Warmongering won't make America great again. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images


January 23, 2025   5 mins

On Monday, Donald Trump promised to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”. It was a quintessentially Trumpian moment. On the one hand, it was genuinely shocking for an American president use the phrase “manifest destiny” in 2025. On the other hand, it was hard to take seriously in a sentence about conquering Mars.

The phrase first appeared in 1845 in an unsigned editorial in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The “destiny” in question was America’s mission to expand across the continent, conquering or displacing all those who lived there. After advocating the annexation of Texas, and the eventual conquest of California, the editorial speculated that the future of “the British Canadas” lay in “their own early severance of their present colonial relation to the little island three thousand miles across the Atlantic; soon to be followed by Annexation”.

In his postmodern remix of manifest destiny, Trump has also expressed interest, not only in space, but in territorial expansion closer to home, rambling about “taking back” the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, and turning Canada into “the 51st state”. The chances are that he isn’t serious about annexing Canada, or actually sending astronauts to claim the red planet for the United States. Even so, his embrace of expansionist rhetoric reveals the contradictions of the MAGA project.

We’re often told that Trump’s domestic policies represent a “populist” break from the Wall Street-friendly Republican Party of Ronald Reagan or the two Bushes. And this break from GOP orthodoxy is supposed to extend to foreign affairs. Many Trumpists claim to deplore the post-9/11 “neocons” who led the country into long and bloody wars in the Middle East.

Yet the “populist” element of MAGA was always pretty thin. Trump’s first term was a four-year orgy of union-busting, deregulation, and tax cuts for the wealthy. But hope springs eternal, and many of his supporters are optimistic that with fewer “establishment” Republicans in the room, Trump’s second term might be different.

There are others who argue that Trump’s (allegedly) non-interventionist foreign policy was itself populist. In 2022, for instance, Jordan Peterson told the political commentator Kyle Kulinski that he supported Trump because the Democrats had “betrayed the working class”. When Kulinski asked him what Trump had done for the working class, Peterson shot back: “Well, how about no war?”

This narrative has always strained the truth. During his first term, Trump’s foreign policy was hawkish in many ways. He tore up Barack Obama’s détente with Iran; ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani; and dramatically escalated America’s drone war over the skies of multiple Middle Eastern nations. He signed off on Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and de facto certified their annexation of East Jerusalem by fulfilling the longtime neoconservative goal of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Nor has Trump given any indication of a more peaceful second term. Even as he takes credit for the ceasefire and the release of hostages, he doesn’t seem especially troubled by the possibility that Israel will soon restart the war. And one of his first acts in office was to reverse Joe Biden’s sanctions on some of the most violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who have been pursuing their own version of “manifest destiny” by trying to drive Palestinian civilians out of the territory.

Even when it came to America’s relationship with Russia, Trump was a far bigger hawk than Obama. This fact has long been obscured by Trump-haters, who often portrayed him as Vladimir Putin’s puppet, and Trump’s defenders, who wanted to hold him up as a non-interventionist. Yet one of the GOP’s main critiques of Obama’s foreign policy back in the day was that he was “soft on Putin”. Obama held back on sending heavy weaponry to Ukraine so as not to escalate tensions. Trump reversed this decision within his first year in office, while also pushing hard against the Nord Stream pipeline, badgering European nations to meet their commitments to Nato, and even lobbing a few bombs at Damascus when that city was full of Russian soldiers.

“When it came to America’s relationship with Russia, Trump was a far bigger hawk than Obama.”

That said, Trump’s rhetoric on Russia has been (mostly) more conciliatory since he’s been out of office. Despite claiming that Putin would never have “dared” to invade Ukraine if he’d been president, and allegedly telling the crowd at a fundraiser last spring that he would have bombed Moscow if the invasion had taken place on his watch, Trump has often voiced support for a negotiated de-escalation between Russia and Ukraine. Yet this is hardly a sign of an isolationist retreat to the home front. Instead, as the rhetoric of many MAGA luminaries has made clear, it’s a harbinger of an imperial pivot to Asia. One of Trump’s most important media allies, Tucker Carlson, has said in so many words that “our main enemy is China” and “the US ought to be in a relationship with Russia, allied against China”.

Where, then, does the disagreement between MAGA Republicans and the old “neocon” Republicans lie? Do Trumpists distrust the neocons because they were warmongers, or because they justified their warmongering as a crusade on behalf of democracy and human rights?

A consistent theme in Trump’s rhetoric over the years has been that the United States, far from being an imperial hegemon running roughshod over the rights of weaker nations, has been the victim of both military and economic “bad deals”. In this view, it’s not that America has no right to cluster-bomb, invade, and occupy other nations; it’s that wars should benefit American self-interest. If we were to look at George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq through this lens, the problem wouldn’t be that it was an unjustifiable war of aggression — it would be that it was a misguided attempt to help foreigners at the expense of American interests.

The MAGA critique of neoconservatism can thus be seen as foreign-policy extension of Albert Hirschman’s “futility thesis” — the classic Right-wing notion that do-gooders who don’t understand how the world works end up making everything worse. Well-meaning liberals, so the theory goes, raise the minimum wage and this (allegedly) leads to more unemployment. For some Trumpists, the same goes for foreign wars.

The difference between these two critiques of neoconservatism is crucial. The first leads to consistent opposition to avoidable wars. The second only rules out wars judged too altruistic to serve American “greatness”.

The kind of warmongering that cloaked itself in unconvincing appeals to altruistic values was bad enough. What Trump is openly promoting in his “manifest destiny” phase is warmongering that is free from even that moral burden. If Greenland is strategically valuable to the United States, America should just take it — the wishes of the native Greenlanders be damned. If giving the Panama Canal back to Panama a quarter of a century ago was a “bad deal”, we should just reverse it — by force of arms if necessary.

Trump may not follow through on any of it. He wouldn’t hold back for moral reasons, or even for fear of coming across as a territory-grabbing imperialist. That prospect clearly doesn’t bother him. But he may well make the calculation that none of it would be worth the risk.

If Trump does end up marching America into war, however, he will make an even bigger mockery of his alleged MAGA “populism”. None of the children of Trump’s tech billionaire chums will come home in flag-draped coffins. Just as they did during Bush’s wars after 9/11, the children of the working class will pay the price. But this time around grieving parents won’t even be fed consoling lies about wars fought on behalf of freedom and democracy. The only comfort they’ll have is that, in the judgement of our billionaire real-estate-developer president, their children’s deaths helped to Make America Great Again.


Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist and the host of the Give Them an Argument podcast.

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