Trump’s New Brand of Imperialism
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. So many things about Donald Trump's presidency have been without precedent. But the U.S. seizing power over a smaller country, well, there's a very, very long history of that. The American record of military intervention and adventure overseas continues. It goes back well into the 19th century and forward to Vietnam, Iraq and beyond. In Venezuela, Trump has made no secret of his desire for oil revenues and who will be running the show.
So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.
Daniel Imervar is a professor of history at Northwestern and one of our most interesting writers on foreign policy and American imperialism. His most recent book, a bestseller, was called How to Hide an Empire. At The New Yorker, he's covered subjects from 17th century piracy to the seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. I spoke with him last week.
What historical context does Trump’s brand of imperialism draw from?
Daniel, let's start with the events of the past week. They're astonishing. In your 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, you wrote of the United States that even when it comes to oil, flare-ups of naked imperialism have been rare and haven't ultimately led to annexations. You wrote this during Trump's first term. Yeah. What's changed?
Yeah.
Exactly that has changed. I described in the book the passage from a desire for annexation as a form of projection of power, so claiming large territories, to a more subtle form of power projection, lots of military bases all over the map, other ways of exerting power. And it seemed to me at that time that the age of colonial empire was not totally over. There are still some colonies, but, you know, really near extinction. And it is extraordinary to hear Trump talk in a way that not only presidents haven't talked in decades, but I think presidents haven't even thought in decades of his desire to claim territory, to annex new places, Greenland, Canada, etc. How would you describe the map of contemporary American empire, and what is it?
Because we do have military bases. I think not everybody's aware of it, just how extensive that map is. So what does American empire look like now? Okay, so there are five inhabited territories that are still part of the United States, and more than three million people live in them collectively. Puerto Rico is by far the largest. But then you're exactly right. The United States has... And this is, again, they don't quite appear on maps that we're used to seeing. And often these places are secret. So you have to sort of do a covert mapping of them. But we think that the United States has about 750 military bases outside of the mainland, most of which are in foreign countries. That's amazing that you say we think.
We think. Yeah, we don't know. So the United States does a basing report and does report on hundreds of those bases. But then there are hundreds more that we're just reliant on journalists to tell us about. And there are a lot of edge cases and a lot of we're not sure cases. You know, in the run up to the Iraq war. you heard rationales coming from the Bush administration and elsewhere having to do with human rights, right? And you even had former dissident leaders in Eastern Europe supporting it. Adam Micknick, Václav Havel, they were for this war from a human rights point of view. And then you heard rationales obviously having to do with weapons of mass destruction. It was an arms control situation.
You would never hear someone in the Bush administration, whether you like them or not, saying, you know why we're going in? Oil, because Iraq's got a whole lot of oil. That was, you know, as the cliche now goes in Washington and elsewhere, it was saying, you know, the quiet part out loud. And it was never said, except by critics. Now you have a press conference on the morning after the invasion of Venezuela saying, where we have gone in militarily in a huge operation that had been, by the way, been going on for weeks, weeks and weeks, but ends with the president of Venezuela being spirited to a jail cell in Brooklyn.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–1:19
2
What historical context does Trump’s brand of imperialism draw from?
1:19–7:00
3
How does Trump's approach to foreign policy differ from past administrations?
7:00–11:25
4
What is the significance of military bases in the contemporary American empire?
11:25–16:54
5
How does Trump's rhetoric reflect a shift in U.S. imperialism?
16:54–23:24
6
What are the implications of the U.S. intervention in Venezuela?
23:24–32:29