U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, on Monday, in Palm Beach, Fla.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
First-year university students taking an Intro to World History course – Plato to NATO, as they used to call it – will soon be doing a module titled something like The Age of Empires.
Like the Middle Ages or the Age of Discovery, it will be studied in the past tense. Outside of Dune and Star Wars, the idea of empire is history. Right?
But in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump disinterred it, and made it part of his project for American greatness. From insisting on his need to take over Greenland, to musing about turning a certain neighbour into the 51st state, to insinuations that Venezuelan oil is somehow owed to Americans, to scheming to use Ukraine’s weakness as leverage to take over its mineral wealth, Mr. Trump has turned back the clock to the 19th century.
If Mr. Trump were a student in Plato to NATO, and reading for the first time about The Scramble for Africa, he might be asking, “Why can’t we do this now?”
A lot of Mr. Trump’s MAGA voters are isolationists. But Mr. Trump is proving himself to be an entirely different species: an anti-liberal imperialist.
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He is at ease with dictators and absolute monarchs, and on guard with the leaders of Western democracies, because he shares the worldview of the former, and disdains the latter. He does not want to be the leader of the free world.
Empire stopped being a legitimate form of government in the West a long time ago. But elsewhere, it’s still going strong.
The People’s Republic of China doesn’t call itself an empire. But it contains or claims territories and peoples that do not wish to be part of a Han nation or a communist state, from Tibet to Xinjiang and Hong Kong to Taiwan.
When Ronald Reagan decried the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the word “evil” got all the attention, with nobody giving any thought to his use of “empire” – even though it perfectly described the Soviet imperium, which presented in the drag of democracy and federalism.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has referred to the breakup of that empire as a historical tragedy. He is making a bid to reverse part of it with his invasion of Ukraine.
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From the czars to the USSR, Russia spent half a millennium conquering and absorbing the neighbours. It expanded east across Siberia, south across Central Asia, and west into Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine and Moldova. It even took nearly two million square kilometres from China, which it retains to this day.
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union rewarded itself by moving its border with Poland hundreds of kilometres to the west.
In the final Soviet census of 1989, ethnic Russians made up only 51 per cent of the population.
When the Soviet Union fell apart two years later, captive states were set free, from Estonia to Azerbaijan and Ukraine to Uzbekistan. The empire lost half its population, and a quarter of its territory.
Even so, Russia remains the world’s biggest country. The Kremlin has many problems; a lack of land is clearly not one of them. Yet one of Mr. Putin’s core goals is the reacquisition of land and people, starting with Ukraine and ending we do not know where.
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The modern United States has been a different sort of hegemon. Unlike Moscow, Washington made no sweeping territorial acquisitions after the Second World War, and even gave independence to the Philippines.
Also unlike Moscow, Washington did not install puppet regimes in the territories it liberated. Western Europe and Japan got self-governing, independent democracies.
And with the Marshall Plan, the U.S. lent billions of dollars to allies and former adversaries. The gesture of enlightened self-interest provided lasting benefits to all.
In Lament for a Nation, George Grant worried that the American empire would absorb Canada – but he meant that in terms of culture, technology, philosophy and economics, not actual invasion. He feared that Americanism was so compelling that it would voluntarily be adopted as the Canadian way of life. He and other Canadian nationalists didn’t fret about military occupation.
But the national security strategy released earlier this year by the Trump administration, with its silence on human rights and democracy, no criticism of Russia and China, and attacks on European governments as cultural threats to MAGA, presents a very different world.
The document suggests a globe divided into spheres of influence, where the U.S. is a great power like the others. It insists that the U.S. should have a free hand to impose its will on the Western Hemisphere, while implying that Moscow and Beijing should be accorded similar leeway in their spheres.
Unlike previous U.S. presidents, Mr. Trump sees no special mission for America, no philosophical or moral differences with Moscow or Beijing, and deep differences with erstwhile friends in Europe. He sees a world of power, and only power, where America’s purpose is to have more power than others.
It’s a vision that Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and George H. W. Bush would have found profoundly incomplete, and wholly incomprehensible. But it could reshape our planet in 2026.
Happy New Year.