U.S. President Donald Trump has steadily talked about taking up Greenland and Canada, nevertheless it’s unclear if he was really critical about it. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a delusion of a limitless frontier—the concept that fixed growth may remedy inside issues. However limitlessness feels much less potential right now than it did two centuries in the past. What does that then imply for Trump’s “America First” mannequin?
On the newest episode of FP Reside, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale College and the writer of books equivalent to America, América: A New Historical past of the New World. Subscribers can watch the complete interview on the video field atop this web page or observe the FP Reside podcast. What follows here’s a evenly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: We’re all aware of MAGA, or Make America Nice Once more. The unusual factor is it has begun to evoke making America not simply nice, however better in dimension.
Greg Grandin: This got here out of nowhere throughout Trump’s second inaugural tackle, when he talked about Canada, Greenland, and probably taking up the Panama Canal Zone. Like many issues with Trump, it’s laborious to determine. It looks as if he rummages by means of the trash bin of U.S. historical past and pulls out no matter fits him.
I don’t assume he’s an expansionist president in the best way that I’d use the time period, however he’s in some ways the primary “batten down the hatches” president. Throughout his first time period, he substituted the parable of the frontier for a brand new image: the border and the wall that grew to become the articulating middle of his many constituencies. He invokes “America First,” regardless of sometimes speaking about taking up Greenland or annexing Canada because the 51st state. All these issues appear to have fallen by the wayside, though we did get the symbolic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico because the Gulf of America.
RA: Effectively, let’s speak about that trash bin of historical past. James Madison wrote in 1787 about “extending the sphere.” There’s a lengthy historical past of the American frontier as being one thing that one can and will broaden.
GG: American exceptionalism means a number of issues to totally different folks, however I don’t assume another self-proclaimed nation had the promise of growth constructed into its very fundamentals—the founders believed that the US was going to succeed in the Pacific.
After we discuss in regards to the frontier, we’re speaking in regards to the land frontier, [Native American] elimination, and wars in opposition to Mexico to get to the Pacific. However we’re additionally simply speaking in regards to the superb of limitlessness and using limitlessness to arrange home politics. The best of a frontier is infinitely helpful as a result of it may be projected into infinity.
RA: You’ve written that when nationalism is inward-looking, it may be damaging. So, the potential of wanting exterior permits you to not self-destruct, because it have been, and as a substitute to maintain increasing each the frontiers and the parable that issues are OK internally.
GG: Each the truth and the best of growth do a number of work. The land frontier was an unlimited financial institution of wealth for the brand new nation by way of land, minerals, and plant cultivation. However the promise of limitlessness was a method of venting social discontent. Different nations needed to cope with labor events organizing, however the US by no means had a Labor Get together, so it may consistently use the promise of limitlessness to be able to reconcile inside contradictions. All the violence and brutality related to Western growth might be saved on the margins, and the US may think about itself within the twentieth century, rising as a bastion of liberalism and internationalism, so long as the frontier was maintained.
That’s why Trump is a turning level. Though he denies local weather change, he’s the primary local weather change politician, as a result of he comes at a second when limitlessness is now not potential. The Iraq Battle, the monetary disaster of 2008, and the truth of local weather change have made that promise of limitlessness untenable. So, Trump is the shortage president.
RA: I take your level about geography right here. However there are different new frontiers: financial conquests, technological conquests, and the race for vital minerals.
GG: However discover that for the Trump administration, the imaginative and prescient isn’t a liberal worldwide order superintended by the US. There’s a way that the worldwide order has fractured into competing superpowers, and it’s a scramble for sources and benefit. Below the outdated liberal order—what folks appreciated to name the rules-based order—there was a way that each one boats may and would rise. All people may sit on the desk if they simply adopted sure guidelines.
Trump is the president who says that not all people can sit on the desk. Not all boats will rise. It’s a contest. And the world order must be organized round competitors and strategic development.
RA: I used to be struck by your description in your final e book of how, greater than a century in the past, Latin American diplomats tried to push Washington to simply accept a imaginative and prescient of cooperative worldwide legislation. America got here reluctantly to the rules-based order.
GG: The USA got here into the world as a lone nation on what the founders imagined to be an empty-enough continent. There was little question the US was going to succeed in the Pacific. The USA’ idea of sovereignty was conquest; [Native American] elimination pushing west. They used the doctrine of conquest to justify taking half of Mexico.
Latin America got here into the world already as a league of countries: seven impartial republics and Brazil, which had an impartial monarchy. Eight polities needed to study to stay with one another. What would have occurred if Argentina abided by the identical conquering logic as the US? It could’ve led to infinite wars. So Latin America’s leaders got here up with a set of authorized rules that insisted that the world must be ordered round cooperation, that aggressive wars must be outlawed, that the doctrines of conquest and discovery have been null and void, and that we must always settle for the borders as they got here to us. That’s the other of the US, the place a border wasn’t one thing to cease at, however one thing to cross over. All the beliefs that have been debated within the 1830s and 1840s in Latin America have been finally put into place in San Francisco in 1945, with the founding of the United Nations.
RA: I’m struck by the self-discipline you could have in saying the US, whereas I immediately began utilizing the shorthand “America” to talk for the US of America. Discuss that nomenclature.
GG: America referred to all the Americas, and Spanish Individuals considered themselves as Individuals. However this grew to become weaponized throughout Texas secession and the battle of Mexico, when Mexicans and Individuals grew to become a really racialized division. And after the time period “Latin America” was adopted, Spanish Individuals started to determine themselves as Latin Individuals: extra non secular, humanist, and common, beholding to a more true set of American beliefs, whereas Saxon America was understood as instrumental, grubbing, expansionist, and enslaving—the strain of two Americas.
It wasn’t simply an elite conceit. Los Tigres del Norte, a Mexican norteño band, has a fantastic music titled “Somos Más Americanos”: We’re extra American as a result of we’re extra humanist, extra earthy, as a result of we work the land. In order that division has a number of cultural weight in Latin America.
RA: To carry us again to the present day, given “America First” and what Trump has invoked with the Monroe Doctrine, how do you concentrate on the revival of spheres of affect?
GG: Early Spanish American critique was not simply of the US’ revival of the doctrine of conquest; in addition they critiqued Europe’s post-Napoleonic steadiness of energy. They insisted that any world order that didn’t acknowledge the interdependence of humanity was certain to result in wars. They have been very vital of any form of worldwide order that didn’t worth extra transcendent beliefs of humanity and cooperation.
However we appear to be again within the period of gunboat diplomacy, hurtled again to the nineteenth century, when the US was sending ships to Nicaragua to destroy Greytown within the 1850s. It’s a really harmful second. Trump’s bombing of boats within the Caribbean speaks to corruption and his want for dominance, nevertheless it additionally speaks to his bid to arrange the Americas on this imaginative and prescient of a fractured world order of polycentric hegemons. This has occurred up to now—after the Nineteen Seventies, [U.S. President Ronald] Reagan principally obtained Latin America to heel below the doctrine of anti-communism. However he additionally articulated native pursuits in that imaginative and prescient on the finish of the Chilly Battle.
Trumpism undermines itself. There’s definitely a social base in Latin America for Trumpism; Ecuador has seen complaints about wokeism and has a number of anti-trans activism, and there’s a cult of the Second Modification in Brazil. So, there are a number of Trumpy actors in Latin America.
RA: Argentina has been within the information as a result of [President] Javier Milei is a chainsaw-wielding libertarian. He desires to slash the forms, and he’s very anti-woke, as effectively. I used to be struck by how Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, prolonged a $20 billion credit score line.
GG: They’re trying to double it. They’re searching for 40 billion. Finally, the peso should actually be in bother. There are overlaps right here. One is simply pure corruption. The New York Occasions ran that article about how Bessent may be very shut with Discovery Capital. They usually positioned huge bets on shopping for Argentine bonds. So this cash is cycled again into U.S. banks as bond funds.
RA: A throughline on this dialog is the trouble to situate Trump’s insurance policies, particularly towards Latin America, in historical past. What does race need to do with Trump’s considering round what to do with Latin America?
GG: “America First” has at all times had a robust racial element. It’s tied to an concept that the US was a white, Anglo Saxon nation. It’s also tied to a really conservative immigration legislation that was handed within the Twenties, which privileged northern European migration into the US and put a restrict on Southern Catholic and Asian migration.
The USA has by no means been actually isolationist. However isolationists have been apprehensive {that a} mission to kind a world legislation would open the door to desegregation, social rights, and financial justice. They didn’t need to signal the Treaty of Japan or the Common Declaration of Human Rights as a result of they have been anti-racist paperwork.
So, there was at all times a way that these reform actions that attempted to liberalize society and socialize the economic system got here from the surface, and that isolationists needed to maintain the road. That’s what’s usually referred to as “America First,” and why what’s referred to as isolationism is finally profoundly racist and classist. It’s a method of sustaining the social hierarchy. Trump represents that, and he’s articulating it in a extra open method than any president has carried out in a very long time.
RA: A few of this dialog can sound like bashing the US. For all of the critiques of a few of U.S. international coverage, some would possibly argue that each one nice powers, sooner or later in time, have been this manner. If every part is about realpolitik, then why are we holding the US to a better customary?
GG: Opposition to energy makes energy extra humane. Latin America’s critique of the US compelled the US to socialize itself on a world stage, laying the groundwork for what later grew to become our allyship with the US in opposition to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. It’s in that pushback that you just create a extra humane world, even when we perceive that the hegemon continues to be appearing out of its personal pursuits.
Even after the US accepted Latin America’s demand to surrender the fitting to intervention, it intervened in Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and the Dominican Republic in 1965. They could have used code phrases, below the quilt of multinationalism with the sanction of the Group of American States, however that may not matter finally. When you push again on energy, then you definately guarantee energy is conscious of its limits.
RA: As the US takes such a special strategy below Trump’s second time period—whether or not it’s expansionist rhetoric, withdrawing U.S. support, or local weather change values—how will the world reorganize round, or with out, the outdated United States? Does historical past have classes for us?
GG: Sure, they usually’re not good. Up to now, there’s a way of this realpolitik steadiness of energy at all times resulting in catastrophic wars. The legitimation of competitors and conquest that Trump represents opens the barn door to a number of dangerous actors. Whether or not Europe opposes the US or whether or not it concedes and subordinates itself to the US, I don’t see something good popping out of the present second, sadly. It’s disastrous.
What’s the top sport with China? China is presiding over, as Adam Tooze places it, this huge social experiment and financial modernization. It’s unprecedented and virtually renders Europe as a footnote within the historical past of financial growth in comparison with what China has carried out during the last couple of many years. I don’t think about how the US may put a cease to that, and it will possibly’t result in something however extra battle and extra wars. Typically, battle isn’t seen as one thing to finish, however one thing to get strategic benefit inside a brand new, reconfigured sphere of affect.
RA: However particularly with Latin America, one may make the case {that a} chief like Lula in Brazil has taken a special tack from what another leaders have carried out this 12 months, by taking a principled stance and standing as much as Trump. Individually, Brazil has additionally taken a management position within the local weather motion, in attempting to create avenues of management inside the international South as a substitute for the US. Do these actions have traction?
GG: Completely. Lula has traction—he’s been elected 3 times in opposition to huge setbacks, together with the lawfare marketing campaign that imprisoned him. The left in Latin America sense that democracy means social democracy. Local weather change is the right instance of the best that comes out of Latin American nationalism: that the world must be organized round cooperation, not competitors.
There’s a number of inspiration in Latin America, nevertheless it’s fragile. Individuals are bored with crime and violence, and also you see that within the reputation of someone like Bukele in El Salvador or the latest elections in Ecuador. Within the 2000s, the left in Latin America strode the stage with confidence and rhetorical hegemony, whether or not it’s Chavez in Venezuela, Kirshner in Argentina, or Lula in Brazil. Now, it’s true that some are standing up, not simply in Brazil, however Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.
It’s a response to the deprivations of financial globalizationism to show to the poisonous, resentful nationalism that you just see in the US, Turkey, the Philippines, and different locations. What’s inspirational about Latin America is that the critique of globalization isn’t in regards to the globalist.
Spanish America was based as a group of countries, having to study to stay with one another to be able to survive. They got here up with this new mind-set in regards to the international order by which nationalism was not seen in opposition to internationalism, however as elementary to a humane, common internationalism. And it nonetheless holds, in Lula’s imaginative and prescient and in Gustavo Petro’s imaginative and prescient. Now it depends on El Salvador and Ecuador.
RA: What wouldn’t it take for the Latin American ideas you describe to develop past the Americas to the worldwide South, to create a brand new world order in a second the place the prevailing one feels prefer it’s fraying?
GG: It takes a risk—like Trumpism—by which teams of countries see their pursuits as extra aligned laterally reasonably than in relationship to the US. Sadly, the BRICs, from Modi in India to Putin in Russia, are hardly inspirations themselves. Lula is Lula—that speaks to the humanist exception of Latin America. Lula nonetheless takes the promise of radical enlightenment at its phrase. You may’t say the identical for different nations. However in response to an aggressive, dominating United States that’s changing into unhinged internally, I think about that’s forcing new connections.
