A brash, expansionist Donald Trump returned from two days in China, having been schooled by Xi Jinping in what global stability looks like.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
In his January 2025 inaugural address, Donald Trump blared the trumpets of the American Empire, putting the world on notice that the William McKinley era of U.S. territorial expansion was back. Not that the American imperium had gone anywhere under preceding presidents. But Trump would no longer hide it.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” he said, not stopping at planet Earth. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”
At Munich last fall, his secretary of state Marco Rubio, stirred the ghost of Cecil Rhodes, loudly proclaiming Western supremacy was back in control.
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio said.
“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, [the territorial expansion] was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.
Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.
But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”
Trump bullied Greenland. He bullied Canada. He took part in genocide in Gaza. He took control of Venezuela. He threatens Cuba. He twice attacked Iran.
And then he went to China.
This week Xi Jinping spelled it out for him: Put away the tough guy act. You’ve run up against China now. The two of us better get along or the world is in for a lot of hurt.
According to the Chinese readout, Xi asked Trump:
“Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides (thoo-sid-uh-deez) Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world? Can we build a bright future together for our bilateral relations in the interest of the well-being of the two peoples and the future of humanity? These are the questions vital to history, to the world, and to the people. They are the questions of our times that the leaders of major countries need to answer together.”
Joining The World This Week to discuss Mr. Trump’s trip to Beijing, and the week’s developments on Iran and Ukraine, are Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. analyst and Oval Office briefer; and Scott Ritter, ex-U.S. Marines counter-intelligence officer and a chief U.N. weapons inspector.
Interviewer: Joe Lauria. Producer: Cathy Vogan
