Donald Trump’s surprising references to the 25th United States president William McKinley (1897-1901) in his inaugural speech look more and more significant. Trump’s territorial claims on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal confirm this, as does his commitment to tariffs against US allies and foes.
McKinley oversaw an aggressive expansion of the US to Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines during his war with Spain, in addition to imposing large tariffs on trading partners. As part of the “Gilded Age” from 1860-1900, McKinley’s rule was marked by unparalleled political cronyism and corruption at home, and self-defeating tariffs, trade wars and wars of colonial domination abroad. Scratching the surface, the history of the Gilded Age reveals massacres, ethnic cleansing and inhumanity on an unthinkable scale, according to the historian of US empire Alfred McCoy.
No wonder this is being proclaimed a new era of imperialism, not only by left-wing critics but by The Economist and academic students of empire. Imperial conquest is back, says Tanisha Fazal in a Foreign Affairs essay. Trump shares it with Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Ukraine, Narendra Modi’s India in Kashmir and potentially China’s policy in Taiwan.
Imperialism happens when a state extends its power through territorial acquisition, economic dominance or political influence, says historian Monica Duffy Toft. “Historically imperialist leaders have used military conquest, economic coercion or diplomatic pressure to expand their dominions, and justified their foreign incursions as civilising missions, economic opportunities or national security imperatives.”
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These factors are at play with Trump, although many would query his civilising credentials. His emphasis on raw materials needed for high-tech industries recalls vividly the period from the 1880s in which European powers divided and seized Africa, the Middle East and Asia, coming on top of their earlier imperial adventures in India, the Americas and within Eurasia itself.
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McKinley’s US was fully intended to emulate and compete with those European endeavours – just as Trump’s is with Chinese, Russian and European competitors now. Greenland, the Arctic and the Democratic Republic of Congo are but some of the places figuring in this competition. The understanding that imperialism is essentially competitive was the conclusion reached by its many analysts in that period, including the great JA Hobson, the English liberal economist.
Hobson deeply influenced Lenin, whose work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was published in 1916 during the first World War, a year before he led the Russian Revolution. Imperialism’s distinctive characteristics in that period, Lenin argued, were fivefold: concentration of capital and production; fusion of bank and industrial capital leading to financial oligarchies; export of capital; monopolies dominating the world economy; and division of the world among great powers.
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Lenin brings together economic and political concentration of power; he insists this intensifying competitive economic and inter-state rivalry is central to imperialism. Wars and social and national revolutions are made much more likely by such a system. His analysis makes sobering reading in this period of sudden transition.
Territorial acquisition was not attempted again by the US on the McKinley scale; rather did it establish an enduring empire of commerce and influence before the second World War. After it, McCoy writes: “As Europe’s colonial empires collapsed amid rebellions and revolutions, Washington ascended to unprecedented global power marked by three key attributes – alliances like Nato that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers and ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty” – among these allies.
Trump has abandoned these norms and is reverting to older imperial ones. McCoy is convinced this actually represents a decisive shift towards relative US decline. The abandonment of US soft power undermines its hegemony, while the reassertion of monopoly power, oligarchy, domination and great power rivalry recalls Lenin’s vocabulary and diagnosis. That is true notwithstanding the far greater economic integration of the world economy now compared to then.
[ Imperialism is back with Trump and the US driving the agendaOpens in new window ]
A Europe shocked by these developments and rushing to rearm overlooks the competitive aspect of US power vis-a-vis Russia, as Nato expanded to its borders after the Cold War. A declining US under Trump is now trying to harness a far weaker Russia against its real competitive rival, China.
A European Union that wants to preserve its own post-imperial norms must resist the Russian imperial threat to Ukraine but should recognise too how much its own interests and values differ from these new US imperial ones. That matters profoundly as Trump’s Israeli allies destroy Gaza. It should involve alternative EU deals with China and the Global South as US tariffs are imposed.
Ireland’s foundational anti-imperial values were forged during that same gilded age in the struggle for Home Rule and in the revolt against British rule during and after the first World War. They remain popular and relevant to Irish and EU debates on neutrality and alignment in this new imperial age.
