Navigating Trump’s (old) world order

“EXTENDING the Blessings of Civilisation to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well...

- By TISARANEE GUNASEKARA.

US President Donald Trump (right) and Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro.

There’s more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played.” Mark Twain (To the Person Sitting in Darkness)The United States Government launched its final assault on Native Americans in the area around Wounded Knee Creek, a tributary of the White River in South Dakota. In December 1890, the US army massacred around 300 Lakota people, many of them women and children, ending Native American resistance to land-grabbing and forced assimilation.

With First Nation resistance crushed, the US Census Bureau declared that there was no longer a ‘land frontier’ to conquer. To gain more land, America would have to look beyond its borders. This was what Captain AT Mahan, President of the Naval War College, had in mind when he wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly tellingly titled The United States Looking Outward. In it he advocated an expansionist foreign policy and emphasised the need to build up American sea power to facilitate it.

Captain Mahan was not the author of American expansionism. In 1823, President James Monroe birthed the Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Western Hemisphere (North and South Americas) the exclusive preserve of the US and, thus, off-limit to European imperial powers. Captain Mahan’s singular contribution was to wrap American expansionism in patriotic linen. As Barbara Tuchman wrote in The Proud Tower, “The motive of the annexationists had been economic self-interest. It took Mahan to transform it into national and fateful importance.”