The word China appeared only twice – and in the context of the promise of resumption of the Panama Canal. Russia did not appear, as well as Ukraine. Trump’s inaugural speech, a radical split with the traditional US foreign policy, had characteristic traits of isolationism. Except for McKinley, as Trump decided to rename, once again, Mount Denali.
Denali, in Alaska, 6,190 meters altitude, the highest mountain in the base world to the summit between those that are fully above sea level, was renamed in honor of McKinley in 1896. President William McKinley, an ardent tariff defender Commercial, led the Hispanic-American war (1898) in which the US conquered the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico. Imperial expansion by both oceans, in line with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s geopolitical thinking, would be completed by Theodore Roosevelt with the Panama Canal.
Manifest fate. The expression coined in the mid-19th century synthesized the idea of a island nation that, after the acquisition of Louisiana (1803), extended from the original Atlantic colonies to the Pacific coast. At the apex of American imperialism, Mahan and Roosevelt have expanded the concept to cover the oceans themselves and the isthmus that delimits them. By exhumuing it, Trump invests in the rhyme between isolationism and imperialism.
“We have an ocean between us,” Trump recorded referring to Europe-and to the Russian imperial war in Ukraine. It is not new. The basis of Monroe doctrine (1823) was the geopolitical separation between the old world and the so -called American hemisphere. Until World War II, with the brief intro of the Great War (1914-18), isolationism gave the tone of US relations with Europe. It was in this long time that the US established its sphere of influence in the Americas and its hegemony in the two great oceans.
Resume the channel, attach Greenland, promote military raids against Mexican cartels. Miracating the past, Trump Aventa restores that “golden age,” as he unveils the future glory: staring at the stars flag on Mars. And the present, that is, the American pax shaken by the rise of China and the war in the center of Europe?
Indocumented immigrants and their children have reason to feel terrified. There are reasons in the fears of Panama, Mexico, even Denmark, allied in NATO. China and Russia, no. Trump promised to impose tariffs on the two neighbors in early February, but only said he will negotiate with Xi Jinping – and temporarily reversed Tiktok’s ban. As for the Russian war, he vaguely rehearsed economic sanctions against a country already halted for sanctions of all kinds. The lion only roars in front of kittens.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will have smiled at the end of the inaugural speech. If Trump invokes the manifest fate to convey threats to the territorial integrity of small allied countries, how can you contest a eventual Chinese achievement of Taiwan or the imposition of a Russian protectorate on Ukraine?
In the shadow of McKinley, Trump opened his contempt for the international order based on rules that were erected in the postwar and consolidated at the end of the Cold War. In their place, he scribbled the contours of a fragmented world in spheres of influence of the great powers. Isolationism and imperialism are not mutually exclusive concepts.
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