When Russian troops occupied Crimea shortly before annexing the territory in 2014, the US Secretary of State John Kerry chastised Russia for acting 'in a 19th century fashion'. He said, 'You just don't in the 21st century behave in a 19th century fashion by invading another country on a trumped up pretext.' For critics of US foreign policy interventionism, Kerry's words were highly ironic and prompted memes and jokes (as captured effectively in the cartoon below).
A little more than a decade later and the current US president is threatening to invade Panama, acquire Greenland from Denmark, and suggesting Canada could become the fifty-first state. 'The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation – one that increases our wealth, expands our territory... and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,' said Donald Trump in his inaugural address. He also reiterated his latest idée fixe about renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
There is no joking about American imperial ambitions any longer. Who knows what Donald Trump might do as he strives to 'make America great again'? He is clearly looking to the 19th century and early 20th century as a guide to foreign policy. In that era the US asserted rights to intervene in the western hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary. The preeminent American naval officer of the day, Alfred Thayer Mahan, advocated for a US navy able to project power farther and more widely. The ambitions of Americans were growing.
In the current era, the US sees its interests as far more widely dispersed round the globe than in the late 19th century. For all Trump's bemoaning the US spending on Ukraine, critics who charge him with 'isolationism' look deeply misguided. Present-day American imperialists will be emboldened by Trump's recent rhetoric. The early signs from the Trump administration are that US foreign policy over the coming years will be anything but isolationist. That should give Russia's Vladimir Putin cause for worry.