Trump is Not an Anti-Globalist: He is an Imperialist

Trump would have no problem with globalism, as long as it was controlled by him.

There has to be a way of talking about actual trade imbalances, the need for more investment, and the urgent demand to stop the inflow of millions of uninvited persons, without losing one’s mind in the process, and without going scorched earth on opponents or even the whole world. Examples of going scorched earth are threats of taking territory and extortion. What we hear coming out of the US now is an echo of the era of gunboat diplomacy: it is both out of place, and out of time. What we are witnessing is the use of the wrong tools, in the wrong hands, for the wrong purposes. China stands as the ultimate beneficiary of a US government that spirals out of control as it aims for instant world dominance and even recolonization.

Joking? There is a Pattern Here

If you believe Trump’s congressional cronies, it was all just a joke; insulting perhaps, but still just a joke. This came as Trump threatened 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada, thereby violating the very trade agreement which he achieved. Trump calling Canada the 51^st state (repeatedly), demoting the Prime Minister to a Governor (repeatedly), arguing why Canada would be better off as an American state, and symbolically taking possession of Canada—was just a joke. The only person who is not saying it was a joke, however, is Donald Trump himself. He kept making the same “joke” over and over again for two weeks. Was he just “trolling”? Or was he being serious, while letting others think he was playing around?

From Trump’s account in “Truth Social”

Was Trump also joking when he threatened all 30 BRICS members with 100% tariffs if they continue to seek independence from the US dollar? How about when he threatened tariffs on the entire EU, if they failed to purchase US oil and natural gas—just jesting? Previously, when Trump threatened to go to war against Mexican drug cartels in what would amount to a lengthier, costlier replay of the Afghan war, was this just reckless trolling? How about the times over the past two decades where he called on the US government to seize all the oil of countries such as Iraq and Libya? Speaking of Mexico, in addition to the extortionist use of tariffs to involuntarily deputize the US’ neighbours into spending money and resources protecting the US border for the US—Trump is also renewing his threats/plans for a “limited” invasion of Mexico. Were this to actually occur, Americans might wish they had remained in Afghanistan, which could be remembered as the kinder, gentler war.

The point is that the claim that Trump was joking fails the credibility test: we have a broad pattern of similar positions announced by Trump. If he speaks of Canada as the 51^st state, it’s because he wants that to happen. The “Trump Legacy”: the president who expanded American borders for the firs time in decades—you can almost hear him dreaming out loud.

Trump’s vision of the world is not one of a medley of free, sovereign, independent nation-states, each interacting peacefully and in the interests of their own people, and in the interests of peace. He wants a world under the US dollar, a world that pays monetary tribute to the US, where the US can acquire goods and not spend any money in the process. Trump’s notion of winning is predicated on everyone else losing—if they gain anything at all from a relationship with the US, then for Trump that means the US lost something. It’s all or nothing, and the world will not stand for it.

Panama: The Subject on which Trump Never Campaigned

Evidence of Trump being possessed by a grand megalomaniac’s vision of the world, reminiscent of US leaders of the 1800s, gained further weight as he very recently put Panama on notice that the US might wish to repossess Panama’s sovereign territory: the Panama Canal. Trump views the canal as American property. Nobody has come forward yet to claim that he is joking. Yet, with the kinds of statistics and arguments he uses, perhaps they should make this claim, urgently. Trump claims that 38,000 Americans died building the canal—this is false, and not even close to reality. In fact, the majority of workers who died were first French (during the first attempt to build a canal), and later workers from the Caribbean. If dying while building the canal is meant to function as a claim on the canal, then France, Jamaica and Barbados have a greater claim than the US. Given that the US intervened in Colombian affairs and sponsored a secessionist movement that founded Panama, then Colombia has a greater claim to the canal than the US. This is not to mention Panama itself, where the canal is located. Trump complains that former president Jimmy Carter “gave away” the Panama Canal to the country after which it is named—he is thus guilty of “giving” Panamanian territory back to Panama. One has to ask if Trump has considered how he is endangering the many thousands of Americans resident in Panama, many of them retirees, in a country with a history of strong nationalism and anti-imperialism. As Panama’s current president stated: “Panamanians may have different views on many issues. But when it comes to our canal, and our sovereignty, we will all unite under our Panamanian flag”.

Trump is the first US president in decades to air such territorial ambitions, and we now have to take his delusions seriously: that he may seek to be the first US president in generations to expand American borders. If so, he will rediscover the limits of American power which are now greater than they were even a decade ago. In addition, he will precipitate American decline in a much faster, harsher manner, that will diminish the lives of far too many, Americans among them.

Just one side note: all of these targets—Canada, BRICS, Panama—were not mentioned in Trump’s campaign speeches. Like in 2016 when, right after winning the election, North Korea suddenly became his primary fixation, so in 2024 he has sprung surprises on his supporters (who are too busy cheering and mimicking his jerky Twin Peaks midget dance to care). These surprises suggest both the lack of a coherent agenda, and the possession of a hidden agenda that only comes out into the open when Trump feels safe.

Grievances, Strange Notions, and Contradictions

Some say that Trump is a transactionalist. He is, in the same sense that a looter might qualify as a transactionalist. What Trump’s grievances really demonstrate is a form of nativism identified by US anthropologist Ralph Linton back in the early 1940s. He explained in that seminal article that frequently it is among the socially and economically dominant strata that nativism emerges, driven by fear of losing whatever is identified as happy or great about that society’s past. Nativism on the home front can easily be married to imperialism on the global front, where Trump’s restorationist “New Golden Age” aspirations involve forcibly reversing the legitimate gains made by other nations.

Here Trump’s notions of winning and losing come into play, as well as his apparently absurd misunderstandings of basic concepts such as “tariff” and “subsidy”. A billionaire developer with resorts around the world really ought to have understood these concepts, and it is difficult to determine whether such studied ignorance is genuine or pretended. Trump thinks that a tariff means that a foreign company exporting to the US, pays a fee to the US government. He does not yet recognize that the tariff is actually imposed on American importers, who then pass on the increased cost to American consumers. It is thus a sales tax. Keep in mind that Trump promised to cut taxes, and fight inflation—and tariffs will help to do neither. Trump insists that tariffs “make us rich”. Who is “us”? Only the US government benefits. His trade henchman, Peter Navarro, routinely lies in saying that Trump’s last round of tariffs were paid for by foreign nationals: instead, American consumers bore 93% of the costs. (What neither Navarro nor Trump tell their supporters is that tariffs are a wonderful cover for massive graft, cronyism, and corruption.)

Likewise, Trump maintains an inexcusably bizarre notion of what is a “subsidy”. A subsidy, put simply, is money given as aid, without necessarily expecting any return. The US does not pay Canada any subsidies. Instead, American purchasers acquire Canadian goods, in return for money—both sides gain, one side gaining goods, the other side gaining money. (That this needs to be explained here is itself absurd.) Since the US has an economy and a population 10 times greater than Canada’s, the US tends to buy more from Canada than the other way around. The result is a trade deficit. Trump sees “deficit” as loss, because the deficit is measured only in monetary terms. (Also, the US does not have a $100 billion trade deficit with Canada—Trump invented this number.) Meanwhile, the US acquires vast amounts of oil, natural gas, electricity, critical minerals, and other goods from Canada—those goods, having left Canada, are no longer available to Canadians. Should Canadians complain that the US is “robbing” them of their resources? What is truly shocking about the US-Canada relationship, is the massive outflow of capital from Canada, into the US. Direct investment from Canada into the US is double the level of direct investment from the US entering Canada, and Canadian investment in the US was over a trillion dollars just in 2023 alone. Is Canada therefore “subsidizing” the US?

On immigration, Trump is a bundle of confusion, obfuscation, and contradiction. He claims that his tariffs are needed to fight illegal immigration. If so, then a key question must be answered: if tariffs work to reduce illegal immigration, then why did Trump not try this strategy during his first term?

Does Trump really have a problem with a massive amount of foreign nationals occupying space within the US’ borders? Consider this odd asymmetry: Trump vows to expel millions of migrants from south of the border, while proposing the acquisition of Canada and its 44 million inhabitants. Is it because Trump mistakenly imagines all Canadians to be white? Maybe, but I think it is more about the power relation: illegal immigrants enter of their own free will, on their terms, and not because the US government invited them. That is unacceptable: they have exercised free choice, thus reversing the power relation with the US. An act of conquest, however, would restore Trump’s preferred power relation of dominance over neighbours.

Imperialism vs. Globalism?

Some are struggling (or pretending to struggle, in order to sow confusion) with the distinction between imperialism and globalism. The first things to note are that these are two heavily-loaded amoeba words, and are more often used as accusations, as derogatory terms, than as concepts that shed light. In academia, I have never met a “globalist,” that is, someone who actually identifies as such. It’s almost as rare to find someone who announces, “I am an imperialist” (Max Boot aside).

Second, both imperialism and globalism involve dominance on an international scale. Imperialism can be restricted to a region (like Italian imperialism in Africa in the early half of the 1900s), or it can aspire to total global control. Both involve basic processes of globalization: the integration of societies in tight networks, spanning time and space. Imperialism is identified more with a nation-state, but globalization itself is also the result of the work of nation-states. Globalism can also be far more innocuous than imperialism: mere recognition that many of the world’s biggest problems span borders, versus a program to cancel such borders and place foreign societies under the rule of empire.

It was a neat trick. Getting masses of people to train all their ire on the World Economic Forum (WEF), a toothless conference organization without an army. The WEF has never invaded a nation; the US has invaded dozens. Constructing the WEF as the headquarters of evil is something that involved calculated fakery and misrepresentation. Meanwhile, “America First” gained steam, and note that “first” is a list term: it means first before all other nations on the planet—globalism, in other words, but headquartered in Washington, DC, not some irrelevant Alpine resort town.

If the US were to acquire the kind of global hegemony of which Trump dreams, then that would be globalism too: American globalism. One world, under the US flag and the US dollar. Trump sounds like a nationalist who respects sovereignty—but like his notions of tariffs and subsidies, it is entirely one-sided and self-obsessed. Like symbolically planting the US flag in the middle of the Panama Canal, and renaming it the “United States Canal,” or Trump planting himself in Canada as he watches over the Canadian Rockies.

Managing Decline without Losing One’s Mind

Threats, intimidation, insults, bullying, trolling, ridicule—does anyone see such attitudes associated with business and trade relationships with China? Maybe, at some point, some Americans will understand how they drove nations into China’s arms.

The US does not know what to do with itself at this historical juncture. Frequently invoking George Washington does not help them to psychologically live in Washington’s world, when the US was small and not one of the world powers. For many years now, American cultural production has heavily projected the (Post)Apocalypse: a world after nuclear war; a world overrun by zombies; a world destroyed by climate change; a world consumed by alien invaders; or some other bizarre happening that changes all life, whether it is wind, noise, or vision that are the threats. They are symbolically scaring themselves senseless. If you do not study how other empires fell, you risk repeating similar mistakes. The US seems determined to fall as hard as possible, and the first victims of that choice will be Americans themselves.

What will not materialize is world of sovereignty just for one, and servitude for all the rest. A world where everything redounds only to the benefit of one country, is not by any means within the realm of reality. What we know now is that—forget George W. Bush—the US has just elected the country’s most imperialist president in many decades. He boasted of having started no new wars—in the past tense, of course—but he never promised that he would start no new wars in the future. Trump also wants to stoke the hungry flames of American consumption of foreign resources and territories, uniting the country under an age-old imperialist bloodlust, thus quelling domestic opposition and greatly centralizing and inflating the power of Trump’s government.

What the US urgently needed at this point in history, was leadership that helped to manage the inevitable decline of the US. The US has not had, nor will it soon get such leadership. One branch, currently exiting, was caught up with a self-righteous missionary quest to remake the world in the preferred image of the US. The other branch, coming in, is stimulating itself with pipe dreams of a New Golden Age. Both are disastrously wrong. The US has unknowingly opted to go down the hard way. Guided by false images and unattainable goals that ignore history, the policies can only do damage. The only questions now are: How much damage? For how long?

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