U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s “America First” model?
On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Grandin, a professor at Yale University and the author of books such as America, América: A New History of the New World. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: We’re all familiar with MAGA, or Make America Great Again. The strange thing is it has begun to evoke making America not just great, but greater in size.
Greg Grandin: This came out of nowhere during Trump’s second inaugural address, when he talked about Canada, Greenland, and possibly taking over the Panama Canal Zone. Like many things with Trump, it’s hard to figure out. It seems like he rummages through the trash bin of U.S. history and pulls out whatever suits him.
I don’t think he’s an expansionist president in the way that I would use the term, but he is in many ways the first “batten down the hatches” president. During his first term, he substituted the myth of the frontier for a new symbol: the border and the wall that became the articulating center of his many constituencies. He invokes “America First,” despite occasionally talking about taking over Greenland or annexing Canada as the 51st state. All those things seem to have fallen by the wayside, although we did get the symbolic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
RA: Well, let’s talk about that trash bin of history. James Madison wrote in 1787 about “extending the sphere.” There is a long history of the American frontier as being something that one can and should expand.
GG: American exceptionalism means a lot of things to different people, but I don’t think any other self-proclaimed nation had the promise of expansion built into its very fundamentals—the founders believed that the United States was going to reach the Pacific.
When we talk about the frontier, we’re talking about the land frontier, [Native American] removal, and wars against Mexico to get to the Pacific. But we’re also just talking about the ideal of limitlessness and the use of limitlessness to organize domestic politics. The ideal of a frontier is infinitely useful because it can be projected into infinity.
RA: You’ve written that when nationalism is inward-looking, it can be destructive. So, the possibility of looking outside allows you to not self-destruct, as it were, and instead to keep expanding both the frontiers and the myth that things are OK internally.
GG: Both the reality and the ideal of expansion do a lot of work. The land frontier was an enormous bank of wealth for the new nation in terms of land, minerals, and plant cultivation. But the promise of limitlessness was a way of venting social discontent. Other nations had to deal with labor parties organizing, but the United States never had a Labor Party, so it could constantly use the promise of limitlessness in order to reconcile internal contradictions. All of the violence and brutality associated with Western expansion could be kept on the margins, and the United States could imagine itself in the 20th century, emerging as a bastion of liberalism and internationalism, as long as the frontier was maintained.
That’s why Trump is a turning point. Even though he denies climate change, he’s the first climate change politician, because he comes at a moment when limitlessness is no longer possible. The Iraq War, the financial crisis of 2008, and the reality of climate change have made that promise of limitlessness untenable. So, Trump is the scarcity president.
RA: I take your point about geography here. But there are other new frontiers: economic conquests, technological conquests, and the race for critical minerals.
GG: But notice that for the Trump administration, the vision isn’t a liberal international order superintended by the United States. There’s a sense that the global order has fractured into competing superpowers, and it’s a scramble for resources and advantage. Under the old liberal order—what people liked to call the rules-based order—there was a sense that all boats could and would rise. Everybody could sit at the table if they just followed certain rules.
Trump is the president who says that not everybody can sit at the table. Not all boats will rise. It’s a competition. And the world order should be organized around competition and strategic advancement.
RA: I was struck by your description in your last book of how, more than a century ago, Latin American diplomats tried to push Washington to accept a vision of cooperative international law. America came reluctantly to the rules-based order.
GG: The United States came into the world as a lone nation on what the founders imagined to be an empty-enough continent. There was no doubt the United States was going to reach the Pacific. The United States’ theory of sovereignty was conquest; [Native American] removal pushing west. They used the doctrine of conquest to justify taking half of Mexico.
Latin America came into the world already as a league of nations: seven independent republics and Brazil, which had an independent monarchy. Eight polities had to learn to live with each other. What would have happened if Argentina abided by the same conquering logic as the United States? It would’ve led to endless wars. So Latin America’s leaders came up with a set of legal principles that insisted that the world should be ordered around cooperation, that aggressive wars should be outlawed, that the doctrines of conquest and discovery were null and void, and that we should accept the borders as they came to us. That’s the opposite of the United States, where a border wasn’t something to stop at, but something to cross over. All of the ideals that were debated in the 1830s and 1840s in Latin America were eventually put into place in San Francisco in 1945, with the founding of the United Nations.
RA: I am struck by the discipline you have in saying the United States, whereas I instantly started using the shorthand “America” to speak for the United States of America. Talk about that nomenclature.
GG: America referred to all of the Americas, and Spanish Americans thought of themselves as Americans. But this became weaponized during Texas secession and the war of Mexico, when Mexicans and Americans became a very racialized division. And after the term “Latin America” was adopted, Spanish Americans began to identify themselves as Latin Americans: more spiritual, humanist, and universal, beholding to a truer set of American ideals, whereas Saxon America was understood as instrumental, grubbing, expansionist, and enslaving—the tension of two Americas.
It wasn’t just an elite conceit. Los Tigres del Norte, a Mexican norteño band, has a great song titled “Somos Más Americanos”: We are more American because we’re more humanist, more earthy, because we work the land. So that division has a lot of cultural weight in Latin America.
RA: To bring us back to the current day, given “America First” and what Trump has invoked with the Monroe Doctrine, how do you think about the revival of spheres of influence?
GG: Early Spanish American critique was not just of the United States’ revival of the doctrine of conquest; they also critiqued Europe’s post-Napoleonic balance of power. They insisted that any world order that didn’t recognize the interdependence of humanity was bound to lead to wars. They were very critical of any kind of international order that didn’t value more transcendent ideals of humanity and cooperation.
But we seem to be back in the era of gunboat diplomacy, hurtled back to the 19th century, when the United States was sending ships to Nicaragua to destroy Greytown in the 1850s. It’s a very dangerous moment. Trump’s bombing of boats in the Caribbean speaks to corruption and his need for dominance, but it also speaks to his bid to organize the Americas in this vision of a fractured world order of polycentric hegemons. This has happened in the past—after the 1970s, [U.S. President Ronald] Reagan basically got Latin America to heel under the doctrine of anti-communism. But he also articulated local interests in that vision at the end of the Cold War.
Trumpism undermines itself. There’s certainly a social base in Latin America for Trumpism; Ecuador has seen complaints about wokeism and has a lot of anti-trans activism, and there’s a cult of the Second Amendment in Brazil. So, there are a lot of Trumpy actors in Latin America.
RA: Argentina has been in the news because [President] Javier Milei is a chainsaw-wielding libertarian. He wants to slash the bureaucracy, and he’s very anti-woke, as well. I was struck by how Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, extended a $20 billion credit line.
GG: They’re looking to double it. They’re looking for 40 billion. Ultimately, the peso must really be in trouble. There are overlaps here. One is just pure corruption. The New York Times ran that article about how Bessent is very close with Discovery Capital. And they placed big bets on buying Argentine bonds. So this money is cycled back into U.S. banks as bond payments.
RA: A throughline in this conversation is the effort to situate Trump’s policies, especially toward Latin America, in history. What does race have to do with Trump’s thinking around what to do with Latin America?
GG: “America First” has always had a strong racial component. It is tied to an idea that the United States was a white, Anglo Saxon nation. It is also tied to a very conservative immigration law that was passed in the 1920s, which privileged northern European migration into the United States and put a limit on Southern Catholic and Asian migration.
The United States has never been truly isolationist. But isolationists were worried that a mission to form an international law would open the door to desegregation, social rights, and economic justice. They didn’t want to sign the Treaty of Japan or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because they were anti-racist documents.
So, there was always a sense that these reform movements that tried to liberalize society and socialize the economy came from the outside, and that isolationists had to hold the line. That is what’s often called “America First,” and why what’s called isolationism is ultimately profoundly racist and classist. It’s a way of maintaining the social hierarchy. Trump represents that, and he’s articulating it in a more open way than any president has done in a long time.
RA: Some of this conversation can sound like bashing the United States. For all the critiques of some of U.S. foreign policy, some might argue that all great powers, at some point in time, have been this way. If everything is about realpolitik, then why are we holding the United States to a higher standard?
GG: Opposition to power makes power more humane. Latin America’s critique of the United States forced the United States to socialize itself on an international level, laying the groundwork for what later became our allyship with the United States against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. It’s in that pushback that you create a more humane world, even if we understand that the hegemon is still acting out of its own interests.
Even after the United States accepted Latin America’s demand to give up the right to intervention, it intervened in Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and the Dominican Republic in 1965. They might have used code words, under the cover of multinationalism with the sanction of the Organization of American States, but that might not matter ultimately. If you push back on power, then you ensure power is aware of its limits.
RA: As the United States takes such a different approach under Trump’s second term—whether it’s expansionist rhetoric, withdrawing U.S. aid, or climate change values—how will the world reorganize around, or without, the old United States? Does history have lessons for us?
GG: Yes, and they’re not good. In the past, there’s a sense of this realpolitik balance of power always leading to catastrophic wars. The legitimation of competition and conquest that Trump represents opens the barn door to a lot of bad actors. Whether Europe opposes the United States or whether it concedes and subordinates itself to the United States, I don’t see anything good coming out of the current moment, unfortunately. It’s disastrous.
What’s the end game with China? China is presiding over, as Adam Tooze puts it, this enormous social experiment and economic modernization. It’s unprecedented and almost renders Europe as a footnote in the history of economic development compared to what China has done over the last couple of decades. I don’t imagine how the United States could put a stop to that, and it can’t lead to anything but more conflict and more wars. In general, war isn’t seen as something to end, but something to get strategic advantage within a new, reconfigured sphere of influence.
RA: But specifically with Latin America, one could make the case that a leader like Lula in Brazil has taken a different tack from what any other leaders have done this year, by taking a principled stance and standing up to Trump. Separately, Brazil has also taken a leadership role in the climate movement, in trying to create avenues of leadership within the global South as an alternative to the United States. Do these movements have traction?
GG: Absolutely. Lula has traction—he’s been elected three times against enormous setbacks, including the lawfare campaign that imprisoned him. The left in Latin America sense that democracy means social democracy. Climate change is the perfect example of the ideal that comes out of Latin American nationalism: that the world should be organized around cooperation, not competition.
There’s a lot of inspiration in Latin America, but it’s fragile. People are tired of crime and violence, and you see that in the popularity of somebody like Bukele in El Salvador or the recent elections in Ecuador. In the 2000s, the left in Latin America strode the stage with confidence and rhetorical hegemony, whether it be Chavez in Venezuela, Kirshner in Argentina, or Lula in Brazil. Now, it’s true that some are standing up, not just in Brazil, but Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.
It’s a reaction to the deprivations of economic globalizationism to turn to the toxic, resentful nationalism that you see in the United States, Turkey, the Philippines, and other places. What’s inspirational about Latin America is that the critique of globalization is never about the globalist.
Spanish America was founded as a community of nations, having to learn to live with each other in order to survive. They came up with this new way of thinking about the global order in which nationalism was not seen in opposition to internationalism, but as fundamental to a humane, universal internationalism. And it still holds, in Lula’s vision and in Gustavo Petro’s vision. Now it relies on El Salvador and Ecuador.
RA: What would it take for the Latin American concepts you describe to grow beyond the Americas to the global South, to create a new world order in a moment where the existing one feels like it’s fraying?
GG: It takes a threat—like Trumpism—in which groups of nations see their interests as more aligned laterally rather than in relationship to the United States. Unfortunately, the BRICs, from Modi in India to Putin in Russia, are hardly inspirations themselves. Lula is Lula—that speaks to the humanist exception of Latin America. Lula still takes the promise of radical enlightenment at its word. You can’t say the same for other nations. But in reaction to an aggressive, dominating United States that is becoming unhinged internally, I imagine that’s forcing new connections.
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