Donald Trump has garnered a lot of support not just by attacking woke liberals and socialist leftists but by slamming the neoconservatives, who preceded him by a decade or two in dominating the Republican Party. This approach plays especially well among millennials, who were the cohort most likely to have seen peers embroiled in Middle Eastern wars and so were ready for a right wing that detached itself from neocon militarism, not to mention old-fogey versions of patriotism and moral rectitude.
Young adults aren’t keen on the imperialist sneering of William Kristol, the “evil-ending” technocratic presumption of David Frum, or the pained anti-market sermonizing of David Brooks, the sorts of late-20th-century pundits who promoted a vision of so-called “National Greatness” back in the 1990s. That was a vision that tended to eschew such subtle, fragile things as markets and individualism (even as those woefully underappreciated forces appeared to be triumphing for the first time in human history) in favor of grand construction projects, moonshot science-dreams, or very long and ambitious wars, all things that tended to involve spending more federal government money we don’t have.
Yet for all the scorn he heaps on his own right-wing predecessors, Trump’s strange recent utterances on Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama make it clear he’s no true isolationist and is more than happy to throw the U.S.’s military weight around if it contributes to his own, more local vision of what makes the country “great.”
Out with Kristol et al’s “national greatness” and in with Trump’s “American greatness,” for those keeping close track—and at some point, you have to forgive leftists for failing to keep track. Figures such as National Review’s Rich Lowry pushing “national conservatism” as a mostly-neocon slight compromise with the Trumper position may only serve to confuse those not already onboard, and it’s hard to tell whether that’s precisely the intention.
It’s only a matter of time, after all, before defense industry lobbyists and the old-fashioned conservative pundits who love them realize they can thrive and make a lot of money even in the ostensibly anti-interventionist, anti-militarist Trump era simply by recalibrating their blood-soaked visions to focus less on distant places about which Trump doesn’t care and more on northern, Western Hemisphere neighbors long considered harmless.
As Ron Paul warned decades ago, even without a Vietnam War to fight, the government can spend billions on helicopters in South America just by trying to eradicate coca crops. That sort of thing is music to weapons-makers’ ears, and Trump hates drug cartels.
So, for all his novel snarling, Trump, especially in his second term, may prove to be not so much a MAGA president (out to “Make America Great Again,” as the hats command) but a déjà vu-inducing MANGA president, surprising some of his least-conservative and younger supporters by effectively working to “Make the Agenda National Greatness Again,” where “greatness” is once more defined by ambitious but stupid, big-spending projects that throw our weight and money around trying to remake the world—all in the name of ancestors who, thankfully, usually had a far humbler understanding of what a limited, constitutional government could and should do, leaving most things to individual action, market exchanges, and the subtle, long-term workings of tradition.
Trump’s style of imperialism, which is arguably a slight improvement over the old model but far from good, may be a bit more insular or regional than we’ve been used to for the past 75 years or so, more akin to imperial Japan than to the would-be world-straddling of Rome or England, but now armed with drones and robots. Not that an egomaniacal blowhard should ever be trusted to act predictably. While half of America chuckles at his dopey X posts and pronouncements, Canadians look on with some understandable fear at his mounting and very frequent—almost daily, in fact—claims that he will one way or another reduce (pardon me, elevate) Canada to the status of a U.S. state.
If you’re reading this in the U.S., you probably aren’t too worried that we’ll go to war with Denmark to wrench away its territory, Greenland. But it would be sociopathic not to worry about what the Danes think of such talk, just as it’s sociopathic to be indifferent to what the Canadians are thinking right now. A generous soul might even find a moment to worry about what the Panamanians and Mexicans, most of them innocent, are thinking.
Despite the obsessive liberal tendency to try explaining all this as evidence that Trump thinks like Putin or serves Putin, it might be more accurate to think that Trump, wary of foreign entanglements (even the productive, voluntary, peace-boosting ties of trade), hopes in a more or less patriotic way for an outcome that’s less like the Russian Empire and more like a renewed and more robust version of the Monroe Doctrine, the young U.S.’s policy 200 years ago of telling foreign powers, in effect, that the Western Hemisphere belongs to the U.S., functionally if not in technical legality, and thus that they should keep out.
That wouldn’t be so terrible, more an effort to tell Russia and China to keep out than to imitate them. Less reassuringly, a recent Wall Street Journal article notes Trump’s a big fan of a president a generation after Monroe, James K. Polk, who was undeniably impressive—even Brooklyn liberal band They Might Be Giants is impressed—but tended to turn his energies to expansionist dreams such as seizing half of Mexico rather than just letting freedom do its own thing.
What goes through Trump’s mind when he gazes at the big portrait of Polk he has placed in the Oval Office? Would that Trump shared Polk’s opposition to tariffs—and his aversion to seeking more than one term in office—not just Polk’s opposition to Mexico.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey