No Empire. No Kings.
Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times.
President Trump has offered various explanations for attacking Iran: the regime’s nuclear program, its proxies’ history of attacks on U.S. troops, its repression of its people. He offered a different set of explanations for attacking Venezuela: its suspected role in drug smuggling, and what he called its theft of “our” oil. He’s also provided justifications for wanting to acquire Greenland, reassert influence over the Panama Canal and even annex Canada.
These rationales share a theme: The United States should be free to remove foreign leaders and dominate foreign lands without regard to national sovereignty and the conventions of international law. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Mr. Trump told The Times.
In other words, Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision is imperialism. It’s a global outlook that closely resembles Mr. Trump’s governing style at home — both feature spectacular violence and contempt for the restraints of law.
Leading Democrats once understood the link between imperialism abroad and despotism at home. At the end of the 19th century, one of Mr. Trump’s heroes, President William McKinley, set out to establish an American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific. William Jennings Bryan, McKinley’s Democratic opponent in the presidential election of 1900, argued that these conquests didn’t only trample the rights of those outside America’s borders. They also endangered liberty in the United States. “Imperialism might expand the nation’s territory,” he said, “but it would contract the nation’s purpose. It is not a step forward toward a broader destiny; it is a step backward, toward the narrow views of kings and emperors.”
Bryan’s theme was nearly as old as the United States. In the 19th century, even as the United States spilled across the continent, stealing Native land, massacring native populations and expanding slavery, prominent Americans still contrasted their supposedly republican, liberty-loving nation with imperial, despotic Europe. In 1821, John Quincy Adams warned that if the United States imposed its will on people in foreign lands, “the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” A generation later, during the Mexican-American War, Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that domestic liberty and foreign conquest were incompatible. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” he wrote, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn.”
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Anti-imperialism brought together Americans across the ideological spectrum. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau also opposed President James Polk’s invasion of Mexico. So did John C. Calhoun, among the Senate’s foremost defenders of slavery. Similarly, McKinley’s attempt to build an empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific met opposition from both W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P., and the racist South Carolina senator John Lowndes McLaurin.
When America became a global superpower after World War II, presidents largely ceased trying to incorporate territory into the country. But in the name of fighting communism and later terrorism, they still used America’s military to control foreign lands. In response, new generations of anti-imperialists — like Senator Wayne Morse, who opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, and Representative Barbara Lee, who refused to vote for the authorization of military force three days after 9/11 — warned that such conquests would corrupt the United States.
Critics of modern imperialism often did not carry the day. Their logic, however, could prove potent today, as no other president in modern history has so brazenly showcased the connection between lawlessness abroad and lawlessness at home, as has Mr. Trump. Last September, Mr. Trump told an audience of top military officials, “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has said that in January when he questioned the federal government’s actions in his state, Mr. Trump told him, “it was successful in Venezuela” (the White House later denied that Mr. Trump had made that comparison).
Anti-imperialism also enjoys broad appeal in this moment because Americans are less afraid of external threats than they once were. When President George W. Bush launched his war on terror, smoldering embers still burned in Lower Manhattan. By contrast, Mr. Trump had to lard his case by reaching back to 1979, 1983 and 2000 to find examples of Iran and its proxies targeting Americans. Surveys suggest that Americans today are less worried about national security than they are about civil liberties.
Imperial conquests have generally proved most popular when the U.S. government is flush with cash. The United States went to war with Spain during the economic boom that followed the panic of 1893. Lyndon Johnson could pour money and troops into Vietnam because the postwar decades had created what John Kenneth Galbraith famously called the Affluent Society, a country with the funds to simultaneously battle communism in Southeast Asia and poverty in the United States. When Mr. Bush took office in 2001, the United States boasted a budget surplus.
Today, by contrast, the federal budget deficit is about $2 trillion, and most Americans believe that American power is in decline.
Even as his advisers reportedly urge Mr. Trump to focus on economic concerns at home, he’s grown infatuated with the spectacle of American military might. As a result, he’s pursuing wars that most Americans reject. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken the day after the United States attacked Iran found that 56 percent of Americans — including 23 percent of Republicans — think Mr. Trump relies too heavily on force.
A revived anti-imperialist movement can rally a diverse group of Americans — progressives who oppose attacking Iran because it violates international law as well as America Firsters who oppose the war because they think America’s moral obligations end at the country’s borders.
While Mr. Trump peddles a fantasy of omnipotence in which the United States assassinates foreign leaders and bombs fishermen, anti-imperialists can help Americans adapt to an era in which they have less power. They can embrace a multipolar world because they don’t want America to be imperial Rome.
As an authoritarian president launches another war, it’s time for a new generation to raise William Jennings Bryan’s historic banner: No empire, no kings.