Trump’s Inaugural Speech Signaled His Agenda by Invoking McKinley’s Ghost

In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump.

But nobody expected this. Nobody at all.

“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs,” President Trump announced to a burst of applause during his inaugural address on January 20th. Continuing his celebration of a decidedly mediocre president, best known for taking this country on an ill-advised turn towards colonial conquest, Trump added: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent — he was a natural businessman — and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did including the Panama Canal which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.”

Moving on from such fractured facts and scrambled history, Trump suggested the foreign policy principles that would guide his new administration, or to quote that poem, the “rough beast” as it “slouches towards” Mount McKinley “to be born.”

Then, to another round of applause, he added ominously: “We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”

In a quick segue, the president then promised to act with a “courage, vigor, and vitality” that would lead the nation “to new heights of victory and success,” presumedly via a McKinleyesque policy of tariffs, territorial conquest, and great-power diplomacy.

Remembering William McKinley

Since President William McKinley’s once-upon-a-time mediocrity was exceeded only by his present-day obscurity, few observers grasped the real significance of Trump’s remarks. To correct such a critical oversight, it’s important to ask two significant questions: Who was William McKinley and how might his legacy influence current American foreign policy? In fact, Trump and his key advisers are planning to use McKinley’s Gilded Age imperialism as their guide, even their inspiration, for overturning the liberal internationalism that has marked American foreign policy for the past 80 years.

After an otherwise undistinguished career in Congress crowned by the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 with record-high import duties, he won the presidency in 1896 thanks to the influence of Mark Hanna, a wealthy industrialist — the nineteenth-century equivalent of a present-day tech billionaire — who tithed his fellow millionaires to create a war chest that would fund the country’s costliest political campaign up to that time. In doing so, Hanna ushered in the modern era of professional electioneering. That campaign also carried American political satire to new heights as, typically, a withering political cartoon caricatured a monstrously bloated Hanna, reclining on money bags given by millionaires like banker J.P. Morgan, declaring, “I am confident. The Working Men Are with Us.” (Sound familiar?)

As president from 1897 to 1901, McKinley enacted record-high tariffs and used the brief Spanish-American War of 1898 to seize a colonial empire of islands stretching halfway around the world from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Instead of crowning the country with an imperial glory akin to Great Britain’s, those conquests actually plunged it into the bloody Philippine-American War, replete with torture and massacres.

Rather than curtail his ill-fated colonial venture and free the Philippines, McKinley claimed he had gone “down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” As it happened, his God evidently told him to conquer and colonize, something that he arranged in great-power bilateral talks with Spain that determined the fate of millions of Cubans and Filipinos, even though they had been fighting Spanish colonial rule for years to win their freedom.

At the price of several hundred thousand dead Filipinos, those conquests did indeed elevate the United States into the ranks of the great powers whose might made right — a status made manifest (as in destiny) when McKinley’s vice-president and successor Theodore Roosevelt pushed rival European empires out of South America, wrested the Panama Canal Zone from Colombia, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

With surprising speed, however, this county’s leaders came to spurn McKinley’s embrace of a colonial empire with its costly, complicated occupation of overseas territories. Just a year after he seized the Philippine islands, his secretary of state called for an “open door” in China (where the U.S. had no territorial claims) that would, for the next 50 years, allow all powers equal access to that country’s consumer markets.

After 1909, Secretary of State Philander Knox, one of the founders of the United States Steel Corporation, pursued a program of “dollar diplomacy” that promoted American power through overseas investments rather than territorial conquests. According to historian William Appleman Williams, an imperial version of commerce and capital “became the central feature of American foreign policy in the twentieth century,” as the country’s economic power “seeped, then trickled, and finally flooded into the more developed nations and their colonies until, by 1939, America’s economic expansion encompassed the globe.”

Emerging from World War II, a conflict against the Axis powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — that had seized empires in Europe, Africa, and Asia by military conquest, Washington built a new world order that would be defined in the U.N. Charter of 1945, guaranteeing all nations the right to independence and inviolable sovereignty. As Europe’s colonial empires collapsed amid rebellions and revolutions, Washington ascended to unprecedented global power marked by three key attributes—alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and iron-clad assurance of inviolable sovereignty. This unique form of global power and influence (which involved the seizure of no more territory) would remain the guiding genius of American imperial global hegemony. At least that remained true until this January 20th.

The Past as Prologue

Although none of us were quick to grasp the full implications of that inaugural invocation of McKinley’s ghost, Donald Trump was indeed signaling just what he planned to do as president. Leaving aside the painfully obvious parallels (like Elon Musk as a latter-day Mark Hanna), Trump’s foreign policy has already proved a surprising throwback to a McKinleyesque version of great-power politics marked by the urge to take territories, impose tariffs, and conclude diplomatic deals.

Let’s start with the territorial dimension of Trump’s ongoing transformation of U.S. foreign policy. Just as McKinley moved to seize an empire of scattered islands instead of whole countries like the Congo or China, so Donald Trump has cast his realtor’s eye on an unlikely portfolio of foreign properties. Take the Panama Canal. In his first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio swept into Panama City where he warned its president to reduce Chinese influence over the canal or face “potential retaliation from the United States.” In Washington, President Trump backed his emissary’s threats, saying: “China is running the Panama Canal… and we’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.” Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, promptly pushed back, stating that Washington’s claim about China was “quite simply [an] intolerable falsehood,” but also quickly tried to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative. The reaction among our Latin American neighbors to this modern edition of gunboat diplomacy was, to say the least, decidedly negative.

Next on Washington’s neo-colonial shopping list was Greenland. On his sixth day in office, President Trump told the press aboard Air Force One: “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it. And I think the people want to be with us.” Invoking that thawing island’s mineral wealth, he added: “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world. It’s not for us, it’s for the free world.” In a whirlwind diplomatic offensive around the capitals of Europe to counter Trump’s claims, Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen won strong support from the Nordic nations, France, and Germany, whose leader Otto Scholz insisted “borders must not be moved by force.”

After roiling relations with America’s closest allies in Europe and Latin America, Trump topped that off with his spur-of-the-moment neo-colonial claim to the Gaza strip during a February 4th news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump announced to Netanyahu’s slack-jawed amazement. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.” After relocating two million Palestinian residents to “one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, twelve” sites in places like Jordan or Egypt, the U.S. would, Trump added, “take over that piece and we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.” Warming to his extemporaneous version of imperial diplomacy, Trump praised his own idea for potentially creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, which would become “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”

The international backlash to his urge for a latter-day colonial land grab came hard and fast. Apart from near-universal condemnation from Asia and Europe, Washington’s key Middle Eastern allies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan — all expressed, as the Saudi Foreign Ministry put it, a “firm rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” When Jordan’s King Abdullah visited the White House a week later, Trump pressed hard for his Gaza plan but the King refused to take part and, in a formal statement, “reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Setting aside Trump’s often jocular calls for Canada to become America’s “51st State,” none of his neo-colonial claims, even if successfully accomplished, would make the slightest difference to this country’s security or prosperity. Think about it. America already dominates the Panama Canal’s shipping traffic (with 73% of the total) and a restoration of sovereignty over the Canal Zone would change nothing. Similarly, Washington has long had the only major military base in Greenland and its continued presence there is guaranteed by the NATO alliance, which includes Denmark. As for Gaza, it would be the money sink from hell.

Yet there is some method to the seeming madness of the president’s erratic musings. As part of his reversion to the great-power politics of the Victorian Age, all of his territorial claims are sending a chilling message: America’s role as arbiter and defender of what was once known as a “rules-based international order,” enshrined in the U.N. Charter, is over. Henceforth, all-American nationalism will Trump — yes, that’s the word! — any pretense to internationalism.

Meet Tariff Man

The second key facet of President Trump’s attack on the liberal international order, tariffs, is already proving so much more complicated and contradictory than he might ever have imagined. After World War II, a key feature of the liberal international order created through the U.N. Charter was a global trade regime designed to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous protective tariffs (and “tariff wars” that went with them) which deepened the devastating Great Depression of the 1930s. While the World Trade Organization (WTO) sets the rules for the enormous volume of international commerce, localized treaties like the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have produced both economic efficiency and prosperity for their respective regions. And while President Trump hasn’t yet withdrawn from the WTO, as he has from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, don’t count on it not happening.

On the campaign trail last year, candidate Trump advocated an “all tariff policy” that would impose duties on imports so high they could even, he claimed, replace the income tax in funding the government. During his first two weeks in office, President Trump promptly imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico. Since North America has the world’s most integrated industrial economy, he was, in effect, imposing U.S. tariffs on the United States, too. With the thunderclouds of an economic crisis rumbling on the horizon, Trump “paused” those tariffs in a matter of days, only to plunge ahead with a 10% tariff on all Chinese goods and a 25% duty on aluminum and steel imports, including those from Canada and Mexico, and threats of reciprocal tariffs on all comers.

As an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute warned, “Introducing large increases in the prices of imported goods could breathe new life into some of the inflationary embers.” Indeed, a sudden spike in inflation seemed to put an instant crimp on his tariff strategy. Even though the U.S. economy’s integration with regional and global markets is now light years away from the McKinley Tariff of 1890, Trump seems determined to push tariffs of all sorts, no matter the economic damage to American business or the costs for ordinary consumers.

A Return to Great-Power Politics?

Consider an attempted return to the great-power politics of the Victorian age as the final plank in Donald Trump’s remaking of American foreign policy. Setting aside the sovereignty enshrined in the U.N. Charter that seats all nations, large and small, as equals in the General Assembly, he prefers to deal privately with peer autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un.

Back in 1898, President McKinley’s deal-making in Paris on behalf of uninvited Cubans and Filipinos was typical of that imperial age. He was only following in the footsteps of Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had, in 1885, led his fellow European imperialists in carving up the entire continent of Africa during closed-door chats at his Berlin residence. That conference, among other things, turned the Congo over to Belgium’s King Leopold II, who soon killed off half its population to extract its latex rubber, the “black gold” of that day.

Trump’s deal-making over the Russo-Ukraine War seems a genuine reversion to such great-power diplomacy. The new administration’s first cabinet member to visit Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, arrived in Kyiv on February 12th with a proposal that might have made King Leopold blush. In a blunt bit of imperial diplomacy, the secretary gave Ukraine’s president exactly one hour to sign over a full 50% of his country’s vast store of rare earth minerals, the value of which President Trump estimated at $500 billion, as nothing more than a back payment for military aid already received from the Biden administration. In exchange, Bessent offered no security guarantees and no commitments to additional arms, prompting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to publicly reject the overture.

On February 12th, President Trump also launched peace talks for Ukraine through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and Trump himself added that NATO membership for Kyiv was equally unrealistic — in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow even before the talks started. And in the imperial tradition of great powers deciding the fate of smaller nations, the opening peace talks in Saudi Arabia on February 18th were a bilateral Russo-American affair, without any Ukranians or Europeans present.

In response to his exclusion, President Zelensky insisted that “we cannot recognize any… agreements about us without us.” He later added, “The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.” Trump shot back that Zelensky, whom he branded a “dictator,” had “better move fast” to make peace “or he is not going to have a Country left.” He then pressured Ukraine to sign over $500 billion in minerals without any U.S. security guarantees, a classic neo-colonial resource grab that he reluctantly modified by dropping that extortionate dollar limit just in time for Zelensky to visit the White House. While witnessing this major rupture to the once-close cooperation of the NATO alliance, European leaders convened “an emergency summit” in Paris on February 17th, which aimed, said the British prime minister, “to ensure we keep the U.S. and Europe together.”

Well, don’t count on it, not in the new age of Donald Trump.

Clearly, we are at the threshold of epochal change. In the words of that poem The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… Surely some revelation is at hand.”

Indeed, that revelation is likely to be not just the end of the liberal international order but the accelerated decline of U.S. global power, which had, over the past 80 years, become inextricably interwoven with that order’s free trade, close alliances, and rules of inviolable sovereignty. If these tempestuous first weeks of Trump’s second term are any indication, the next four years will bring unnecessary conflicts and avoidable suffering for so much of the world.