In the first half of the 19th Century, many Americans were gripped with a sense of Manifest Destiny, an idea that they were destined to control the entire North American continent.
This led them in the 1840s to provoke a war with Mexico as a pretense to conquer large and valuable tracts of land, including everything from the newly independent Texas til California. Then, after the American Civil War, several decades were spent dispossessing, pacifying, and eradicating tribes of native Americans in the interior of the nation.
Not everyone was enamoured of this doctrine. This is probably just as well – it does not sit comfortably in the mostly rules based system which has evolved in the 20th Century after several of the most ruinous wars in history. Ulysses S Grant commented in an interview, many years after the war between the United States and Mexico:
“I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. … The wickedness was not in the way our soldiers conducted it, but in the conduct of our government in declaring war. We had no claim on Mexico. Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River, and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion .”
Early on in his Personal Memoirs, when reflecting on his ante-bellum career, Grant sombrely observed:
“The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
From Sea To Shining Sea indeed!
Once and Future President Trump has made some belligerent comments in recent days which are reminiscent of the ideas of Manifest Destiny, talking about taking control of Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, and regaining ownership of the Panama Canal.
Many of the comments which Trump has made over the years since he embarked upon his political career have seemed to express views which best belong in the 1840s or 1850s.
Much of his isolationism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, which first propelled him into the White House with his promise of a border wall, seem reminiscent of 1850s Nativism (commonly described as the ‘Know Nothings’), which had been directed at the fresh waves of Irish and continental European migrants who were flocking in growing numbers to the USA in newly developed steam ships.
Manifest Destiny was an earlier idea, and one of more lasting impact to shaping the USA. Whilst it found its most cynical and wicked expression in the Mexican War in 1846, Manifest Destiny originally grew from the religious ideas of the puritan ‘pilgrims’ who arrived on the Mayflower, with their attachment to the ‘city on a hill’ from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14).
The pilgrims felt that they were on a Mission from God, and that idea came to permeate American political thinking for centuries to come.
Much as the attempts to force the American Colonies to pay taxes and incur expenses for the maintenance of the military establishment needed to protect the colonies in the Seven Years War are cited as the main reason for declaring independence from Great Britain, British rule also impeded the expansion of the colonies beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This was something which the American colonial leaders deeply resented.
It is not really mentioned, except in passing in the Declaration of Independence, where it is obscurely touched upon:
“He [ie George III] has endeavoured to prevent of the population of these states, for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.“
Nine simple words at the end of a short paragraph. A truth which is more sinister than self evident, but probably one which the leaders of the American Revolution placed greater weight on than many of the other paragraphs justifying their rebellion.
With independence, the fetters came off. They bought, conquered, or annexed everything which is now the United States by the end of the 19th Century, including the formerly independent Kingdom of Hawaii deep in the Pacific Ocean, with little regard for former occupants or sovereignty.
Manifest Destiny made this all OK, as Andrew Jackson might have said (one of his election campaigns is believed to have originated the term ‘OK’, incidentally).
When Trump makes his broad statements about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal, he is harking back to a time, 180 years ago, when such thinking among Westerners was seen as more or less normal.
Such thinking is not normal anymore. Several ruinous wars (and I am not simply talking about the First and Second World Wars) have caused geopolitical thinking to move away from the idea of warfare as a rational means of dispute resolution, or that conquest of territory is a legitimate expression of foreign policy.
The reversion in 1999 of the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty was a result of a treaty signed by the late Jimmy Carter with the president of Panama in 1977. Many on the American Right deplored this greatly during the 1980s, and demanded that the treaty be disavowed.
The treaty has been in effect for 26 years. What should Trump do now? Disavow it and occupy the canal by force? Such disregard of the sovereignty of other nations in the Americas would not be new – there are plenty of examples of this in my lifetime, including the invasion of Panama to depose General Noriega 36 years ago, and the invasion of Grenada. To say nothing of the CIA coup in Chile in 1972.
But such an action reeks more directly of Manifest Destiny than the superficial excuse of national security given for those invasions and coups. It would be done the same way that treaties were broken with the Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, Sioux, and numerous other Indian nations. Manifest Destiny justified the breaking of those 400 treaties, and it could be similarly used to justify breaking the 1977 treaty on the Panama Canal.
The problem is that if the contemporary USA cannot be trusted to honour some of its treaties, it cannot be trusted to honour any of them.
Take the North Atlantic Treaty. Denmark is a signatory and therefore an ally of the USA. Greenland is an autonomous region of Denmark. Occupying Greenland would be an act of invasion against an ally. The impact on the national security of the USA in causing upheaval in NATO would be enormous, far greater than the gain in gaining Greenland.
Canada? Since the UK effectively defeated the USA in the War of 1812, the only people who have publicly suggested the invasion of Canada are the creators of Southpark, when they produced the first Southpark movie in 1999, and the highly toxic and hypocritical Michael Moore, who made an actual movie (Canadian Bacon) on this premise once. So, there have been two unsuccessful movie comedies on this subject.
One is left to wonder whether Trump is getting his foreign policy ideas from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who are satirists, and who do not want their stated ideas taken seriously. Their other movie creation, Team America: World Police, could also be, worryingly, be taken literally by Trump as a blueprint for foreign relations, given his utterances. None of it seems so funny now, does it?
But when you look at what Trump says on foreign relations, one cannot help but wish for the return of circumspect and mature leaders like General Grant, who saw Manifest Destiny for what it really was – a pseudo theological justification for military conquest.
Lost For Words! 