Annex Greenland and Protect Hong Kong: A case for American imperialism

With the hindsight of history, we can now safely say that the official story about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was overstated. If we take a generous interpretation, it was chosen from among a laundry list of possible justifications because it would play well in the media. It was not because it was an imminent or particularly real threat.

Since then many have chosen to call this claim a lie, and serious accusations have been levelled at the government regarding the rationale and conduct of the war. However, a far more interesting discussion has been relegated to the subtext of history: Why did the United States even need a deceptive subtext in order to justify an invasion of Iraq?

After all, it had only been a little over a decade since boots were on the ground in the Middle East to contain Iraqi aggression into Kuwait. And even more recently, the United States acted to save the Bosnians from annexation and extermination at the hands of Slobodan Milošević.

Despite the apparent humanitarian benefits of the U.S. serving as policeman of global affairs, the reality is that the American people have very little appetite for war on humanitarian grounds. Look beyond the surface of each of these conflicts, and one finds an elaborate plot to convince the American people that these wars were undertaken for selfish reasons.

This is the grand mistake of the widely spread ‘war for oil’ conspiracy theory about Iraq: The American people would be receptive to the idea of invading the Middle East for natural resources and wealth. The real lie was that the U.S. stood to benefit from mass war and intervention—after all, at the end of the day, they did not even get the all-important oil in Iraq that the American people were promised by Michael Moore.

This nuance was a massive boon to Donald Trump back in 2016; he did not merely say that war was axiomatically wrong like so many anti-war candidates before him, he said that wars are dumb, and that we should have taken the oil so long as we were there. As the joke goes, “I invaded Iraq and all I got for it was this dumb MAGA hat!”

The evolution of this cynical, conspiratorial, selfish view of warfare is certainly understandable given recent history: Almost every major conflict the U.S. has involved itself in since the end of the Second World War has been founded on naked deception of some kind or another. But even if it is understandable, it is not an eternal constant of the American zeitgeist.

Despite what you may have heard at anti-war rallies in the 1960s, war and conquest are usually coloured by the cultural and philosophical principles of the nations involved—they do not mirror a universal human desire for barbarity. At various periods throughout history, revolutionary powers have undertaken efforts to spread their philosophical principles around the globe, rather than being merely driven by naked ambition.

The conquest of continental Europe at the hands of revolutionary France resulted in the birth of dozens of new democratic governments and new, liberalised systems of law, science and secularism. The expansion of the USSR was not just an expansion of traditional Russian imperial ambitions, they imposed quintessentially Communist systems across eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America beyond the demands of mere geopolitical conquest.

This was once also the case with the United States of America. Perhaps the most important figure in expanding the United States was President Thomas Jefferson. At the suggestion of other founding figures of the American Revolution, he secured a massive expansion of land via the Louisiana Purchase. He also actively sought out war with the Islamic pirates in North Africa to shut down the Mediterranean slave trade. This was explicitly done in order to enforce American ideals of liberty across the globe.

However, at some point, the attitude of the American people underwent a massive shift. Later expansionist acquisitions, such as that of Hawaii, took on a fundamentally nationalist tone. Woodrow Wilson’s case for American involvement abroad during the First World War did not rest on notions of American liberty, but instead on a particularly racist interpretation of Westphalian sovereignty. And in modern times, the very notion of an American role as ideological hegemon over the globe is in decline.

It has become trendy to categorise the United States as just the same as any other great power, and as a result rejecting any claim to special purpose or authority on the world stage. But this is obviously false. Even if nothing else is so, the foundation of America uniquely represents a democratic, liberal, principled view of the world.

The United States is unique even among Western nations in that it guarantees absolute freedom of speech for every citizen. The United States is unique in declaring in its founding documents that citizens have the right to form new government when faced with tyranny and injustice. The United States has also uniquely evolved towards a more perfect form of liberty: having fought a war against itself to abolish slavery and undertaken an internal convulsion to spread its democracy to all its citizens in the civil rights movement.

This mission does not grant America any special right to act with impunity. Declaring grand principles of righteousness confers, if anything, a special responsibility on the United States to live up to those principles. But this is precisely why it should not shy away from declaring its intentions of being an exceptional nation.

The smug view that America best serves the world by just minding its business is chiefly a convenient delusion. America’s failing is not in caring too much, but in caring too little. It is not a secret, for example, that the Trump administration has been mulling over how to respond to an agitational Iranian government. They even famously considered a direct military response. However, the deliberations in the West over this possibility have been nothing short of perverse.

All discourse over Iran has rested on the premise that whether war or peace is the result, the only justification for either is the strategic, selfish interests of the United States as a geopolitical entity. However, the United States has demonstrated in the past the unique potential for rising above this conventional reasoning. Perhaps it is time to ask, as a primary concern of foreign policy, what is the right, moral thing to do? What would be of benefit to the human rights of the Iranian people?

What of the democratic movement in Hong Kong? When faced with the repression of a liberal self-determination movement by a Communist regime, the United States has been all too willing to play both sides. Out of concern for the economy, the President has been talking down any possibility of sanctions in China—he has not even offered spiritual assistance for the protests.

And in this environment of cynicism and retreat, the President has offered a novel idea: to buy Greenland. What if the United States was to, once again, offer to peacefully expand its revolution around the globe to those who want it? I am sure Trump’s own motivations are vulgar and dull, but what exactly is so crazy about this plan? Several of the States in the United States were acquired by purchasing land from other nations.

Is it really the worst idea he has had? On careful reflection, it may be among his most sensible—and not just because that is a low bar.