Cromwell

When asked about the Amritsar Massacre, General Dyer essentially said that it was necessary to send the message that the British were in charge. An element of racist, pro-imperialist public opinion supported him, but most of the nation was appalled. It was another step towards independence for India.

In the same vein, MAGA supports brutal behavior by ICE, but America as a whole finds it sickening. Trump will have to listen to that voice as long as we remain a liberal democracy. How long will that last? TBD.

Kevin Warsh is Trump’s choice for the Fed.

Independence is key, it is said.

He wants to cut rates

But inflation’s not great

And his colleagues aren’t easily led.

My wife and I went to a free musical event last night. The first song on the band’s set list was CSNY’s “Ohio.”

The band didn’t say why they played it, but no explanation was necessary. I knew what they meant, and so do you.

Here is the list, in order of importance:

1. Chinese economic and military might;
2. Russian nukes;
3. The markets;
4. The opinions of the base;
5. Opinion polls; and
6. Whatever lingering respect he has for law and the Constitution.

I can see it now. The nominee stands by smiling while Trump demands lower interest rates. The chosen one then confirms that he believes in radically lower interest rates while insisting that he won’t take direction from the president. He is, he will say, his own man, and he believes in an independent Fed.

Sure.

We have finally reached Trump 2.0. In just a year, Trump has demanded Greenland, attacked Venezuela, threatened Canada and Mexico, bailed out Argentina, imposed absurdly high tariffs on Brazil, and used El Salvador as a black jail. The Good Neighbor Policy, it isn’t.

The new approach to imperialism combines TR’s aggressive pursuit of short-term material interests with Trump’s signature emotional neediness. Can it work in the long run? History over the last century says no.

To him, the only meaningful political question was who/whom? Were you the subject or the object? The hammer or the nail? Could you work your will on the other or not?

Is it Trump or Lenin? Actually, in spite of their ideological differences, it is both.

FDR was reflexively anti-imperialist; in any event, he was too busy fighting the Great Depression and fascism to spend much time with Latin America. He opted for the Good Neighbor Policy, and the nature of our relationship with the rest of the hemisphere changed for good, at least until now.

Most of our actions that smacked of imperialism during the Cold War were done purely in the name of fighting communism; in other words, they were motivated by ideology, not material self-interest. Jimmy Carter even gave back the Panama Canal. After an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the regime in Cuba, we promised not to invade, and we kept our promise. We cemented our relationship with our immediate neighbors by signing the NAFTA agreement. A new era had begun.

Tom Petty tells us in “Echo in the Canyon” that California is the kind of place where you can dream of doing something different and special. To the right, however, it is the land of fruits and nuts; to turn a DeSantis quote on its head, it is the state where woke ideas are born. It needs to be brought under control.

As a result, the base would have approved if ICE started shooting protesters in LA or San Francisco. But Minneapolis? The land of friendly white people from Scandinavia? Did Trump ever have a chance of selling that to the American people?

No. The Somalis were a shiny object he couldn’t resist. I bet he’s sorry now.

Life in the time of Trump.

Street fighting in Iran.

The ayatollah mows them down

Just to prove that he still can.

But freedom’s just around the bend.

You can almost taste it now.

Intimidation doesn’t work.

The people won’t be cowed.

The decades on both sides of the turn of the twentieth century were the golden age of American imperialism, if such a thing can exist. The military supported a sugar planter coup in Hawaii, which was ultimately annexed. The Spanish-American war, which was initially fought to protect human rights in Cuba, became a raw exercise of imperialism; Puerto Rico and Guam became American possessions, our country claimed a right to intervene in the politics of nominally independent Cuba, and we fought a bloody guerrilla war to subdue rebels in the Philippines. TR engineered and supported a coup in what subsequently became Panama to expedite the construction of the canal. Woodrow Wilson shelled Veracruz for specious reasons and sent the US Army over the border after Pancho Villa. And those were only the famous episodes.

These were not mostly private-sector attempts at ethnic cleansing, as with the Native Americans; these events were primarily initiated by the US government for geopolitical and economic reasons. They were an embarrassment by the 1930s. A new era was about to begin.

During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan sold American weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon and then used the funds without authorization to support the Contras in Nicaragua. In a similar vein, can’t you imagine Trump taking the oil in Venezuela and then using the oil sale proceeds to finance a forced purchase of Greenland?

Sure you can.

Nineteenth century American imperialism got off to a bang in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon initially wanted to revive the French empire in the Western Hemisphere, but the cost of crushing a revolt in Haiti and more pressing needs in Europe persuaded him to abandon the scheme. The Native Americans who actually occupied the land in question were not, of course, consulted in this matter.

One of the American objectives during the War of 1812 was the conquest of Canada. This part of the war was a miserable failure. The war, as a whole, was a draw; the Native Americans, however, were the big losers, as the British quietly gave up on their plan to create a buffer state for Canada that would be controlled by the natives. American campaigns against Native Americans in nominally Spanish areas that are now included in Alabama and Florida also set the stage for the acquisition of these areas after the war.

The Monroe Doctrine was inspired by British efforts to prevent the restored Spanish monarchy from reasserting control over its former colonies. America had no military power to prevent European intervention in South American countries, so it essentially had to rely on the British fleet for that purpose. The Doctrine was not, therefore, an attempt to establish American hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, as no resources existed to make that a reality. It was, in reality, a blow against autocracy and imperialism, not an attempt to assert an American variant.

The highlight, if you could call it that, of American imperialism during the first part of the nineteenth century was the Mexican War, which was provoked by President Polk in an effort to force Mexico to sell, at a minimum, its northern possessions to the United States. The war was strongly opposed by the Whig Party, but it was a huge military success. Politically, it was a disaster; the acquisition of new territory made the Civil War much more likely.

I’ve discussed the likelihood that the United States and the EU could force Ukraine into a bad deal on many occasions. But recent events have raised another possibility-that the need to keep America’s support on Ukraine could result in EU pressure on Denmark to sell Greenland.

That may be Trump’s end game here. It is definitely plausible.

The 18th century in America was marked by two kinds of imperialism: the British, French, and Spanish doing battle with each other; and all of them pushing against the Native Americans who weren’t allied with them. But was the effort to take land from the Native Americans really imperialism? After all, virtually all of it was driven by settlers, not the governments of the mother countries or the colonies, and there was no real attempt by either the British or French colonists to exploit and rule the much-diminished native population, whom the British settlers just wanted to go away, one way or the other. Morally speaking, that may not be an improvement over imperialism, but it doesn’t fit my definition.

Anyway, the British Empire prevailed over the French version in the French and Indian War, and the French relinquished their rights to North America. The British government, far from encouraging the colonists to take Native American land, imposed a limit on it with the Proclamation of 1763. This in turn was one of the most important colonial grievances that resulted in the Revolutionary War.

At the end of the 18th century, both American political parties recognized that settlers would ultimately control all of the land east of the Mississippi. The Federalists were unenthusiastic about the process and wanted to keep it slow and organized; the Republicans were far more bullish about the expansion of “civilization.” The Native Americans, for their part, were in deep trouble, and the American colonies were still bordered by Spanish possessions to the south and west.