Thucydides Trap

US President Donald Trump is not known for respecting science and history. From promoting unproven treatments for COVID-19 to insisting that any discussion of shameful elements of America’s past is “divisive,” he prefers to manipulate them for political ends. One wonders whether he realizes when he waxes nostalgic about America’s imperial greatness that he is casually referring to times when the United States was a geopolitical weakling.

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Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is a case in point. When President James Monroe asserted in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere was solely the domain of the US, America was far from establishing itself as a global power. And while it has been used to rationalize US intervention and imperialism since then, Monroe’s original vision was focused on keeping European colonialism at bay. It certainly would not justify Trump’s ambition to assert US sovereignty over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, even as he enlists European geopolitical spheres of interest effectively dominated by other powers – Israel and Turkey in Syria, Russia in Ukraine – to seize territory by force.

Similarly, Trump justifies his embrace of high tariffs by pointing out that they were a feature of the Gilded Age, when rapid industrialization fueled prosperity in the US. But, again, he is referring to a period – the late 1870s to the early 1900s – when America’s global clout was relatively modest. While the US was already a rising economic power, it was not yet “at its richest” by any means. Inflation-adjusted GDP per capita is about six times higher today than in the 1890s – which was also a period of mass economic inequality.