It is ironic that just four years after doing so an even bigger monument to Roosevelt is going up: Trump redux is lifting entire passages out of the Roosevelt playbook.

Roosevelt greatly increased the influence and interests of the United States, building on the recent seizures of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, Cuba and Guam.  He wanted to Make America Great and to do so he would,”speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Big stick diplomacy – the willingness to use the military – was increasingly unleashed to assert US hegemony and business interests.

General Smedley D Butler, author of War is a Racket, spent his entire 33-year career (1898-1931) enforcing the rules as defined by Theodore Roosevelt and his successors. Smedley eventually realised he was fighting as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Like thousands of Marines he fought for the US in countries up and down the Americas, Caribbean and Asia, including Cuba (1898), Venezuela, Panama, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and China.

President Roosevelt’s greatest legacy was the building of the Panama Canal. The US intervened militarily in Panama to drive out the Colombians and “liberate” Panama so the US could build the Canal.

‘Literally as one man’
He said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man” — to which a senator retorted, “Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt!”

Is history repeating itself — as tragedy or comedy?  If Trump’s threats all sound either nuts or 19th century it’s because it is both those things — which doesn’t mean they won’t happen.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  I think Trump has a very good point for a number of reasons (clue: none of them relate to international law or respect for the sovereignty of nations).

Greenland has a ton of energy, fishing and mineral resources the Americans would love to lay their hands on. The Arctic maritime routes are slowly opening and if you look at a map of the Arctic you’ll realise the USA has very little real estate, to use Trumpspeak, up there and Russia has a vast amount.

The third reason is equally important: incorporating Canada and Greenland into the US would give the country an enormous boost at a time when it is slipping behind China in all critical areas.

According to the IMF, the Chinese have already overtaken the US in share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity (19-15 percent).  By 2035 this gap will likely explode out to 25 percent to 14 percent in Beijing’s favour.

How should the US respond?  Its current China containment strategy of sanctions, tariffs and threats are failing as China’s manufacturing and tech sectors greatly outperform the US.

Losing its proxy war
Military planners say the US would almost certainly lose a conventional war against China over Taiwan; the US is already losing its proxy war in Ukraine. A course correction seems inevitable.

Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of “the rules-based international order” — the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the US and its allies.

The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are “objects”, we are mere things to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”.

Trump is refreshingly candid: he wants stuff and he’s prepared to dispense with the preachy posturing that we got with Blinken and Biden.  America is not your friend.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

This article was first published at Solidarity on 11 January 2025 under the title “A man, a plan, a canal:  Trump might be on to something”.

One of the revolutionary generals that day in 1792 was a Venezuelan, Francisco de Miranda, who in time, returning to the Americas, would wrest power from imperial Spain and become leader of an independent Venezuela.

Miranda knew Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and, of significance to this story, the father of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe. Were he alive today he would again unsheathe his sword to fight King Donald Trump and all the forces of L’Ancien Régime.

L’Ancien Régime — the “Old Order” — refers to the system of absolute monarchy, hereditary privilege, and rigid social hierarchy where a tiny elite owned everything while the masses owned little or nothing.

In today’s world, given the concentration of power among the few in our countries, I extend the term Ancien Régime to capture the way the US, working in concert with local elites, is operating in ways that would be familiar to a Bourbon King or a British monarch.

If they had such a thing as shame, the American elites should wince that their country, born out of an epic anti-colonial struggle, now plays the role of a Prussian army seeking to impose its will on another state.

1792. La patrie en danger. The homeland is in peril.
The monarchies of Europe had rallied their armies for an assault on France to destroy the Revolution that had swept from power not only King Louis XVI but the entire absolutist order of L’Ancien Régime.

After a string of victories, the invaders swung their armies towards Paris, intent on snuffing out the revolution, to ensure the contagion did not infect the rest of Europe. Desperate, the French Assembly declared “La Patrie en danger” and called on patriotic citizens to rally to the flag.

The two world orders clashed in a pivotal battle at Valmy, 200 km northeast of Paris on 20 September 1792.

At Valmy, for the first time in history, the battle cry that General Miranda and others called out — and thousands of citizen soldiers answered — was “Vive la nation!”  “Long live the Nation! (not for a king, nor an emperor, nor a god).

Confronting them on the field was the superpower of the day, the best armed, best drilled war machine in history: the Prussian Army, led by Prince Field Marshall Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. As well as his Prussians, he commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire and, significantly, L’Armée de Condé, led by King Louis XVI’s cousin and comprised of French royalist émigrés.

To the citizen soldiers of France, this latter group were traitors to their country, men who put their privileges and their class ahead of the interests of their homeland. This is a theme relevant to discussions of Venezuela today.

Things went badly for the republican French in the opening and the lines wavered.  The Venezuelan Miranda, history records, raced his charger up and down the lines, urging the troops to sing La Marseillaise, written earlier that year by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. We know it now as the French National Anthem. It is a stirring call to arms, a passionate appeal to fight the enemies of the nation.

French First Republic
Long story short, the French prevailed that day and France’s First Republic was declared in Paris two days later.  A witness to the battle was the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who, by way of consolation — I would have thought a little rashly —  told some dejected Prussian officers, “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”

Today Francisco Miranda’s name is among the 660 heroes of the Republic engraved on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has been called the “First Global Revolutionary”, having fought in the American War of Independence as well as his other exploits in Europe and Latin America.