by Mindy Clegg
Just a scant few days into the new year and our supposedly anti-war peace president has greenlit what some are calling an unprecedented attack on another country: we bombed Venezuela, killing up to 40 and kidnapped their sleeping president and his wife (who apparently got roughed up in the process). They are currently sitting in a jail cell in New York City facing drug and weapons charges. Some people are shocked (just SHOCKED) that a man who ran on ending our endless wars is presiding over such a brazen intervention into the affairs of a foreign country. Those who believed Trump would not use American military might in the same way as his predecessors… well Jamelle Bouie has something to say about that:
One thing to remember about the far right is that they lie about almost everything except the most cruel things they have planned. The language of the MAGA movement on both the people and countries of Latin American have long been cruel, jingoistic, and violent. Imperialism is nothing if not those very things. While Trump’s openly violent language and some of his foreign policy actions seem out of step with previous post-war and post-Cold War presidents as they soften the realities of the American imperialism, they are not entirely out of step with our imperial history. What we’re seeing is an attempt to return to more naked forms of imperialism, rather than the somewhat softer imperialism of the Cold War. To understand our present Trumpian moment, we need to understand a couple of facts. First, that America is and has been an imperial power and second, that imperialism takes on many forms, some softer than others. Possibly, the very real damage being done by this destructive administration will make clear American imperial history. But that will necessitate people understanding the nature of American imperialism historically and just what we mean by Trump’s specific version of American imperialism.
Many Americans have insisted over the years—invoking our supposedly exceptional status as a nation, buying that old shining city on a hill rhetoric—that America is not an empire. Sometimes, when admitting that we are, they insist that we are a different kind of empire—kinder, more accepting of difference, less apt to destroy, murder, maim those we conquer. We merely give them democracy and commodity fetishism through which to shaped their identities. They believe that the American way of life is superior, an end point of a historical processes that concludes with the American way of life. None of that is the case. The men and women who formed this nation out of a revolution were imperial from the jump. They opposed the various treaties between the British crown and Indigenous Americans that forbade colonial expansion. Expanding across the continent was an act of imperialism:
If, as Benedict Anderson convincingly argued, the new country formed a historically novel political structure known as the imagined community of the modern nation-state, it also pioneered a new form of imperialism, walking a tight rope between imperial postures. President Monroe’s rather toothless Doctrine meant to exclude European intervention in Latin America was imperialist as it made assumptions about who got to wield power on this hemisphere. The much more naked and violent form of imperialism appeared after the American Civil War, as the US turned the newly consolidated and more powerful US Army on the Indigenous people organizing to preserve their way of life. If the American civil war allowed for the economic and industrial expansion of the US, it also allowed for imperial expansion. We can’t call the destruction of the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee anything but an act of the most brutal imperialism against an already defeated people. By the era of Teddy Roosevelt, violent conquest outside the continent became more acceptable including the rump Spanish empire even as some voices rejected American imperialism at the time, such as Mark Twain. By the Cold War era, the rhetoric changed. America was promoting democracy and containing the Soviet Union not colonizing the world. That created a careful tightrope that American officials needed to walk as we pushed our European allies to decolonize while at the same time trying to bring those very same decolonizing countries into our orbit over the Soviet orbit.
Few people walked that tightrope better than the late war criminal Henry Kissinger. If figures like Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles shaped the early days of American Cold War with regards to how it would look into the 1960s, Kissinger’s vision of how to rule the world dominated the shared understanding of American foreign policy from the 1960s until Trump. The “iron laws” recently described by Stephen Miller were often visited upon the decolonizing world of the global south, but sometimes came with incentives to embrace the US (aid programs, economic development, and so on). But the global north received a different treatment by the American empire. If “winning” in Vietnam necessitated bombing (and destabilizing) Cambodia, so be it. Meanwhile, China got the rapprochement treatment, with Richard Nixon getting a chance to walk the Great Wall. Kissinger can be partially credited with both Detente with the Soviet Union and aiding the genocide in Chile under Pinochet. One approach elided the other, if we’re being honest about it. We often remember the Cold War as a period of tensions, sure, but one of much more peaceful relations around the world. But nothing can be further from the truth. The US and the Soviets (and later China) sought to shape the course of the decolonization around the world. For their part, the Soviets were often willing to deploy violence on what we can call their European colonies. This made them seem more bellicose and violent from the NATO perspective. But the US used a new form of imperialism that seemed far less nakedly violent such as American corporations gaining market access to the European market. But this was only true when came to certain people. Violence carried out in the name Cold War stability were often understood as the fault of those who demanded freedom from western imperialism, not of continued western interventionism. The US developed a system of soft power via cultural, economic development, and public health program, in part as a counterweight to Soviet diplomatic pushes around the world. These included programs like the Jazz Tours, the formation of USAID and the Peace Corps. These also functioned to cover up more problematic policies of resource extraction (access to local markets often came with these soft power programs). As such, it was easier for the American public to ignore the more openly imperialist impulses in our Cold War foreign policy. But under Trump, we’ve done away with almost all of the soft power programs, so we can more easily see the naked imperial power favored by those on the far right. The reality is that we’ve always been an imperial power. That never started nor ended, it is a core aspect of our national identity coupled with white supremacy.
If we’ve always been an imperial power, we must ask what is different with Trump and his merry band of weird cronies, because there is some difference from the Cold War era at least. It would be helpful if more could acknowledge how interconnected all of this is with the longer history of American imperialism. Far too many insist on the narrative of a Trumpian rupture with our supposedly less imperialist past. I can sort of hear Ezra Klein bemoaning now about how “this is not who we are” while plugging up his ears when anyone insists on a history lesson that goes back further than 2016. What other American president cheered on an insurrection once he lost an election, these interlocutors will tell you (I guess we’ll let the enslavers reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln be a surprise for them). The rise of MAGA has sent some never-Trumpers fully into the arms of the remaining center-right party, as people like George Conway are now running for office as Democrats, most likely to counter more progressive candidates. If nothing else, Trump certainly pushed the overton window to new extremes. But for many, the naked violence is the locus of concern which makes sense. The leadership of the Democratic party is certainly wringing their collective hands over this administration’s actions. Yet they refuse to take any risks to try and stop their actions. They point out the break with norms on a regular basis without any action to address the norm breaking. To some degree, the actions taken in Venezuela and on American streets via the ICE raids are different. They are norm breaking and international law breaking, of that there is no doubt. But then again, we have broken international law before and the rise of anti-immigration sentiment was already rising prior to Trump’s first term in office. How the United States functioned as an imperial power during the Cold War—most notably by building up a coalition of support via organizations like the UN and NATO and softening (sometimes) their imperial ambitions in the rest of the world with forms of persuasion and economic incentivization—is not what Trump is doing right now. Nor did either Biden or Obama ignore immigration courts during their deportation push. They also did not authorize the shooting of random people for opposing their immigration policies.
But we should not ignore the connections to our longer history . Aimé Césaire’s argument about imperial boomerang certainly should inform our understanding of the the Trump administration’s use of violence against countries in the global south and on the American homefront against the opposition. Many have just forgotten the violence of the Cold War as carried out by the American (and the Soviet) state, just like they’ve forgotten the longer history of American racism and the violence that bolstered white supremacy. Trump might be employing terms like “fraud” to strip states of various of needed public assistance in blue cities like Minneapolis, but that old tactic dates back to the earliest days of Reconstruction, if not before. As we just saw with the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis, violence and justifications around that violence are part and parcel of ensuring white supremacy. For those paying attention, we are living through an incredibly difficult period of uncertainty, with people looking to take advantage of the resultant instability. Many of us see how unequal our country and the world has become, and most of us are not on the side of the haves. There is no doubt we live in a set of failed systems. We should seek to try and convince people that there is a better way to address our failed systems rather than tearing them down with no thought for what we build in the detritus of the past. Those looking to impose their will on the rest of us and grift to wealth and power do not have the answers for a better world. Rather, we build a better world together that works for all of us.
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