Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administration. What's going on with Greenland.
Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump's avarice for Greenland was revealed, and not by Trump, but by Ted Cruz.
Look, the whole history of America has been a history of acquiring new lands and new territories, whether you go back to Thomas Jefferson making the Louisiana purchase — about half of the United States of America today — or you go back to America purchasing Alaska from Russia. You want to talk about — at the time they called it ‘Seward’s Folly’ — It turned out to, to be an extraordinarily consequential purchase, Greenland has massive rare earth minerals and critical minerals. There are enormous economic benefits to America, but like Alaska, it is located on the Arctic which is a major theater for major military conflict with either Russia or China,
In short, it's a naked imperial land grab whose intellectual justification dates back to the 19th Century. The age of alliances and of the United States representing hope and freedom is over. The age of grabbing lands to exploit because we can is back.
It's deeply immoral, but Donald Trump is a profoundly immoral man.
He probably also didn't come u pwith this idea, but it was a natural for him. He's not smart enough, or learned enough, to know of manifest destiny.
We've never covered the concept of Manifest Destiny here before, although we've covered some of the latter stages of the exercise of it. We probably should have, as we've mentioned the Indian Wars fairly frequently, which are tied to it. Having said all of that, it's worth nothing that there was never a time at which the concept had anywhere near universal American approval, and it was often hotly contested.
Manifest Destiny had its origins to some degree in the earliest history of the Republic, but less than is sometimes imagined. The term itself was coined in 1845 in an editorial by later Confederate propagandist John L. O'Sullivan, although an earlier editorial by the adventersome Jane Cazneau entitled Annexation is credited by some with being the first work backing it. That advocated for the annexation of Cuba and was penned about the same time. O'Sullivan had used the term "divine destiny" as early as 1839. O'Sullivan entered the scene advocating for the annexation of Texas, and then in an editorial about the Oregon Boundary Dispute wrote:
And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
The entire concept is patently absurd, but it had a strong pull on people as an excuse for aggressive expanding. God, the concept holds, made the United States unique and it the country was charged with a divine mission that included expanding its territorial control. It had opposition right from the beginning. None other than U.S. Grant stated:
I was bitterly opposed to the measure [to annex Texas], and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
An obvious problem with the concept is that once the United States reached the Pacific, the expansion should have been over. It was used to justify everything about the worst of American expansionism up until that point. Thomas Jefferson had seen the acquisition of Louisiana as a 1,000 year long preservation of agrarianism, but everything the country could do to exploit the West and its resources started nearly immediately. The expansion not only left room for yeoman farmers to expand into, the country forces the native inhabitants into reservations and began destructive extraction of minerals nearly immediately. The mixed legacy of expansion can be seen in contemporary illustrations, such as the often seen painting Manifest Destiny, showing a barely clad angelic woman pointing the way west, while in the shadows a Native American family (with fully topless Indian women) look back as they're pushed off the land. Wyoming's state seal has a cowboy and a miner. Colorado's features mountains and a the phrase, Nil sine Numine, Nothing without Providence.
By the time the Frontier closed in 1890, the entire concept was really losing its appeal. The Battle of Wounded Knee that same year raised questions about the morality of Western Expansion in a new bloody way, although the questions has always been there. A sort of national angst set in with nowhere to expand to. That soon found the concepts old backers urging war with Spain.
Supposedly the Spanish American War was over Cuban freedoms and dissatisfaction over Spain's reaction to the explosion on the USS Maine. In reality, McKinley was forced into it, or at least ended up going along, as it looked like the US could grab Cuba and add it as a new territory. Opposition in Congress, however, . . . which affords us a roadmap now, statutorily kept that from happening.
What was wholly unanticipated, however, is that the US would brilliantly deploy its Navy to position it to take the Philippines.
Congress hadn't precluded the US from adding the Philippines, or Gaum, as U.S. territories. The Philippines had a long running independence movement and a well educated class that thought of the American arrival as guaranteeing their immediate independence, which they were quickly disabused of. The U.S. ended up fighting to keep the Philippines as a colony, although the war was deeply unpopular and lead to Theodore Roosevelt simply declaring that the US had won it, when in fact it had not. Some part of the Philippines contested for independence all the way into December 1941, when they then took up the cause against Japan. Indeed, some other elements of the movement to gain independence, which by that time had been promised by the U.S., welcomed the Japanese as liberators and collaborated with them, something that was not held against them by the Philippine people later.
Up until the end of the 19th Century the US had been hostile to Great Britain for historical reasons. The UK, however, immediately saw what was occuring, and was in its high colonial phase. The reality of what the US was doing was portrayed in Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden.
Most Americans had a strong distaste for colonialism, and had it before the Spanish American War. The population bought off on the concept that we need to "Remember the Maine", but that didn't mean owning Cuba. The war did bring the US into the Caribbean like never before, and for four decades the US fought an endless series of Banana Wars, often to secure the interests of American business, that has made us hated in Central America to this day.
The US intervention in Venezuela was a page right out of that book. The US intervened in a foreign nation that really isn't a problem country for us, and now the Administration is busy trying to figure out how to profit from its oil.
Greenland is the same sort of thing.
The justification routeinly features the same sort of rationalization that was used to shove Native Americans off their land. They'd be "better off" with the kind entrepreneurial American hand guiding them, and they would "get rich" with their country more efficiently exploited, never mind if they didn't' want to get rich and they didn't want to exploit their land. In Greenland's case, it's now bitterly clear that part of real estate developer Donald Trump's desire to steal the country is so that rich American enterprises can exploit its mineral wealth.
What if they don't want it exploited?
That though never enters the minds of a certain branch of American capitalism. Maybe most people don't want endless economic exploitation. Maybe we don't want to mine everything. Maybe we don't want endless business growth.
By World War One the US had moved very much away from colonialism. The country started a series of "good neighbor" policies with countries to our south. At the end of the Great War we favored self determination for nations. World War Two's results emphasized this even more, with the US now favoring collective security against nations that were fundamentally opposed to democracy.
Trump has thrown that all in the trash.
People, myself included, have been struggling to figure out what on Earth Trump is thinking, and if he's being paid to destroy the US position in the world. Nobody really knows, but all this does point back to the lunacy of National Conservatism, which looks back on a world that never was. National Conservative thinkers see the US in much the same way the members of the New Apostolic Reformation do, and both forces are at work here. National Conservatives want the US to crawl into the Western Hemisphere, making it solidly Christian, and shut the door behind us. They figure Europe will do the same, if its not too late, in their view, with many looking at authoritarian regimes like those of Orbán and Putin as Eastern European models. Putin, they imagine, will advance Orthodoxy, although there's no reason to believe that his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church is anything other than convenience. Orbán is supposed to do the same with old world values in Hungary and Eastern Europe. Immigrants to Europe and foreign influences are to be exterminated and tossed out.
That's what's going on in the minds of the National Conservatives, and that's partially what's going on with Greenland.
At this point, I frankly feel that its nearly inevitable that the US is in fact going to invade Greenland. Europe can't really stop us from doing it, although it'll result in bloodshed. It'll destroy the post war order completely. The Trump Administration will set about trying to exploit the minerals of Greenland immediately.
But that won't be the end of the story. It's taken this along, amazingly, for people to get a concept of how horrible Donald Trump and his backers really are, but it's finally occuring. Americans don't want to invade Greenland. They didn't want to invade the Philippines. If, and I feel its a when, we do this, it'll be followed by several realities.
The first will be that exploiting a nation takes time, and those backing this move do not have it. The House will flip in November, even though Trump will in fact take a run at suspending the election. The Senate might flip in November as well, although that's doubtful, but Senate Republicans, their own careers on the line, will begin to back away from Trump. In 2028 a disgusted populace will elect Democrats into office.
The US will leave Greenland, and in a big hurry. It'll be independent. The Trump legacy will be the pile of shit it deserves to be. The US will begin the process of rebuilding itself, but as a much, much, weaker country than before. That will be Trump's legacy.
May God grant that I'm wrong on all of this, and that somebody intervenes to stop this insanity before it's too late.
This again. It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream. It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.
