Trump Is Closing the Curtain on the American Century

It’s probably the case that children have already died as a result of Donald Trump’s war on U.S.A.I.D. If the freeze on foreign aid and mass furlough by fiat goes forward, many certainly will.

But the agency is not just a faucet of humanitarian money, distributing $40 billion in global aid, supporting soup kitchens and lead abatement and vaccination programs and saving millions of lives. It has also always been one face of American empire. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, the agency has funded health and development, but it has also supported business-friendly politics and what are often called democratic reforms to draw more of the world’s poor countries into the sphere of American influence.

And so the sprint to “delete” U.S.A.I.D. on grounds of waste and ideological bias also sent its own bigger message: that soft power, properly understood, is not really power at all, only a shackle restricting the exercise of the harder and more old-fashioned kind.

During his last time in office, Trump was pictured with a hurricane map marked up with black Sharpie ink so that the potential path of the storm matched his own ignorant projection. This time, he’s marking up some notional maps of American empire, which he says he would like to see stretching north through Canada and Greenland, south through the “Gulf of America” to the Panama Canal and across to the decimated rubble of the Gaza Strip, which he has taken to calling the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

It’s not clear, of course, that any of this will (or even could) happen — Francis Fukuyama described the Gaza plan as a “nonstarter” in an essay announcing both “the new American imperialism” and a return to the world of the 19th century. But each declaration of imperial desire is that mercurial kind of Trumpist speech act, in which a given utterance can be both meaningless and full of portent at the same time, self-disavowing even as it also demonstrates the president’s world-shaping power. Foreign leaders including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Rasmussen have warned that Trump’s acquisitiveness is deadly serious. And whatever comes of Trump’s retrograde dreams of manifest destiny, the implicit challenge to the legacy geopolitical order is just as striking: If we want these things and these places, who is going to stop us?

Among Trump’s Day 1 executive orders were withdrawals from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, which led some to describe the new president’s emergent foreign policy as a kind of strategic retreat, even an effort to “unwind” or “reorient” American power abroad, as Ryan Grim put it. But another first-day order designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, and as he assumed office, the new secretary of defense affirmed that when it came to military action in Mexico, “all options will be on the table.” The national security adviser has suggested the United States must recoup the money it has sent to Ukraine by plundering the country’s natural resources, and the president has threatened harsh tariffs on Denmark over Greenland, too. In addition to China, the first round of Trump tariffs targeted allies, with longstanding trade deals in place renegotiated not that long ago by Trump himself — and although the tariffs were withdrawn quickly in response to trivial concessions, you couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t safe to assume any existing arrangement would last for very long, with Trump likely to stress-test many aspects of the world order, country by country.