, Washington ascended to unprecedented global power marked by three key attributes—alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and iron-clad assurance of inviolable sovereignty. This unique form of global power and influence (which involved the seizure of no more territory) would remain the guiding genius of American imperial global hegemony. At least that remained true until this January 20.
The Past as Prologue
Although none of us were quick to grasp the full implications of that inaugural invocation of McKinley’s ghost, Donald Trump was indeed signaling just what he planned to do as president. Leaving aside the painfully obvious parallels (like Elon Musk as a latter-day Mark Hanna), Trump’s foreign policy has already proved a surprising throwback to a McKinleyesque version of great-power politics marked by the urge to take territories, impose tariffs, and conclude diplomatic deals.
Let’s start with the territorial dimension of Trump’s ongoing transformation of U.S. foreign policy. Just as McKinley moved to seize an empire of scattered islands instead of whole countries like the Congo or China, so Donald Trump has cast his realtor’s eye on an unlikely portfolio of foreign properties. Take the Panama Canal. In his first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio swept into Panama City where he warned its president to reduce Chinese influence over the canal or face “potential retaliation from the United States.” In Washington, President Trump backed his emissary’s threats, saying: “China is running the Panama Canal… and we’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.” Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, promptly pushed back, stating that Washington’s claim about China was “quite simply [an] intolerable falsehood,” but also quickly tried to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative. The reaction among our Latin American neighbors to this modern edition of gunboat diplomacy was, to say the least, decidedly negative.
Next on Washington’s neocolonial shopping list was Greenland. On his sixth day in office, President Trump told the press aboard Air Force One: “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it. And I think the people want to be with us.” Invoking that thawing island’s mineral wealth, he added: “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world. It’s not for us, it’s for the free world.” In a whirlwind diplomatic offensive around the capitals of Europe to counter Trump’s claims, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen won strong support from the Nordic nations, France, and Germany, whose leader Otto Scholz insisted “borders must not be moved by force.”
That revelation is likely to be not just the end of the liberal international order but the accelerated decline of U.S. global power.
After roiling relations with America’s closest allies in Europe and Latin America, Trump topped that off with his spur-of-the-moment neocolonial claim to the Gaza strip during a February 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump announced to Netanyahu’s slack-jawed amazement. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.” After relocating 2 million Palestinian residents to “one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, twelve” sites in places like Jordan or Egypt, the U.S. would, Trump added, “take over that piece and we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.” Warming to his extemporaneous version of imperial diplomacy, Trump praised his own idea for potentially creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, which would become “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”
The international backlash to his urge for a latter-day colonial land grab came hard and fast. Apart from near-universal condemnation from Asia and Europe, Washington’s key Middle Eastern allies—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan—all expressed, as the Saudi Foreign Ministry put it, a “firm rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” When Jordan’s King Abdullah visited the White House a week later, Trump pressed hard for his Gaza plan but the King refused to take part and, in a formal statement, “reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
Setting aside Trump’s often jocular calls for Canada to become America’s “51st State,” none of his neocolonial claims, even if successfully accomplished, would make the slightest difference to this country’s security or prosperity. Think about it. America already dominates the Panama Canal’s shipping traffic (with 73% of the total) and a restoration of sovereignty over the Canal Zone would change nothing. Similarly, Washington has long had the only major military base in Greenland and its continued presence there is guaranteed by the NATO alliance, which includes Denmark. As for Gaza, it would be the money sink from hell.
Yet there is some method to the seeming madness of the president’s erratic musings. As part of his reversion to the great-power politics of the Victorian Age, all of his territorial claims are sending a chilling message: America’s role as arbiter and defender of what was once known as a “rules-based international order,” enshrined in the U.N. Charter, is over. Henceforth, all-American nationalism will Trump—yes, that’s the word!—any pretense to internationalism.
Meet Tariff Man
The second key facet of President Trump’s attack on the liberal international order, tariffs, is already proving so much more complicated and contradictory than he might ever have imagined. After World War II, a key feature of the liberal international order created through the U.N. Charter was a global trade regime designed to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous protective tariffs (and “tariff wars” that went with them) which deepened the devastating Great Depression of the 1930s. While the World Trade Organization (WTO) sets the rules for the enormous volume of international commerce, localized treaties like the European Union (E.U.) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have produced both economic efficiency and prosperity for their respective regions. And while President Trump hasn’t yet withdrawn from the WTO, as he has from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords, don’t count on it not happening.
On the campaign trail last year, candidate Trump advocated an “all tariff policy” that would impose duties on imports so high they could even, he claimed, replace the income tax in funding the government. During his first two weeks in office, President Trump promptly imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico. Since North America has the world’s most integrated industrial economy, he was, in effect, imposing U.S. tariffs on the United States, too. With the thunderclouds of an economic crisis rumbling on the horizon, Trump “paused” those tariffs in a matter of days, only to plunge ahead with a 10% tariff on all Chinese goods and a 25% duty on aluminum and steel imports, including those from Canada and Mexico, and threats of reciprocal tariffs on all comers.
As an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute warned, “Introducing large increases in the prices of imported goods could breathe new life into some of the inflationary embers.” Indeed, a sudden spike in inflation seemed to put an instant crimp on his tariff strategy. Even though the U.S. economy’s integration with regional and global markets is now light years away from the McKinley Tariff of 1890, Trump seems determined to push tariffs of all sorts, no matter the economic damage to American business or the costs for ordinary consumers.
A Return to Great-Power Politics?
Consider an attempted return to the great-power politics of the Victorian age as the final plank in Donald Trump’s remaking of American foreign policy. Setting aside the sovereignty enshrined in the U.N. Charter that seats all nations, large and small, as equals in the General Assembly, he prefers to deal privately with peer autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.
Back in 1898, President McKinley’s deal-making in Paris on behalf of uninvited Cubans and Filipinos was typical of that imperial age. He was only following in the footsteps of Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had, in 1885, led his fellow European imperialists in carving up the entire continent of Africa during closed-door chats at his Berlin residence. That conference, among other things, turned the Congo over to Belgium’s King Leopold II, who soon killed off half its population to extract its latex rubber, the “black gold” of that day.
Trump’s deal-making over the Russo-Ukraine War seems a genuine reversion to such great-power diplomacy. The new administration’s first cabinet member to visit Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, arrived in Kyiv on February 12 with a proposal that might have made King Leopold blush. In a blunt bit of imperial diplomacy, the secretary gave Ukraine’s president exactly one hour to sign over a full 50% of his country’s vast store of rare earth minerals, the value of which President Trump estimated at $500 billion, as nothing more than a back payment for military aid already received from the Biden administration. In exchange, Bessent offered no security guarantees and no commitments to additional arms, prompting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to publicly reject the overture.
On February 12, President Trump also launched peace talks for Ukraine through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and Trump himself added that NATO membership for Kyiv was equally unrealistic—in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow even before the talks started. And in the imperial tradition of great powers deciding the fate of smaller nations, the opening peace talks in Saudi Arabia on February 18 were a bilateral Russo-American affair, without any Ukranians or Europeans present.
In response to his exclusion, President Zelenskyy insisted that “we cannot recognize any… agreements about us without us.” He later added, “The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.” Trump shot back that Zelensky, whom he branded a “dictator,” had “better move fast” to make peace “or he is not going to have a country left.” He then pressured Ukraine to sign over $500 billion in minerals without any U.S. security guarantees, a classic neocolonial resource grab that he reluctantly modified by dropping that extortionate dollar limit just in time for Zelensky to visit the White House. While witnessing this major rupture to the once-close cooperation of the NATO alliance, European leaders convened “an emergency summit” in Paris on February 17, which aimed, said the British prime minister, “to ensure we keep the U.S. and Europe together.”
Well, don’t count on it, not in the new age of Donald Trump.
Clearly, we are at the threshold of epochal change. In the words of that poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… Surely some revelation is at hand.”
Indeed, that revelation is likely to be not just the end of the liberal international order but the accelerated decline of U.S. global power, which had, over the past 80 years, become inextricably interwoven with that order’s free trade, close alliances, and rules of inviolable sovereignty. If these tempestuous first weeks of Trump’s second term are any indication, the next four years will bring unnecessary conflicts and avoidable suffering for so much of the world.
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Trump’s Back! With a New and Improved Plan to Pervert American Democracy
Trump will undoubtedly attempt to enhance his authoritarian aspirations by subordinating other branches of power to his will, inspire his base in civil society, and then, in turn, employ it to increase pressure on governmental institutions in his behalf.
Feb 07, 2025
And, so, it begins—again! Only this time, with new vigor, improved efficiency, and an all-encompassing agenda. Following his four-year layoff from 2020-24, in which he licked his wounds while still dominating the media, Donald Trump’s second presidency has already witnessed a blizzard of executive orders, pardons for fascists and criminals, promises to roll back the welfare state, overt threats to American democracy, and actions that endanger the well-being of the planet. This flurry of activity reflects the sobering truth that, while enough intelligent people expected him to win the election of 2024, no one believed that he would win like he did.
Trump will undoubtedly attempt to enhance his authoritarian aspirations by subordinating other branches of power to his will, inspire his base in civil society, and then, in turn, employ it to increase pressure on governmental institutions in his behalf. This might produce a transition to fascism, but to claim that fascism has taken over the United States is a drastic oversimplification. This empties the word of meaning. We are not yet living in either an authoritarian dictatorship or a “party-state”—and resistance is still possible. America’s democratic institutions and traditions are stronger than those in Italy following World War I or in the Weimar Republic. Institutional checks and balances still exist, though they are under attack, and nominal respect for our Constitution remains.
Most importantly, the military is still independent and no secret police is acting with impunity outside legal constraints. Were the state “fascist,” I would be under arrest and the venues that publish my writings would already have been shut down. Certain members of the “resistance” sometimes like to exaggerate their courage in the face of authoritarian dangers. That is insulting to those living in real fascist states who put their lives on the line daily.
Trump glories in his cult of personality and undoubtedly sees himself as Hegel’s “world spirit on a white horse.” It is his world as far as he is concerned, and the rest of us are simply allowed to live in it.
“Fascist” tendencies are apparent in civil society, but it remains contested terrain: censorship, conformism, segregation, religious intolerance, and racism are rampant in many more agrarian “red states” where Trump’s base is active. In urban environments, however, myriad progressive forces challenge them and interfere with the new administration’s programs with respect to abortion, immigration, multiculturalism, and other matters. Moreover, independent civic associations still exist, other loyalties compete with what any fascist administration would demand, rights of assembly are still exercised, and debate continues in public forums. However, this is not to deny that civic freedom is imperiled—and , under Trump’s rule, the dangers seemingly grow greater every day.
Is the president a fascist? Yes. Whether he actually knows what that means is an open question, but his presentation of self and explicit political ambitions justify that view. His pathological indifference to truth, unsubstantiated claims, blatant bigotry, thoroughly corrupt inner circle, and celebration of authoritarian politics is telling. He thinks that he knows better on every issue. He rages against “enemies of the people,” threatens retribution against his opponents, and places himself above the law. Trump glories in his cult of personality and undoubtedly sees himself as Hegel’s “world spirit on a white horse.” It is his world as far as he is concerned, and the rest of us are simply allowed to live in it.
If Trump’s desired transition to some form of fascist state is successful it will have been enabled by “pragmatic” conservatives, who once foolishly thought they could act as “adults in the room” and control the upstart. The enablers of Hitler and Mussolini thought the same thing, and wound up in the same position. Soon enough the puppet was controlling the puppeteers. The president’s return to office has been marked by the self-serving use of institutional opportunities, perverse constitutional interpretations, and loopholes in the legal system to succeed in becoming the dictatorial presence he believes that he deserves to be.
Democrats still fail to appreciate the shrewdness of this New York real estate broker who closed the ultimate deal. They forget what Max Weber—among the very greatest of social scientists—knew, namely, that charisma lies in the eye of the beholder. It has nothing to do with intelligence, or kindness, or humanitarian politics. It is instead a seemingly magic connection established between the charismatic personality and those who encounter him. Of course, the magic does not magically appear. Charisma is always the product of a tumultuous context, and it is misleading to personalize what is a sociopolitical phenomenon; indeed, this misperception is precisely what Trump himself wishes to reinforce. Ultimately, the charismatic personality’s power rests on an ability to express the political thoughts and emotions of his community during any given crisis. Keeping the crisis alive thus becomes crucial, and Trump grasps that. Under his rule, no less than any other fascist, there is always a crisis and there is always publicity—whether good or bad is immaterial.
Obsessed with him, no less than ratings, established media enhanced Trump’s charisma and also provided him with billions of dollars in free publicity. In the process, they systematically underplayed former President Joseph Biden’s record. Legitimate criticisms could be made of the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, the president’s Gaza policy, inflation, and more. But they came while virtually ignoring Biden’s defense of democratic norms in the face of an attempted coup, his life-saving response to the Covid-19 pandemic, his bold infrastructure initiative, his protection of the welfare state and healthcare, his role in generating jobs and higher employment numbers, his reinvigoration of NATO, his defense of Ukraine, his radical environmental policies, and his heightening of America’s standing in the world. Biden’s gravitas was shaken by his disastrous showing in his debate with Trump. Poor packing helped further undermine his popularity and his presidency to the point where his substitute in the presidential race of 2024, former Vice-President Kamala Harris, couldn’t decide whether to embrace her former boss or distance herself from him.
Did this cost her the election? Perhaps. But it remains unclear what her campaign should have done instead: Poll numbers for Democrats and Republicans remained remarkably stable throughout. Not that it matters now. What does matter is that progressives still have no feasible idea for how to “reach” the most intellectually apathetic, ill-informed, prejudiced, and plain reactionary supporters of Trump who—using the colloquial phrase—“just don’t want to hear it.” The idea that the “message didn’t get out” is ridiculous: Every voter either knew or should have known what was at stake—I think they did know and each made his or her decision.
The Democrats are now faced with a stark choice: Either frighten “independents” and moderates with the haunting specter of fascism or mobilize those alienated voters who had formerly been part of their base. Democrats can’t do both at the same time. They need to make up their minds. Best for them to look in the mirror, formulate a message, stop trying to convert the collaborators, and inspire their former friends to return home.
This will require a radical stylistic change in dealing with the media and the public. With very few exceptions, such as Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” the liberal establishment has responded to Fox News and the rest of Trump’s quasi-fascist propagandists like nerds trembling before a school-yard bully. CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are shifting their most critical newscasters to off hours or simply letting them go. Their hosts and commentators remain too timid, and high-minded, to deal with the vulgar, racist, and demeaning rhetoric that has traditionally been used by fascist insurgents.
Liberal media cannot again afford to provide the new president with billions in free publicity by focusing on him, and wringing their hands over his follies, while ignoring the need for unifying principles and a class agenda. This didn’t work before and it won’t work now. Trump gained votes among every meaningful demographic, and his old base remained firm. Meanwhile, identity formations in the Democratic Party turned against one another—and the wounds are still fresh. The majority of white women voted against Senator Harris, a woman of color, along with a record number of Black men, and Latinos concerned about abortion, empowerment of trans-people, and immigrants. Even worse, perhaps, too many young people stayed home. Today, the self-styled “resistance” appears lifeless, a bold programmatic alternative is lacking, and there is no resolve to move beyond identity politics, soft welfare reforms, and an ideological strategy that neither offends nor inspires.
The timidity of the president’s critics is self-defeating. The bully is still in the schoolyard, and it’s time for the Democrats to stop being scared of their own shadow.
Of course, circumstances may change. Political parties in power tend to lose votes in midterm elections, and Republicans might suffer the same fate in 2026. However, fascist parties have traditionally suffered setbacks before assuming power and there is already whispering that the midterm elections may not take place. Many are afraid that Trump (who will have served two terms) is preparing for a third term in 2028, when he will be 82 years old. We are not there yet, but much harm to democracy will surely have been done by then.
How much depends on the extent to which institutional checks and balances remain operative. Trump made 245 federal judicial appointments during his previous tenure and three to the Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court now has a conservative majority, and it already provided the president with immunity from virtually all criminal prosecution. Republicans also hold a slim majority of 219-213 in the House of Representatives and control the Senate 53-47. There should be no mistake: These are Trump’s Republicans and they are marching in lockstep. It is hard to believe that either the House, Senate, or Supreme Court will exercise checks and balances in a consistent manner.
Trump plans to “drain the swamp” and hollow out the federal government by firing tens of thousands of employees from numerous regulatory, cultural, and scientific agencies and departments. In concert with his bizarre cabinet and agency appointments to lead cabinet offices and agencies, whose only qualification is unconditional loyalty to him, this can only lead to bureaucratic anarchy. But that too is part of the authoritarian playbook. Feeding rivalries among subordinates and flunkies, like all successful dictators, the ensuing chaos can only strengthen his position. In addition, purges are being planned for the Department of Defense, the State Department, various intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Department of Justice.
Herein is the basis for any transition to a more authoritarian state. Fascism is based on the “unification” of all political institutions—the Nazis called it “Gleichschaltung”—under the aegis of the (deified) Führer, Duce, or president. In the context of Trump’s pardons for more than 1,500 convicted insurrectionists, mostly white supremacist members of the underclass, it is not difficult to envision a private militia—a militant and violent vanguard loyal to the person of Trump—that can help bring this unification about. However, it remains incomplete without the support of elites and, to gain it, Trump has fashioned an economic agenda that benefits them. Following in the footsteps of other fascist leaders, indeed, he is selling it to his economically disadvantaged base through the use of psychological projection and his opponents supposed betrayal of the national interest.
Insisting that Democrats are catering to “special interests,” which actually comprise the popular majority, Trump has forwarded a tax cut that will disproportionally benefit the 728 billionaires who possess more wealth than half of American households combined. In the same vein, he has also called for privatizing public lands, deregulating energy production, and cutting agencies that test the safety of consumer goods and the standards of food. With regard to his base, in similar fashion, he is intent on protecting the supposedly real victims of racism (white Christian men) from further discrimination by eliminating “diversity, equality, and inclusion” programs that benefit women, the transgendered, and people of color. For good measure, casting himself as the primary victim of legal persecution, in spite of being convicted on 34 felony counts, Trump has pardoned himself and his family along with the disgraced ex-General Mike Flynn, grifters like Steve Bannon, genuine fascists like Enrique Torres of the Proud Boys, and others of this ilk. Unleashing the former insurrections would in a pinch, of course, create the disturbances that only the president can quell, thus again increasing his own power.
Foreign policy deserves its own separate discussion, but the unifying thread is already clear. It is the desire to transform a popular belief that the United States is a nation under siege into a self-fulling prophecy. It begins with sending 1,500 troops to the southern border in order to prevent an immigrant “invasion.” Trump has also provoked a tariff war with China, and another with Canada and Mexico is hanging in the balance. Outrage has already greeted his saber-rattling over Greenland and the Panama Canal, his withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord, and the closing of the humanitarian aid agency U.S. Agency for International Development.
Infuriating Egypt and Jordan, two allies fearful of Islamic extremists spilling over their borders, Trump has called upon them to take in 2.3 million Gazans in order to clear out Gaza for Israel. What will happen with Russia and Ukraine is anybody’s guess, but a $177 billion aid package has already been reduced to $76 billion. For the moment, suffice it to say, that Trump’s foreign and domestic policy aims should converge in a politics that blends conflict with chaos. Our president surely hopes that this will lead citizens to rally around. him, the self-proclaimed “savior,” who always puts “America First!”
Creating such laundry lists of threats and warnings is not the stuff of great journalistic prose. However, they demonstrate the overwhelming sweep of the Trump project and the early signs, if not of fascism, then of a new order that will surely pervert American democracy. Critics need to bare their ideological teeth, unify competing lobbies, and demand a bold class agenda on par with the “New Deal” of the 1930s and “the Great Society” of the 1960s. The timidity of the president’s critics is self-defeating. The bully is still in the schoolyard, and it’s time for the Democrats to stop being scared of their own shadow. Otherwise the next four years will turn into eight—and then, if some acolyte takes on Trump’s mantle, perhaps more.
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American Voters Need to Care About Foreign Policy Again
Foreign policy is not truly foreign; it remains a domestic issue, not some abstract concept that does not affect the average American’s everyday life. Voters do not realize this, but they need to.
Jan 27, 2025
At the start of 2024, in an AP-NORC poll, only 4 out of 10 Americans mentioned a foreign policy topic when asked to list five important issues facing Americans. This represented an increase from years past but is still bleak since it means 6 in 10 Americans do not view foreign policy as a top concern.
Yet, as I write this, the United States is involved in multiple violent conflicts, many of which have no real end in sight, along with foreign interventions that drastically affects other countries’ well-being. While Israel’s now multi-front war has broken through to an extent over the past two years, and time will tell if this cease-fire is real, many of the other conflicts and interventions linger in the background, if, indeed, they are mentioned at all in day-to-day political chatter.
For instance, the United States is normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia despite open questions on that government’s knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and its hold on the oil industry, not to mention MBS’ brutal killing of a Washington Post journalist. In addition, Saudi Arabia’s relentless assaults on Yemen, backed with U.S. arms, began in 2015. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has gone on for almost three years while the United States supplies humanitarian aid and arms to Ukraine. Crippling sanctions on Cuba have decimated the country’s economy and caused it to struggle mightily after recent hurricanes. And that’s not even to begin to list the various ways the United States has increased its involvement in Africa via AFRICOM, arming countries and training paramilitary groups.
For many Americans, with their own positions so precarious due to our capitalistic approach to society, worrying about how to improve relations with China and Cuba is simply not a priority.
These events, all of which involve or are directly caused by the United States, can and in most cases will result in history-changing phenomena for better or worse. This is not to say that all of these situations require a complete reversal—humanitarian aid to Ukraine is a worthy cause in my opinion—but the scale of these endeavors should not be absent from the political sphere. So, why don’t more voters care?
Consider: In the 2024 vice president debate, the opening question was about foreign policy, but pitched in the most juvenile fashion possible, circling around the candidates’ eagerness to bomb Iran. Not an intellectually serious question but rather a little blood sport for the masses to enjoy. It led to no real discussion on the United States’ overall approach to foreign policy nor to the possible aftereffects of the country’s decisions. No discussion of Ukraine and NATO, no discussion of Cuba or even Yemen.
To an extent, this is understandable. Based on polling in general and exit polls in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, the average American does not seem to vote based on Ukraine or Yemen or Gaza (although recent polling shows that Gaza mattered a bit to those who didn’t vote in 2024). One of the downsides of having a weak safety net in the United States is that voters’ main issues will almost always be the economy and healthcare. If you lose your job, you receive a pitiable amount of unemployment and end up in dire straits with health insurance. For many Americans, with their own positions so precarious due to our capitalistic approach to society, worrying about how to improve relations with China and Cuba is simply not a priority.
But it should be. There’s a moral argument that the United States’ foreign policy is largely making lives worse for millions and that with the immense capital the United States has it can care for refugees fleeing desperate situations instead of vilifying such people.
While Americans may like that argument in the abstract, it does not appear to be a pressing concern for them nor one they see affecting their own lives in any real way. With the 2024 election’s remains smoldering behind us, it’s worth reviewing the speeches and discussions to see how often issues of migration and prevention of war came up. The verdict? Beyond glancing references to a cease-fire in the Middle East and supporting Ukraine, it’s hard to find much rhetoric that addresses American foreign policy.
Voters need to consider that the next economic impact on their wallets may well originate due to decisions made overseas as opposed to ones here in the homeland.
Immigration is entirely treated as a domestic issue and even then, largely in a law-and-order fashion. The economics of immigration, which are extremely positive, were mostly absent from the discussion. So, too, however, were the causes, and it is impossible to address immigration without noting that the United States itself is responsible for many of the migration issues. After spending much of the 1900s undermining government after government in South America, it is no surprise that many of those countries still struggle economically, resulting in migration. Ditto the unrest in the Middle East, which can easily be traced back to George W. Bush’s neocon policies. On a purely ethical level, it seems immoral to turn around and claim that the United States has no duty to help the people it has hurt. On a foreign policy level, it makes sense to examine how our continued interference in other countries’ elections, which is done both overtly and covertly, has caused such a destabilizing effect. Whether the U.S. has done it on behalf of the United Fruit Company or Halliburton, U.S. involvement in South America and the Middle East has helped only the very wealthy and hurt everyone else, both in those countries and in America itself.
The other foreign policy issue sometimes addressed is terrorism, although that, too, was not much mentioned this past election cycle outside of vague allusions to immigrants being terrorists in order to scare swing voters into voting for U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet in most cases, terrorism does not come from nowhere: Destabilized countries brew radicalization and radicalization brews terrorist attacks. An unstable Middle East is far likelier to lead to another terrorist attack than a stable Middle East. A foreign policy geared toward non-intervention could result in a severe decrease in terrorist acts around the world, including in the United States itself. In turn, this would allow for the United States’ economy to detangle itself from the web of the military industrial complex and perhaps spend some of the seemingly infinite cash on concerns closer to home, such as building a safety net that allows Americans to vote with a vision beyond whether their next paycheck will allow them to afford rent.
In short, foreign policy is not truly foreign; it remains a domestic issue, not some abstract concept that does not affect the average American’s everyday life. Voters do not realize this, but they need to.
Of course, much of this lies at the fault of politicians, many of whom could easily formulate a foreign policy narrative but choose not to. Voters are not blameless, they have their own agency and the ability to inform themselves, but politicians seem to see no pressing need to address any foreign policy issue that is not massive front-page news—and even then, not always as we saw this past election season. Why?
For one, it does allow them to make foreign policy decisions without much interest from the public, meaning they can make decisions that enrich their donors with zero pushback from your average voter. For another, involving foreign policy means political risk, something they are naturally averse to. Questioning the economic sense behind Cuban sanctions, for instance, invites pushback from neoconservatives. Politicians often take the cowardly route. Don’t rock the boat, receive your donations, smile, get reelected.
If that makes it all sound hopeless, well, that’s a fair interpretation. But, once again, America finds itself in a precarious position as Donald Trump takes the reins in the White House. His tariffs may well crash the economy, and such a circumstance would be a good occasion for the American public to be reminded that we do not exist separate from other countries and their own economies and cultures. This is a globalized world, and all chickens come home to roost in one way or another. Voters need to consider that the next economic impact on their wallets may well originate due to decisions made overseas as opposed to ones here in the homeland. I also hear there is a political party entirely out of power as of now: Perhaps they could involve this message and use it to their advantage?
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