Imperialism is back. Many point to Russia’s Vladmir Putin as having set the trend in 2022, when he likened himself to Peter the Great and then sought to recreate the Russian Empire by once again turning Ukraine into a vassal state. But China’s Xi Jinping has also shown his imperial inclinations by ramping up direct domination of Tibet and Xinjiang, effectively eliminating Hong Kong’s alternative governance system and making clear his desire to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s control.
Now it seems that U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t want to be left out of the new great power turn toward imperialism. In the past three weeks alone, Trump has asserted that Washington will “run” Venezuela and named himself chair of a “Board of Peace” that hearkens back to the League of Nations’ quasi-imperial protectorates following World War I. Prior to that he also declared an interest in the U.S. retaking ownership of the Panama Canal. Most of all and most vociferously, he has expressed his imperial ambitions in his determination to “own” Greenland, a semi-autonomous island that is currently the sovereign territory of Denmark. As Hope Dancy recently wrote in reference to Trump’s actions in Venezuela, “This isn’t even neocolonialism; it’s simply colonialism.”
In the grand scheme of things, none of the above is especially surprising. After all, empire is the most common form of polity in world history. If empire is defined simply as vast territorial possessions with different peoples united by a dominant power’s force and ambition, then many polities over time fit the bill, including the United States. And I am not referring to the “territorial possessions” of what Daniel Immerwahr calls America’s “Hidden Empire.” Instead, I am referring to the United States proper. America’s territorial growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries was an imperial process. Just ask the Native Americans who reside in what is now the continental United States, the Inuit people of modern Alaska and the Indigenous people of Hawaii. Thomas Jefferson famously called on the United States to become an “Empire of Liberty,” and that view fueled the “civilizing” imperial mindset of Manifest Destiny.