Trump’s 2025 Foreign Policy Plan: Make Colonialism Great Again

A little over four years ago, I wrote a political obituary for Donald J. Trump. My fervent hope at the time was to write the grand finale about the national trauma that Trump had imposed on the country for four years; I wanted, one way or another, to pull us out of the political darkness that Trump embodied during his term, then take a long bath to clean off the accumulated filth of covering this heinous figure for four years and move on to brighter topics.

Unfortunately, this dream was horribly premature.

And here we are, in 2025, heading into another round of chaos, dysfunction, sadism, corruption, and sycophancy. Except this time, we can’t even say that we, as a country, voted for all of this in a fit of mindlessness. We can’t pretend we didn’t know how dirty what Trump and Trumpism represent. We cannot claim ignorance of the pseudo-fascist religious teachings of the MAGA movement. And we can take solace in the fact that Trump was elected without winning the popular vote — because in 2024 he not only won the Electoral College vote, but also won a plurality (not quite a plurality) of all the votes. He slanders. In other words, this is exactly what America is now.

Nearly half of this country’s voters were willing to make a deal with the political devil in exchange for a promise to lower supermarket egg prices and gas station gas prices — and in exchange for permission to unleash their gang on marginalized “others,” whether asylum seekers or young people. Transgender people. Their voices will now unleash the attack dogs of our culture.

But give the man his due. It’s hard to imagine how boring the next four years will be. Oh my goodness, we’re still more than two weeks away from Inauguration Day and the stock market has already become one giant Roller coaster ride. The various incomplete wings of the MAGA movement are at open war with each other over immigration policy and the extent of xenophobia specifically. Elon Musk and Laura Loomer You’ve been indulging in the equivalent of an illegal cockfight – you know you’ve crossed the mirror when Musk, who recently… She supported the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany partycomes as a voice of moderation in the debate over immigration policy. and Bird flu It threatens to jump to humans as anti-vaxxer conspiracy monger RFK Jr. prepares to… To control the Department of Health and Human Services.

None of this even touches on Trump’s extraordinary proposals to upend the international order. Over the past few weeks, as he hovers in the wings to take power again, Trump has signaled his foreign policy priorities, centered on a series of threats against Iran. Unilaterally impose tariff regimes Not only against geopolitical rivals like China, but also against close allies of the United States, as well as a series of quite unusual reflections on Stealing land from other countries—The Panama Canal is from Panama, Greenland is from Denmark, and Canada is from… Canada.

CNN described these plans as a “deal”. As merely a bold geopolitical strategy similar to the one that led to the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska Purchase from Imperial Russia. It seems to me that it is actually about two German words beloved by the Nazis: Biosphere and annexation. The first expressed the Nazi desire to expand eastward into lands where people whose ideologues considered them racist lived, e.g Alfred RosenbergThey were identified as being of a lower human order than the Aryan Germans. The latter expressed the idea of ​​uniting all ethnic Germans into a single political unit – an idea that reached maturity with the absorption of the remainder of the Austrian state into the Third Reich in March 1938.

When Trump talks about seizing land in Panama, or seizing Greenland and all its vast mineral resources without regard to the will of the indigenous people living there, this is an updated version of the European colonial project of the nineteenth century and the fascist colonial project of America. The thirties and forties. When Trump deliberately insults Canadian leader Justin Trudeau by referring to him in his social media posts as “Governor TrudeauHe speculates that Canada will be annexed to the United States as its 51st state, and he assumes so annexation The philosophy of Manifest Destiny has been updated for the 21st century; It is a worldview that believes that all of wealthy North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, is inherently doomed to be governed by Washington, D.C.

The temptation is to dismiss all of this as just Donald J. Trump’s usual ugly trolling strategy. It is certainly possible that this is all it is. In the twenty-first century, no person in their right mind would be able to turn on a former friend or neighbor by seizing their land… Would they, Putin?

But it is also possible that Trump 2.0 is more committed to an extreme political philosophy than Trump 1.0. It is possible that this time Trump, who is approaching eighty years old and intoxicated with his own power and belief in fate, as well as his sense of political immunity, will allow his fascist instincts to be freely expressed, as Putin did before him. After all, Trump has survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and two apparent assassination attempts, not to mention the fact that he was rewarded for his serial misconduct with a Supreme Court ruling granting him virtual impunity, and a stunning election victory last November. . For a man with Trump’s already massive narcissism and ego, such a streak of good fortune can only amount to something akin to divine intervention. In fact, he did Expressly suggested And that God had saved him so that he could save the “broken country.”

If so, I think we will see this not only at the local level, but with a full frontal assault on media and academic freedoms, with political prosecutions and show trials, and with a willingness to deploy the National Guard, and perhaps the US military, against protesters and against immigrants, but also quickly Great on the international scene.

Trump and his allies like to portray the “America First” policy as an exercise in peace through strength, of a United States that cares only about the well-being of its citizens. In fact, what this cabal of villains is proposing is that America use or threaten to use brute military and economic force, not only against established enemies, but also, at least as importantly, against former friends. It is a “might is right” philosophy that views the world entirely from a zero-sum perspective, where what benefits the United States must necessarily harm others; Conversely, what benefits others must, in one way or another, be viewed as an intolerable theft of the good United States of America.

Given such calculations, why would Trump, who will soon control the most powerful military on Earth, wonder? no Bully allies to cede territory to him? Why is it? no Threatening to withdraw from alliances unless allies pay to play? Why is it? no Seizing key infrastructure assets, such as the Panama Canal, or at the very least forcing the governments that own those assets to make huge economic concessions, in order to maintain their sovereign integrity?

I very much hope that I am wrong, and that Trump turns out to be more of a troll than a tyrant. But frankly, I don’t see many signs of a calm and coherent governance strategy emerging in this strange period. What I see, hiding in plain sight, is the erratic, perhaps senescent, nature of the would-be strongman, on full and corrupt display before a global audience.