Trumperialism

Add the Panama Canal to the foreign territories under threat from Trump, and take note that China is the excuse facilitating this emergent framework.

Trump just stated the intent to abrogate the Torrijos-Carter treaties and reestablish a colony in the (currently) sovereign nation of Panama.

If this surprises you, then you probably have not yet come to terms with the imperial character of Trump’s global outlook. He’s not even back in office yet and already the data points are stacking up.

He threatened to annex Mexico and Canada just a couple weeks ago. He campaigned partly on waging war on Mexico by way of war on cartels there (as well as war on American sanctuary cities). Steve Bannon said explicitly in Trump’s first term that US allies were nothing more than protectorates. “Monroe Doctrine 2.0” was one of the chief foreign policy ideas batted around the Republican Party during the presidential primary.

This is the context within which Trump is now also threatening to annex the Panama Canal. In this same statement above, he’s praising Teddy Roosevelt—a proud imperialist. Everyone knows Trump is transactional, but so is imperialism. Also keep in mind that there is a substantial amount of imperial structure in the US foreign policy that Trump will be inheriting from Biden, and all of that is obviously going to persist as well.

I anticipated all this:

Dispossession is a classic (and inevitable) means of accumulating capital for a non-democracy in a world of diminishing economic growth.

Trump and his policy elites are a mix of ethnonationalists and oligarchs…and that’s a succinct way to describe the alchemy of a 21st century imperialism. It’s worth remembering that for Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, nationalism was a justification for formalized imperialism.

Finally, in both Trump’s statement as well as in mainstream think tank analysis—which makes this insanity appear as an issue of normal policy like any other—the profit motive is inseparable from the China rivalry motive. Great-power competition has brought us here.

A failure to diagnose the imperialism in Trump’s foreign policy impulses will lead to many “black swans” in the coming years.