Manifest Destiny Redux - Thomas Jefferson And Donald Trump's International Expansionism

Manifest destiny was the expansionist belief in 19th-century America that American settlers were destined to expand westward across the continent and that this belief was both obvious ("manifest") and certain ("destiny"). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, romantic nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American Way.  According to historian William Earl Weeks, there were three basic tenets behind the concept:

• The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States.
• The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life".
• The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission.

Thomas Jefferson played a crucial role in the early stages of Manifest Destiny through the Louisiana Purchase and his vision of westward expansion which laid the groundwork for the United States territorial expansion. 

Jefferson sponsored and promoted the famous Lewis and Clark expedition on a maiden voyage to map out, plat, and claim the vast lands recently bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase. The enterprise was central to the development of the new American lands, for it provided the framework for the titling and private ownership of land, on the basis of which new landowners could borrow money to improve it. 

The United States has never veered far from this founding principle.  Throughout its history it has claimed territorial rights over sovereign lands and used military force to secure it.  The Mexican wars were meant to push Spain back from its own territorial designs on the Southwest, the American War against Spanish Main Philippines was a conflict that arose after the Spanish-American War.  The United States which had defeated Spain in the war, sought to assume control of the Philippines, a colony which had been under Spanish rule for over 300 years. 

The American invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the compacts made with the Pinochet regime in Argentina and the colonels in Brazil were outright attempts to exert American hegemonic influence in the hemisphere. 

Under George W. Bush and the Neocons, American exceptionalism was the policy meme, and US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were expression of it. American-style democracy was, in Francis Fukuyama's words, the end of history, and spreading it among the newly liberated Soviet states and elsewhere was America's calling and duty. 

'I am Manifest Destiny', said Donald Trump in a speech before the American Foreign Policy Institute in February of this year (2026) and he made it quite clear that he was invoking the spirit of Jefferson in his bold nationalism.  

There is no way that the Americas, long continents in America's orbit, ambit and geopolitical interest can be allowed retreat into socialism, a political philosophy antithetical to American values and one on which corrupt governments have pillaged, raped, tortured, and deceived the people they were to serve.

America will not stand by idly and let Cuba continue to deprive its citizens of their natural rights, consign them to more years of destitution and poverty; nor did it remain on the sidelines while the venal, corrupt, and vile regime of the dictator Nicolas Maduro ran Venezuela into the ground. 

We will stand with Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador and other countries whose leaders are visionary men, determined to return the country to free elections, free markets and free enterprise. 

America will not stop in its own backyard, said the President.  China will not be allowed to range free to exploit African countries, control the mining of rare earths, oil, and gas.  Africa, while not in America's direct geographical orbit is within its geopolitical one. 

Progressives have cried foul.  The President is turning America into a neocolonialist power no different from those European empires which exploited black and brown people, ransacked Africa and Asia of its natural resources and turned them into subservient lackeys.  Donald Trump may say he is promoting the cause of freedom, but his only interest is dominant control. 

'I am indeed', replied the President in a speech to the Hoover Institute.  'I make no bones about my intentions.  Why should billions of people suffer under communism, socialism, and brutal dictatorships when America is there to help? 

'And yes', he went on, 'in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Manifest Destiny, I want American access to the world's resources without restriction.  Just as settlers from Ohio and Pennsylvania moved westward in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and laid claim to the fertile lands of the prairies and beyond,  Americans have the right to the world's oil, minerals, and rare earths.  There are no limits or boundaries to international commerce.'

 

As part of this renewed doctrine of American geopolitical expansionism, the President has isolated what he has called 'the nexus of possibility' a triumvirate of geopolitical power, all in competition for power, territory, and resources but honest brokers in their Machiavellian intentions. 

Russia, China, and the United States - finally and at long last - have understood the nature of political adversity, and in so doing have made the battle lines unequivocally clear.  Of course Russia and China will try to expand their spheres of geopolitical influence and now so will the United States.  All will be above board, a clear, defiant contest of wills. 

There will be no negotiations, no Neville Chamberlain 'Peace in Our Time' capitulations, no Biden era Utopian, One World idealism.  Each of the three powers of the triumvirate will be acting on willful purpose to extend and expand its power and influence and in so doing control the world's resources. 

American progressives, steeped in this Chamberlain-esque compromise and craven idealism, march in protest - the Hamas, Venezuela, and Iran wars are nothing but bald neo-colonial adventurism and display Donald Trump's arrogance, dismissiveness, and autocracy.  America's F-16s over Tehran, Gaza, and Caracas are there only to bully, intimidate, and destroy. 

The President did not answer these charges, too pitifully naive and self-serving to deserve a reply, but said in a speech to the DAR in Washington:

We are patriots all, defenders of freedom, liberators, and pioneers of Manifest Destiny.  The world has changed, reverted to history's old ways of survival, conquest and spoils.  I invoke Genghis Khan when I convene my Cabinet to discuss our foreign policy, a man of iron will, unshakeable purpose, and vast geopolitical vision.  Thanks to him and his Mongol-Turkic armies, the Mongol Empire spread from Europe to the Far East. 

Again the Left raised its voice in protest.  'We are on the cusp of a new, verdant, harmonious, peaceful world order', said Bob Muzelle, a leader in the peace movement since the days of the Cold War, 'on the verge of diversity, inclusivity, and equity on an international scale, and we shall not be denied.'

His voice trailed off in the March wind, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, and in ever more faint echoes down the National Mall.  It was a feeble, desperate plea to return to an age of idealism which never existed.  The United States has always been a nation of Wild West justice, Robber Baron enterprise, and Harry S Truman brass balls, and the new Manifest Destiny is right in line. 

Love And Other Incidentals - How Sex With Younger Women Fuels Men In A Dog-Eat-Dog World

Love is a balm, spread it liberally and it will magically relieve angst and anomie and remove the desperation that the world is becoming unhinged, unaligned with sense and sensibility, and nothing but chasms, sinkholes, and emotional crevasses.  Yes, love the anodyne, the miracle-worker, the fountain of youth, the lucky charm. 

So thought Henrik Baylor many months into a December-May affair, an early Christmas, toys and bikes and baseball gloves under the tree, the smell of quince pies, pine needles, and turkey roasting in the oven. 

He had met Annette Browning at the Town & Country bar of the Mayflower Hotel, the grandest grande dame in Washington, a Victorian place of class and opportunity, a meeting place, a confessional place where policy is discussed and where affairs begin.

'I'll have another', said Henrik, one of Bill the Bartender's spot-on martinis, Stoli with just a breath of Vermouth, two olives in a fluted crystal glass.  Drinking at the Mayflower was not just an alcoholic routine, it was a ritual, a precedent, and the first step to trysts and confidences. 

Annette was a young lawyer at Parker & Fiske, one of K Street's premier firms, the go-to defender for white collar crimes, famous for its literary, high-toned rhetoric masking a wolverine viciousness.  They rarely lost a case and their lawyers had that brain surgeon machismo, so when Annette was hired they were breaking the mold, but the young woman was known for her steely, uncompromising will - a man in woman's clothing, one of the boys. 

She never lost a beat and did the firm proud, a honey bear in Lanvin and Armani, a gorgeous woman as smart as they come.  All the lawyers admired her but kept their personal distance.  Annette was intimidating, demanding in a way which suggested conquest in bed as well as the courtroom. 

Henrik knew none of this when he asked the attractive young woman sitting next to him at the bar of the Town & Country.  He was just a middle aged man striking out for new territory, long tethered in a dogtrot of a marriage, not exactly unhappy but not happy either, and realizing that the clock was ticking and he had nothing to lose, he decided to stray.

The Town & Country was known for its atmosphere - not its ambience so much as pheromones in the air. There had to be something floating free that heightened sexual sensibilities, offered promise and opportunity, and lubricated the machinery of love. 

December-May affairs on the surface suggest sugar daddies, gold-diggers, sexual opportunists, and hungry vixens; but this is far from the truth.  There is something particularly alluring about a mature, successful, handsome man that is irresistible to young women.  Older men will understand them; they will love them for who they are; they will look past the glamour and sexual appeal and discover the inner woman. 

The middle aged man sees youth, a reprieve from aging, a confirmation of his lasting virility.  A younger woman's love confers identity, transfers youth, and offers release from years of life with old parchment.

The affair began that night fueled by Bill's martinis, the pheromone-filled air of the Town & Country, the devil-may-care ferocity of Henrik, and the months-long celibacy of an intimidating woman. 

It was perfect, an easy meant-for-each-other sexual and emotional elision. It was what they both had been waiting for, hoping for, and increasingly worried that would never happen. 

There are always daddies and their little girls in such affairs.  Annette loved her father, his favorite, his special, his delight; and consciously or unconsciously she hoped she would find and marry someone like him.  Henrik loved his daughter Lucia, delighted at her charm, her enthusiasm, and her coquettish good humor. 

This is not so say that the affair was solely predicated upon these Freudian factors.  It was far from that, and was a Lawrentian equilibrium, two individuals who found equipoise and sexual equilibrium in the relationship. 

Now, sex for most is routine, at best limited to a pre-marital concourse, romantic love followed by predictably; for others it is conquest, and for still others it is dominance and submission. 

For the very few - the willful, Nietzschean few - a December-May affair adds octane to the already potent male desire for battle, conquest, and reward. 

Henry Kissinger, former Secretary or State under Richard Nixon famously said that power is the greatest aphrodisiac - men's sex drive is heightened and women are increasingly drawn to them.  

This however is only the tip of the iceberg, a pedestrian matter, an issue of sexual attractiveness; but in the case of men like Henrik Baylor, already the Genghis Khan of the courtroom, it made him invincible with a status, allure, and confidence only imagined by others. 

Sex with Annette conferred virility - the street variety, the take-no-prisoners, vandalizing, unleashing of pure male power.  He felt superhuman, indomitable. 

Now, as an older man who has been in such a revitalizing, energizing, unforgettable affair, the letdown is worse than coming down from heroin.  To have one's sexual life tail off, dwindle, and recede is one thing.  To have had it in a blaze of glory and then to lose it is insufferable.  Suddenly old age returns. There is nothing left.  Looking in the mirror the lover no longer sees a graying, dashing Errol Flynn, but a bagof bones, a lined, saggy, jowly old man. 

Henrik saw the end of the affair coming, tried to put it off, but the wisdom, patience, attention and loving insights of Daddy had run their course, and Annette grew restive and confined.  After she left, Henrik was disconsolate and dispirited.  His swagger disappeared, his appearance flagged, and he began to lose trials

With heroin there is always another fix; but with this unique, equally exhilarating hit, there is no re-upping.  It is too late, younger women look the other way or simply do not see the older man. 

Henrik was not only finished as lover but as an Ubermensch.  He felt deflated, flaccid, and empty.  How could this be? he wondered.  He hadn't changed from the superman he had been with Annette to now, and yet he felt supernumerary, unneeded.  Early detritus, a bit of unnecessary clutter. 

'Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all', was the old adage, totally inappropriate for the likes of Henrik Baylor for whom the end of a young-old affair meant a life of quiet desperation and nothing more.  The love he had with Annette became his benchmark, his touchstone, and everything was measured against it - it became an obsession, a reminder of mortality; and he couldn't shake it. 

He never got over it but accommodated nevertheless.  He retired early - what was the point of working? - and lived a comfortable life in South Florida.  Gradually thoughts of his grandchildren edged out Annette, but only for brief moments. 

The Inevitability Of War - That's Mine! Say Children, Countries, Everybody, So Man Up

Mary Longstreet sat in the park with two of her neighborhood friends, watching over their young children playing in the sand. One, Rosa Perkins' little boy, was pushing a toy dump truck towards the hole he had dug, and was about to fill it with a load of sand when Mary's boy grabbed it, shouted, 'Mine! and started digging his own highway.  The Perkins' boy looked at his truck, now at the other end of the sandbox, turned to his mother and howled. 

Mary jumped up, held her boy by the shoulders and said, 'Toys are for sharing, Jason'. 

The boy, standing defiant with long strands of snot dangling from his nose and a face turned a splotchy red, said, 'But truck mine!; and so it was that the great, true, forever drama of territorial ownership was played out in the playground of Turtle Park. 

Both mothers had done their best to train their children to share - not only as a way to avoid playtime issues but because the future of the world depended on it.  They were committed, longstanding progressives, who were dedicated to compromise, consideration, negotiation, and the settlement of disputes through generous understanding. Theirs was a responsibility not only to raise kind, compassionate children, but to add their bit to world peace. 

The little Longstreet boy, despite his mother's words which, although delivered kindly without a trace of anger and only with a pleading resort to reason and understanding or because of their Christmassy, smiling delivery fell on deaf ears.  When his mother had returned to her bench, apologizing profusely to the mother of the victim, Jason looked up from his digging, eyed a toy bulldozer, and headed towards it. 

It was an endless battle to keep harmony at home.  Her son and daughter fought over the size of food portions, who was served first, and who was more favored.  Her older daughter was smarter because she was older, but her younger son Jason was stronger because he was a boy and they fought to parity.  She tricked him, fooled him, lied to him, and calmed him with false promises.  He bullied her, emptied her drawers and threw all her neatly folded clothes on the floor, while she tried to hit him in the face. 

He stopped emptying and throwing, pushed his sister with a hard shove onto the floor, which sent her screaming downstairs to her mother. 

At no time in the history of human settlements has it been any different.  Cultural differences may mitigate this territorial imperative, this claiming of 'mine!', this angling for dominance and favor, but they never amount to a hill of beans. 

Nowhere on the social phylogenetic scale from playpen to family to school, society, region, and nation has this particular imperative ever changed.  Whether the assault of Jason Longstreet on the sand box dump truck of the little Perkins kid to the Nazi blitzkrieg, the hegemonic expansionism of the Soviet Union, Russia's attack on Ukraine, the United States' assault on Iran, the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, and a thousand other major and minor wars everywhere, the lesson is the same.  Human beings are all the same and always will be. 

Deep in the African rainforest and Amazonian jungle tribes have always been killing each other for hunting, grazing, and growing rights.  Mungo Park, English explorer of Africa in the late 18th century wrote in his journals about the continual tribal raids, cannibalism, slavery, and brutality. Neanderthals fought each other with the jawbones of wild animals.  The first Paleolithic human settlements were defensive redoubts. 

 

After their children had been put to bed, Mary Longstreet told her husband of the events in the park. 'What's a mother to do?' she said over a sink of soapy dishwater to her husband, in BBQ apron and dishcloth drying. 

Bob Longstreet worked for a small non-profit organization, Physicians for Social Progress which was dedicated to assuring a better, more verdant, peaceful, and harmonious world.  He was a good progressive who, despite millennia of history,  the perennial, assured, armed conflicts which had characterized every decade, and the aggressive territorialism happening at every level of society, believed that only if we tried harder, peace and harmony would be at hand. 

The spat on the playground was particularly hard for him to handle. He and his wife had done everything in their power to avoid this seemingly inevitable battle of wills between children.  They had read them only the most peace-affirming books, allowed them to watch only the most congenial, accommodating television programs, never used demeaning or abusive language, and avoided any discussion of war, violence or civil dissension.  Their home was to be an asylum from the harsh world outside and would be the moral and ethical center of their children's lives. 

To their chagrin their son was the cause of a fracas that was not supposed to happen.  Their boy was to be the one to offer the olive branch, to mediate, to share, and to compromise; and here he was the bully of Turtle Park. 

'We must redouble our efforts' Bob said to his wife, but how?  They had swept every nook and cranny of their family life clean of contention and dispute.  Bob and his wife shared the housework, shared the child care, never raised their voices, were always kind and considerate to each other, showed tolerance, consideration, and love at every turn; so there was little else to reform or reconfigure to make the child's environment more congenial. 

The next day Mary took the children back to the park and urged Jason to act like a gentleman, to share, and to be nice to other children; yet no sooner had the boy deployed his sack of toys, that he began to canvas the sandbox for likely prey, eyed a firetruck, and honed in.  He grabbed it, trotted over to an empty quarter of sand and started to play with it.  The victim, startled at the pillage, watched his firetruck disappear, looked around for his mother, and started to wail. 

Mary Longstreet who had seen only the end of the affair but put two and two together - the bawling boy and her hyperactive son with a firetruck not his own - and realized that the unthinkable had happened again. 

She jumped up, left her knitting, excused herself, and ran over to Jason who was using the truck as a battering ram for the line of cars he had assembled in convoy.  Once again, she hugged her son, squatted down and explained to him proper behavior, and asked him to return the truck to its rightful owner. 

'No', shouted Jason. 'Mine!', and at that moment the whole house of cards came tumbling down.  It was not just that her son had behaved unconscionably, but it suggested something far worse.  If she and her husband, the best intentioned of all parents could have produced a child with this level of antisocial hostility, what did that mean for society higher up the phylogenetic scale?

There is nothing new in this scenario. Progressive families everywhere are dutifully trying to reshape the native impulses of their children, deny their hardwired human nature, and make them into Utopian models of kindness and virtue. 

To no avail, of course.  Such idealism and willful denial of reality only produces offspring ill-equipped to make their way in a world exactly the opposite to what they have been told.  It is the Jasons of the world - the refusers, the square pegs - who are the fittest. 

Bob Longstreet moped to work the next day - one in which bombs were blowing up Tehran, Tel Aviv, Doha, Bahrein, and Kiev; where Tuareg militants were raiding Malian military outposts in Mopti and Timbuktu, ISIS was consolidating hegemony in the Sahara with Genghis Khan savagery, and the Chinese were moving to eliminate Uighur nationalism once and for all. 

'Give peace a chance' was the motto inscribed over the door of Bob's office, John Lennon's honeymoon ode written with Yoko Ono, but was ironically reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain's naive overtures to Adolf Hitler, 'a man who would give peace a chance if given the opportunity'.  

Winston Churchill, leader, politician, historian knew better - not only about the imminent threat of Germany but the Soviet Union.  Force must be met with force, he said, the Battle of Britain was engaged and won, warnings and alerts about Communist hegemony were posted, and the post-war era began. 

Bob shook off his doubts, shuffled the papers on his desk, buzzed for his aide de camp and began the meeting on stopping Donald Trump's adventurism. 

What Bob and his colleagues missed was the formation of the new Machiavellian triumvirate of Russia, China, and the United States - adversaries on the surface, but likeminded nationalist powers.  Finally the United States had jettisoned its moral exceptionalism, its conditional war strategy and its hearts and minds philosophy and gotten real.  The world order was finally and once again solidly based on the principle of countervailing power. 

 

Bob tried his best to gin up enthusiasm for his campaign to dethrone the King Of Pennsylvania Avenue, but he knew he was facing strong headwinds.  The world was changing, the European and American dalliance with socialism was over, and a hardline nationalism was resurgent.  That, and his own son was becoming a mini-Trump. 

'What's the world coming to?',  he lamented, but retreated perhaps for the last time into his congenial, warm and accommodating world - until he opened his son's pre-school report card.  'Jason needs to work on his interpersonal skills...', gobbledygook for disruptive behavior and deeply anti-social tendencies but clear enough. 

All the smarmy, feelgood, considerateness and forced social niceties were to be left on the curb, a new leaf was to be turned over, some rigor, discipline, and proper intimidation were to replace the Neville Chamberlain hopefulness; and before he knew it the new child-rearing paradigm made sense for Physicians for Social Progress; but since the institution was now long set in its vaporous ways, it was time for him to move on. 

Now a pariah - dunned from the PTA, the park, his own living room, and the professional community of which he had for so long been a part, and a Trump admirer - Bob Longstreet's days were numbered; but right will always out, he found a place in the new Washington, Jason met his match in the sandbox.