We do not want Trump to annex Britain

Rhodes Napier

While the new Trump administration is still in its early gestation, it has become increasingly clear that a new American irredentism is on the cards. The long forgotten territorial ambitions of older waves of Manifest Destiny have been revived. This is no longer revanchist shitposting as it may have been in the first term, nor simply an attempt to pressure European countries into self-sustaining their own occupation. Trump has made it clear that he wants to annex Greenland, the Panama canal and potentially Canada in some form. The eagle claws will extend to Columbia, and its wings to either side of the North American artic.

These are very old (and indeed in some cases, simply reversals of disadvantageous and unnecessary decisions) territorial ambitions. Andrew Johnson contemplated the purchase of Greenland in 1867, and of course in the war of 1812 many Americans wanted to annex lower Canada. The great Anglo-American imperialist William Walker claimed much of Nicaragua as his fief, only to be abandoned by his home country. There was always a strain within the early American political conscious which saw their country's expansion as only stopping at the geographical boundaries of the North American continent (if even then).

Indeed, the actual boundaries of America which did manifest make no ethnographic or geographic sense. Most of the Canadian prairies forms a contiguous ethnocultural zone with the American Mid-West and much of the Albertan working class are politically closer to the average blue collar Trump supporter than they are to Ottawa liberals. One can easily imagine a Baja California which was largely settled by white Europeans, and like most of the arid northern states of Mexico, is not the natural ecological stomping ground of Mestizos.

Of course, there is a part of me which greatly admires Manifest Destiny. It was one the most radical manifestations of the Anglo-Saxon and more broadly Germanic territorial wonder-lust. Its the natural tendency of Northern European man to expand outwards, it his Faustian destiny. Call me a romanticist LARPer, but all those 19th century thinkers interested in skulls have basically been confirmed right by the wonders of modern science. It is the was the most basic impulse of our ancestors all the way back to their origins in the Boreal Corded Ware heimat to expand outwards. We see this whether in the Oregon trails, the Voortrekkers or the Ostsiedlung. The British in their own right repopulated entire continents with their descendants even after the loss of America. No doubt there will be those will bore on about 'sociological' or 'economic' factors, but this is all tedious obfuscation. None of them can explain why the Han, in spite of their relative technological advancement sat firmly contained within the boundaries of the Tibetan Plateaus and the Gobi Desert. The attempts by the British to limit the expansion of the white man across America were always petty. In many respects it was the begetter of our separation from our American cousins and was even more pointless after their independence.

I say all this to be clear to any Americans that read this I do not hate or hold even resentment against their country. The historical America was an immensely based entity, a continental republic with its own helotry. It was in many respects far more radical than any European empire which existed in its pursuit of its demographic policies. What I am about to say is therefore not a critique of actually historically existing America or what remains of it in substrates of the modern United States. It is more a reflection of my country's own national interests and my dislike of the forming new 'American' nationalism.

I am not enthused by Trump's expansionism. Of course, I am dispassionately fascinated by it as I am by all 'hard-power' flexes on the international stage (which I was assured were impossible in the age of 'global financial flows) much like I am by Israel's latterly expansion or Russia's demographic engineering of eastern Ukraine. But much of the adulation for it from the non-American right stems from 1) basic reflexive power worship or 2) a mistaken understanding that Trump is the harbinger of some Spenglerian occidental imperium. It is not good that America is in a position to simply annex European territories, nor historically European oriented states like Canada (an example of Anglo-French reconciliation in territorialised form). Nor is it good that America will aggressively leverage its economic heft to destroy European economies, something which we are more vulnerable to since we are largely dependent on their natural gas now.