Manifest Destiny: Is this expansionist US political doctrine driving Trump?

In 1845, conservative American journalist John O’Sullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny as the overlying principle of the great American dream – “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us”.

A year after O’Sullivan laid claim to the whole of the North American continent, then-president James Polk, a Democrat and a big fan of the expansionist concept, waged a war against neighbouring Mexico to extend American territories as far as the Pacific Ocean.

Polk’s war, which legendary American general Ulysses S Grant denounced as the “most unjust war ever”, helped the US claim 55 percent of the Spanish-speaking state, including areas corresponding to current California, Nebraska, New Mexico and a few other states.

Nearly two centuries after O’Sullivan justified expanding “democratic” rule across the continent, President-elect Donald Trump seems to have invoked the same doctrine to lay out his own imperialist agenda – to seize Canada, take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, and rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

“Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” Trump said in a social media post, drawing a sharp rebuke from outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“While Manifest Destiny (in a modern form) has remained an implicit assumption of US leaders ever since, Donald Trump embodies it as a modern ‘manifestation’ better than any president since Teddy Roosevelt, over a hundred years ago,” says William Earl Weeks, a professor of history at San Diego State University and the author of several books, including the Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War.

“Trump seems to intuitively grasp that ‘making America great again’ requires that the nation return to its expansionist roots, both for strategic as well as ideological reasons,” Weeks tells TRT World.

Toward Manifest Destiny

According to Weeks, Manifest Destiny envisages the US as “a godly-ordained nation” on a universal divine mission to bring freedom and representative government, not just to the Western hemisphere but to the whole world.

Adam Dahl, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, agrees.

“The idea of Manifest Destiny is quite complex and has many moving parts. (But) the core of the idea is that the US has a divine right to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” Dahl tells TRT World.

He also points to the inherent racism of the ideology, which saw Indigenous populations as “less civilised and in need of the guidance of a superior population”, which led to a staggering loss of Native American lives and large displacement during its march from the east to the west.

After 13 original American colonies gained independence from British colonial rule through a series of battles in the late 18th century, the new state sailed for expansion, reaching a deal with France to purchase Louisiana, which doubled the size of the country in 1803.

Trump, incidentally, is inspired by the Louisiana Purchase for his Greenland project.

All this, alongside technological and economic progress the new state rapidly made, increased the political confidence of many Americans, who felt that “their presumed Godly destiny had been made apparent--or ‘manifest’”, according to Weeks.

“Presumed destiny became proven destiny by the 1840s, the decade the term was first used,” he adds.

Later, the same justification was used for overseas interventions by the US in the name of defending democracy – from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. While the US was victorious in both world wars and the Cold War, American interferences and invasions have not stopped.

“Most recently, you certainly saw elements of Manifest Destiny in the 2003 invasion in Iraq… after WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) were not found, the justification for the war shifted to bringing democracy in the form of free elections to Iraqis,” says Dahl, who wrote Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought.

“The idea of manifest destiny is baked into US foreign policy thinking. It lays the foundation for this notion of the US as the leader of the ‘free world’," says Dahl, pointing out former president Woodrow Wilson’s argument to enter WWI to make the world “safe for democracy.”

Wilson was one of the presidents who directly referred to the term Manifest Destiny, Dahl says, adding, “It's difficult to separate the idea of Manifest Destiny from any phase of US foreign policy making in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”.

‘Expand or die’

Trump’s imperialist agenda comes amid alleged signs of weakening or decline in the American political and economic structure, apparently spotted by some leading political analysts in recent decades.

Is Trump merely a reactionary to those who promote the idea of the American demise?

“​​Unlike some recent presidents, Trump is unapologetically American and understands that if the US stops expanding, stops reaching for greatness in various forms, then it will slowly die, or at least become much less important on the global stage,” says Weeks.

From this political perspective, which identifies US supremacy with global security, the professor says that Trump’s references on “acquiring Greenland, making Canada a state, and re-securing the Panama Canal, are not surprising to me, and actually make a great deal of sense”.

Dahl, however, is not so sure about the ideological depth of Trump’s comments on the Panama Canal and Greenland, which has “the tone of a shady real estate transaction rather than touching the notes of the lofty and idealistic rhetoric of Manifest Destiny”.

But he does see “subtle elements” of the Manifest Destiny ideology at play in both cases due to their long connections with US continental interests, which was dubbed the Monroe Doctrine by President James Monroe in 1823.

The Monroe Doctrine sees any European intervention into the Americas as a potential hostile act against the US. In this context, the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, which advocate US expansion across the continent, have strong links with each other, according to historians.

“The idea of Manifest Destiny was crucially connected to the Monroe Doctrine,” says Dahl. In the modern context, the Monroe Doctrine applies to any external powers, including China, which has increased investments in Greenland and has a significant commercial presence in the Panama Channel.

“Asserting US superiority in both areas could be interpreted as a means of opposing Chinese economic power and reasserting US claims over the Western hemisphere as its own distinctive sphere of influence,” he adds.

Like Weeks, Dahl also points out that proponents of Manifest Destiny have historically viewed a strong connection between imperialism and democracy.

“....American democracy grows and develops through time by expanding in space. Without limitless frontiers of expansion, proponents of Manifest Destiny fear that American democracy would stall and begin to degenerate into either anarchy or tyranny.”

‘America First’

Former US diplomat Matthew Bryza draws a parallel between the Manifest Destiny of the 19th century and Trump’s America First agenda, pushed by his MAGA support base and close aides, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

“Manifest Destiny was a philosophy of the 19th century. But echoes of the concept of American exceptionalism…seem to animate Trump’s ‘America First’ approach,” Bryza tells TRT World.

The Manifest Destiny rhetoric is evident in Musk’s world of spacefaring ambitions, says Dahl, drawing attention to the fact that the world’s richest man is a source of inspiration for the "cosmic manifest destiny" of human beings to be “a multi-planetary species”.

“This language is also clearly evident in the way US officials equate space colonisation with US westward expansion or speak of space as ‘the final frontier’,” observes the political scientist.