The president of the United States, Donald Trump, embraced this Monday the doctrine of “manifest destiny”a concept from the 19th century that reflects its desire for expansionism from the Panama Canal to Mars, but which, according to experts, will hardly help it in its great international challenge: competition with China.
Days after alarming several allies with his claims to power, Donald Trump reaffirmed those impulses in his inauguration speech, in which he proclaimed the beginning of a “golden era” that will make the United States “the envy of all countries.”
To achieve this, the president has adopted an openly imperialist stance: as he said in his speech, his goal is for his to once again be a nation “that expands its territory (…) and takes its flag to new and beautiful horizons.” “We will follow our manifest destiny to the stars, sending American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes (of the flag) on the planet Mars,” the president said.
A nineteenth-century doctrine
Beyond the , which aspires to colonize the red planet with its company SpaceXTrump’s statements have surprised more than one because the doctrine of “manifest destiny” was already considered forgotten. “The idea of manifest destiny speaks of a destiny of the United States to be different, to mark the light (in the world),” explained this Tuesday Federico Steinberg, principal researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute, at an event organized by that study center. in Madrid.
The concept dates back to 1845, when conservative columnist John O’Sullivan defended in an opinion article the annexation of Texas as part of a “manifest destiny” given by God and by which the United States should expand throughout North America.
That idea was used to justify the confiscation of territories belonging to Mexico and Native Americans, and later laid the foundation for the ‘Monroe Doctrine‘ of 1904, which attributed unilateral rights to the US over the American continent and which Donald Trump has also upheld, despite his bad reputation in Latin America.
Less Greenland and more Panama
Perhaps because of this American approach, he did not mention his idea of controlling Greenland at all, but he did insist on his promise to “recover” control of the Panama Canal. Although – according to the Panamanian Government – it is false that China controls the channel, it was revealing that the president dedicated a paragraph to that topic in a speech in which he did not mention either the Asian giant or the war in Ukraine, his two supposed great challenges in foreign policy.
Graham Allison, professor of national security at Harvard University, predicted this Tuesday at a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Trump will manage to “take the reins of the Panama Canal,” and that the Chinese companies that now help operate it “they will leave.” What seems certain is that Panama will be forced to negotiate on the canal with Trump, whose expansionist desire was also reflected in two other measures on his first day in power.
The first was the decision to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to call it ‘Gulf of America’, and the second was to eliminate the indigenous name that Barack Obama gave to the highest mountain in the country, Denali, in Alaska. He did so to return that mountain to its previous name, which honored President William McKinley, whom Trump admires precisely for his use of tariffs and his colonialist record.
“Pandora’s Box”
It was under McKinley – in 1898 – when the United States declared war on Spain and took control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, in addition to forcing it to accept the independence of Cuba.
McKinley was also a fervent defender of the doctrine of “manifest destiny”, which however lost weight – at least under that name – in the 20th century and which Trump is now rescuing in a context of US loss of influence on the world stage.
However, it is “a great delusion” to think that controlling Canada, the Panama Canal or Greenland would allow the United States to “end the China challenge,” analyst Howard W. French recently wrote in the magazine Foreign Policy.
A territorial expansion would not change the fact that Beijing has invested “in industrial processes and technologies that will play a decisive role in the future,” and could “legitimize Russia’s aggression on Ukraine, or China’s claims on Taiwan,” warned the expert. “In short: Pandora’s box is opening,” he concluded.
