Donald Trump, the new US leader, has made repeated claims over the past few weeks that the country may “take up” the Panama Canal and that it should retake control of Greenland in some way or another. He has talked of Canada becoming America’s 51st state and now he even wants to “take over” the Gaza Strip to convert it into a” Riviera” on the eastern Mediterranean.
It appears as though the US senator thinks that his nation should have an empire. Trump appears to be attempting to imitate Russian officials Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who he has claimed he admires and who have both shown some obvious royal tendencies in recent years.
Russia has waged wars in Georgia and Ukraine, fought wars in Transnistria and Abkhazia, and constantly interacted with Syria and other African nations.
Russia also launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, claiming that Ukraine had previously been indistinguishable from Russia and that hostile Western influences were attempting to sabotage that unity.
China, however, has militarized a number of small desolate islands in the South China Sea. It has constructed 27 setups on disputed islands in the group of islands known as Spratly and Paracel, as well as those of Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
This has prompted a rush of creation, as other countries in the region have raced to create their own strongholds in the contested but quite resource-rich, area. Additionally, Beijing continues to assert that it wants Taiwan, which it claims is an intrinsic part of China, to” come home.”
Civilizations and nation-states
Most individuals assumed that the era of dynasties had been put to rest in history. But this is by no signifies a simple proposition.
The rise and fall of dynasties had dominated many of recorded history up until recently. Nation-states just appeared at the end of the 18th century. And as those says gained popularity, many of them also exhibited royal tendencies.
So the US wasted little time expanding its borders west and acquiring large swaths of new place in what essentially turned a small cluster of east coast states into a western empire. The US, clean from removing the yoke of the British empire, wasted little time doing so.
However, other newly minted nation-states such as Italy and Germany also aspired to acquire outside empires and involved themselves, with varying success, building what turned out to be somewhat short-lived imperial empires in Africa and elsewhere.
Most traditional dynastic empires, meanwhile, began to adopt various aspects of the nation-state model, such as conscription, legal equality and political participation. historians frequently refer to the decades that followed the Second World War as a period of decolonization by traditional imperial powers like Britain and France.
But the transition from empire to nation-states was far from smooth. The majority of imperial governments hoped to maintain some degree of influence while establishing more egalitarian commonwealths in their empires.
This was done with varying degrees of success and frequently under extreme duress, such as in France and Vietnam, or under severe economic pressure, such as in Britain and India. The real age of the nation-state didn’t begin until the 1960s.
The return of empire?
Today, the world consists of about 200 independent countries, the overwhelming majority nation-states. Nonetheless, one could argue that empires– or at least imperial tendencies – have never totally disappeared.
France, for instance, frequently interfered in many of its former colonies in Africa. However, these military interventions were not meant to permanently occupy new territories.
Today, imperial tendencies seem to resurface around the world. The past, however, tends not to repeat itself. In the near future, massive conquests or attempts to establish new overseas empires are unlikely. The majority of imperial expansions are currently sought close to home.
The brutal nationalist rhetoric used by Putin, Xi, and Trump to support their imperialist objectives is striking. Putin, as we have seen, claims the indivisibility of Ukraine and Russia and blames” Nazis” for trying to turn Russia’s sister state towards the west. He cited it as a justification for his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Xi, in turn, often maintains that Communist China has finally overcome the “century of humiliation“, in which the country was the plaything of foreign powers. Both of them have a nostalgia for previous imperial dominance.
The Russian Federation aims to reverse the Soviet Union’s collapse, and communist China turns its back on the Qing empire. Interesting is that Turkey, another regional power with imperial tendencies, draws inspiration from the Ottoman Empire under its increasingly authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The US case seems to be more complex, but in fact is very similar. Trump then contends that Jimmy Carter foolishly handed over the Panama Canal, which has long been US-run, to Panama, and that it is now under Chinese control. He will, he says, return it to the US.
Trump also refers to America’s” Manifest Destiny”, the 19th-century belief that American settlers were destined to expand to the Pacific coast. His aspirations are now more toward the north than the west. The president also intends to take his imperial aspirations into space by planting the US flag on Mars.
If the US joins China and Russia in violating recognized borders, the international, rights-based order could be in danger. The signs are not very positive. The entire international structure could be destroyed if someone took the steps to illegally annex territories.
Eric Storm is senior lecturer in general history, Leiden University
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