Daniel Immerwahr

But I think we've just seen a sort of gradual erosion of the basis for US power.

And it is not surprising that that is expressing itself in a kind of temper tantrum from a US leader who just, you know, really no longer thinks that the thing holds together.

What's your political sense of who's actually for this?

That's what's so interesting is that there are a lot of things that Trump threatens to do or has done where I think, wow, this would really be a departure and an alarming one.

And yet the MAGA base is for it.

I mean, Greenland particularly, you think who in MAGA wanted this?

Who was talking about this?

Who in the Republican establishment wanted this?

You can maybe say that there's been some sort of Silicon Valley bros who have this vision of Greenland as like the laboratory for a space exploration.

But I just don't see the constituency for a lot of these things other than the sort of machismo that Trump offers, right?

We are just gonna- That's it, that's it.

I mean, in old imperial days-

There was a sense that the leadership of the country, there came a time when they wanted to hide our imperial presence in the world.

Now it seems it's almost advertisements for myself that Trump wants to advertise and amplify imperial ambitions and aggressions.

Yeah.

So, I mean, the moment of most stark imperialism in U.S.

history is around the end of the 19th century, which is when the United States went on a sort of colonization spree.

And the usual take on that is this is the generation that was too young to fight the Civil War.

They feel a sense of heroism.

They want to feel a sense of heroism that their fathers had that they haven't got.