Trump’s designs on Greenland may have a curious historical inspiration
“President McKinley”, Donald Trump said in his inaugural address last week, “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”.
There was a point to the President’s praise for one of his long-dead predecessors: he was foreshadowing one of the flurry of executive orders he issued on his first day. Trump announced that the federal government would restore McKinley’s name to America’s highest peak, which Barack Obama – an advocate of submerging American power unexceptionally within a “rules-based” world order – had replaced with an indigenous Alaskan name in 2015.
But was there more to Trump’s comments than the renaming of a mountain?
William McKinley, elected in 1896 and re-elected in 1900, remains a subject of discreet fascination. A 2021 survey of American presidential historians rated him 14th out of the 45 men who have held the country’s highest office. A decade ago, the Republican advisor Karl Rove, a major adversary of Trump, took a break from his own career in political analysis to author a substantial study of the 25th president’s 1896 election campaign, which, Rove argued, bore intriguing similarities to the political contests of our time.
Then as now, America was divided between partisan visions of what it should be in the world. A burgeoning economy bucked an inherent tension between a desire to focus on domestic issues and unavoidable strategic challenges abroad. In both periods, the United States hosted an immigrant population of unprecedented size and unpredicted effect. Like Trump, McKinley’s path to office required him to wrest control of the Republican Party from its entrenched and discredited leaders and then win the same Upper Midwestern “swing states” on cross-party defections from a disenfranchised industrial working class.
Assuring American prosperity required both presidents to jettison longstanding consensus and pursue an aggressive defence of American economic and geopolitical interests.
Tellingly, Trump’s second inaugural address eschewed substantive mention of any other president. Not even the perennial favourites George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or the once – for Republicans – sacrosanct figure of Ronald Reagan made it in.
So is McKinley, a disruptor in his own right, driving Trump’s thinking?
As the returning President told the World Economic Forum via video conference last week, “If you don’t make your product in America … then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff”. In a sharp turn from the economic neoliberalism that dominated both major American parties for two generations, Trump has pledged to institute tariffs both to protect American industry and the workers who operate it, and to punish foreign countries for objectionable stances on immigration, the international drug trade, and fiscal policies adverse to American interests.
Broad tariffs reaching 25 per cent may be imposed on Canada and Mexico as early as next week, with others at the forefront in a gambit to enrich America. “Tariff”, Trump has said on multiple occasions, “is the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.
It remains to be seen whether what worked for McKinley – who as an Ohio congressman successfully championed a 50 per cent tariff in 1890, far above the 10 or 20 per cent general tariff Trump suggested during the campaign or those McKinley managed to impose later during his presidency – will work for the returning President.
The similarities do not end there, however. McKinley, whose nationalism was also fundamentally economic and pro-growth, shared his modern successor’s aversion to foreign wars. Yet he wasn’t against territorial expansion if it favoured American interests.
In the Caribbean of McKinley’s time, this resulted in a war with Spain, which was then struggling to hold onto what was left of its once-vast empire, and whose remaining colonies traded overwhelmingly with the United States.
McKinley preferred a negotiated solution on the particularly thorny issue of Cuba’s future, but when the Spanish government and Cuban rebels failed to reach a settlement – and an American battleship was blown up in Havana harbour in suspicious circumstances – a short three-month war in 1898 delivered Cuba’s independence as a de facto American protectorate, while Puerto Rico, Guam, and the distant Philippine islands became American possessions outright.
That same year, McKinley annexed Hawaii, then a republic dominated by American business interests that had overthrown the native queen some years earlier. McKinley understood the strategic imperative of a Pacific base and a need to keep the island archipelago out of expansionist Japanese hands.
What the Caribbean trade and Pacific strategic imperative were in the 1890s could resemble today’s economic scramble for Greenland, where Denmark’s weak hold of the territory has invited an imperial contest between the United States and China for the island’s rare earth minerals and control of fast shipping routes. Trump clearly prefers a negotiated solution, but has said that he would not rule out a military one.
He has the same position on the Panama Canal, which emerged from careful diplomacy that McKinley began prior to his assassination in 1901 and was completed by his successor Theodore Roosevelt, who had the capital to complete the project and the military wherewithal to stare down other strategic challenges in the Caribbean.
McKinley refrained from any acquisitive designs on Canada, so maybe the comparison will end there. Or will Trump, who presides over a vastly more powerful country, seek to expand on his predecessor’s legacy?
Paul du Quenoy is a historian and president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute