Horny for Territory, or Desperate for a Fix?
The class politics underneath the Trump administration’s obsession with territorial control and extraction.
Dan Drezner1 wrote an essay for Reason magazine, a libertarian outfit. In his newsletter, he said he originally tried to insert a line in it characterizing Trump as “horny for territory,” but the editors took it out (I can relate).
To explain Trump’s territory fetish, Drezner argues the following:
First, Trump has always possessed a mercantilist, zero-sum view of world politics and the global economy. In that mindset, more territory is better than less.
Second, Trump believes that peace among the great powers can be achieved through spheres of influence. This means conceding parts of the globe to Russia and China—while expanding U.S. control over the Western hemisphere.
Third, changing territorial boundaries transgresses all sorts of international norms—and Trump loves transgressing.
Finally, Trump wants to emulate the leaders he admires. Putin and Xi are also into expanding their territorial control.
I guess this is all true enough, and if we’re going to sit Trump down on the couch, we have the makings of the man’s psyche here. But teasing out the beliefs of an individual leader is only going to get you so far; it’s not an especially helpful way of understanding what’s happening.
I was among the first to describe Trump’s foreign policy as imperialist, which Drezner also acknowledges, and the territory fetish is the crucial part of that imperialist label. But while Greenland, Canada, Gaza, the Panama Canal, and Ukraine have all attracted Trump’s gaze in this particular horny way, most of the rest of the world has not.
The question that must be asked, then, is: Why have only a select few places become part of the Trump administration’s imagination of expansion and extraction?
The answer to that has nothing to do with Trump’s id, or what’s going on inside Trump’s head; it has everything to do with US elites turning to state power and “primitive accumulation” as alternative modes of wealth hoarding in a world of declining growth. With the exception of Canada, each of these issues was force-fed to Trump by imperialist-reactionaries who have aligned themselves with MAGA.
Territorial expansion and extraction is class politics by other means.