I’m a little surprised at Trump’s recently expressed expansionist ambitions – Greenland, Canada, Panama, his Gaza seafront condos – as I had always had him marked down as an isolationist, following in that well-trodden American tradition. But the US has always – from its very birth – had a solid imperialist tradition too; which of course I’m aware of, to the extent of having written half a book about it a few years ago. That was in order to demolish the common American assumption that – as Donald Rumsfeld memorably put it in 2006 – ‘we don’t do empire’; which I imagine was inferred from the fact that the USA was originally born of an anti-imperial rebellion, and so must have been innocent in this regard ever since. In fact Rumsfeld was egregiously wrong about this, in ways I explain in that book (Empire and Superempire, Yale UP, 2006), and in ways that most modern American historians will confirm. (I wasn’t by any means the first to come to that conclusion.)

So, Trump’s expansionist ambitions should come as no surprise. Indeed, some of them are revivals of older colonial projects, such as his Panama scheme, which would see the US return to a colony it only abandoned (sort of) in the 1980s; and Canada, which it tried – but failed – to annex in 1812. Before that there was the seizure of much of Mexico and of all of the previously French territory in the South to look back on, as well as Hawaii, Alaska, and the ‘Wild West’ of the north American continent – stolen of course from the native Americans. Greenland might be a new imperial target today, as the ‘purchase’ of Gaza as an ethnically-cleansed piece of luxury real estate certainly is. But territorial expansion has always been an essential part of the greater American project; sometimes – at the turn of the 20^th century in particular – called imperialism, but even when it wasn’t.

The reason why most Americans were reluctant to recognise this as ‘imperialism’ – apart from the word’s association with mad King George III – is that America’s ‘colonies’ were not, and presumably won’t be under Trump, ruled in the traditional European way, with ‘viceroys’ in silly plumed hats and district commissioners in khaki shorts and pith helmets; but more indirectly, through local and American commercial collaborators doing the USA’s will. (This was a favourite British method too, but supplemented here by the plumed hats where necessary.) So American ‘informal’ colonies didn’t carry the visible signifiers that were generally associated with ‘imperialism’; thus allowing the USA to cling to its anti-imperial reputation for all those years.

One thing America shared with other imperial powers, however, was a certain arrogance: a tremendous self-belief that she represented the summit of civilisation, just as the ancient Romans, British imperialists, the Spanish conquistadores, German Nazis and Russian international communists had, in every case justifying their control or influence over other peoples. We can see this in Trump, of course; it’s one of the things that in his view will render Greenlanders, Canadians and Gazans eager to welcome their new status as the 51^st to the 53^rd States of America eventually. That of course would also draw some of the alleged ‘imperial’ sting. The US’s superiority is supposed to lie in its ‘freedom’, defined commercially, and its prosperity; which are the prizes Trump is offering to Canada, Greenland and Gaza, but entirely oblivious of the possibility that these goodies might not be what the populations of these places really want. America holds all the ‘cards’, as he told Zelenskij last week; other places (‘shithole countries’, as he once characterised some of them) must envy her. There’s the mind of the property-developer capitalist talking. The ‘Art of the Deal’ is as simple and materialistic as that.

It’s this that could be said to bring the two great traditions of American foreign policy together. Trump is an isolationist first and foremost: ‘America First’, and all that. But his other big slogan – ‘Make America Great Again’ – implies competition with other countries; colonising many of them in effect, in America’s commercial interests, but not understanding them at all. His is a sort of ‘isolationist imperialism’ which has the advantage of being cheap – indeed profitable – but with none of the advantages that the older-fashioned European plumed-hatted sort of imperialism had. When you run ‘alien’ colonies more directly, and out of a sense of ‘service’, not just for profit, you get to know about their alien ways, and often to empathise with them. (I realise that this is an unfashionable idea; but you’ll find it elaborated in my ‘British Empire’ books. Two great novels, EM Forster’s Passage to India and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, also bear on it.) Hands-off rule doesn’t have this advantage.

Trump’s approach also seems to me to bear out Lenin’s famous characterisation of ‘imperialism’ as being ‘the last stage of capitalism’. What could be more last-stage capitalist than a property developer and a fabulously rich techno-entrepreneur looking around for more real estate to annex?