By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
The first 12 months of Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president have been a bonanza for historians. Comparisons and analogies abound, and the “history repeats itself” cliche is doing too much lifting. Of course history doesn’t repeat, nor does it rhyme — it’s a continuum.
Starting with the U.S. attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and his wife on Jan. 3, the historically astute saw echoes of the Monroe Doctrine.
Articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, it was nothing less than a declaration of the United States’ imperial prerogative across the Western Hemisphere and a direct response to the post-Napoleonic tottering of European colonialism in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
While we tend to think of Manifest Destiny as an expansionist impulse westward across North America, U.S. imperialists had always looked greedily to the hemispheric south. The British controlled more than two dozen colonies in the Americas — only 13 rebelled in the 1770s, all the others stayed loyal and most were in the Caribbean.
Those Caribbean colonies were worth far more to the British Empire than a gang of cantankerous, self-righteous and entitled, murderous land speculators, who also wanted those properties.
The U.S. was never a wholly westward-looking North American “republic.” It was a southward-looking, embryonic empire, and Trump is trying to revive that imperial logic both abroad and at home. He’s not “Hitler” (as so many want to draw the comparison, apt as it may be in certain aspects of his character) but a Monroe Doctrine president with a domestic fascist toolkit.
Hemispheric domination by the U.S. has always been tied with racial hierarchy, elite rule, militarized police and the erasure of knowledge of these coordinating systems in the cozy blanket of patriotic mythology. “Manifest Destiny” is the national bedtime story — or, truly, nightmare for the Indigenous peoples who were “in the way” — while the real American project was hemispheric, entailing sugar, slaves, ports, gold and trade routes. Now oil.
As “The West” was “won” in the 19th century, the real prize of all U.S. foreign policy has been control of the Caribbean basin and its tributaries.
The Southern slave system wasn’t just about labor; it was a geopolitical project to dominate the slave-and-sugar world, and now it’s the oil-and-gas world, concomitant with right-wing ideological political and racial animus.
Crack a book like historian Matthew Karp’s brilliant This Vast Southern Empire and the contours of the U.S. Civil War are redrawn by its preceding political culture of white, Southern military-industrial-slaving elites who lusted after Cuba, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
We have to dispense with the North-South morality play in North America, and look beyond the East-West expansion story. There are no “red” and “blue” states, every state is part of an imperial, hemispheric project dating to the beginnings of the so-called “republic.”
The United States is not a nation-state that became imperial, but an imperial system that happens to use the language of a nation. Trump embodies this as a purebred robber-baron — fit to type, even if I can’t give him much intellectual credit for understanding it.
Blaming Trump for the dissolution of the post-World War II order is safe; what we should do is blame a centuries-old imperial tradition. Remove Trump from office and the machine remains.
The same wealth class that profited from slavery, sugar and empire is still setting the terms — it’s not repetition, it’s a straight line from 1823 to 2026.
That means a foreign policy of regime change, economic extraction, racialized nationalism and executive supremacy, reinforced by domestic repression — because you can’t revive empire abroad without building authoritarianism at home. It’s all the same machine, and it’s been humming in the background since before the “founding,” requiring obedient populations, militarized policing, controlled information and crushed dissent.
Trump’s project is to make all this normal again, despite concerted efforts to make imperialism and authoritarianism illegal in the 20th century. Yet, the United States was born as an imperial claimant, behaved like one and is reverting to its true identity.
Trumpism betrays no ideals — there was a territorial and economic program from the beginning, and it’s playing out now. Slavery, racism, genocide and military adventurism are not the contradiction — they’re the U.S.’s operating system. He succeeds because he’s us. Our country isn’t hypocritical. More terrifying, it’s coherent.
