When President Trump chose Alaska for Friday’s summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to discuss the war in Ukraine, his supporters suggested that the location offered a nod to savvy deal making. The United States had purchased the territory from Russia in 1867 for about 2 cents an acre.
But with Ukraine being excluded — as was the case for Indigenous Alaskans when their land was transferred — the summit has already revived discussion of what some scholars say Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump seem in some ways to share: an imperial mind-set.
The term was first popularized by Gerard Libaridian, an Armenian-American historian, who used it in a 2014 speech in England to refer to former empires like Iran, Turkey and Russia, as they sought to influence post-Soviet states they had once controlled. In his view, it describes an approach that lingers in many a national psyche, fusing a simplistic nostalgia for greatness to strong beliefs about the right to keep dominating smaller nations and neighbors.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the idea has gained momentum, usually in reference to Putin’s Russia. And Mr. Trump’s assertive second term — with his threats to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal, make Canada the 51st state and send American troops into Mexico — has spurred new accusations from historians and world leaders that his demands for deference reflect an imperial mentality.
Mr. Trump has hardly been consistent. He has often condemned foreign intervention and “stupid wars,” while bombing Iran and expressing ambivalence about U.S. alliances and the defense of vulnerable democracies like Taiwan.
Still, there’s perhaps something imperial — or at least a version of great power behavior with some additional traits — in his talk of “land swaps” to bring peace in Ukraine over the country’s own objections.
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The post How the Trump-Putin Summit Signals a Return to Imperial Thinking appeared first on New York Times.
