Manifest Destiny Returns
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This dream is all amiss interpreted.
It was a vision fair and fortunate.
Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,
In which so many smiling Romans bath’d,
Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck
Reviving blood, and that great men shall press
For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance.
This by Calphurnia’s dream is signified.
-Julius Caesar, II, ii, 83-90
The first founding murder in living political memory is complete. Brutus mustered up the willpower to rise up and kill Caesar (November 3, 2020); whom the crowd cast as a monster (November 6, 2020). “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife”, as then covered Italy in the battle of Philippi (and now reached its climax in 2021-2023), was suddenly resolved in the suicide of Brutus: the concluding half of Caesar’s murder (July 13, 2024), and the founding of the Roman Empire.
It’s so over; we’re so back.
So, now what? Where does the American story go from here?
American exceptionalism, once upon a time
You have to give him credit here. In the cacophony of the first few weeks of a presidency, when campaign themes get absorbed by the demands of governance, it’s hard to keep your foot on the gas pedal of leadership: defining a goal of where we want to go. Trump had no trouble with this the second time around. “We’re going to buy Greenland.” And the Panama Canal; perhaps Canada? And now Gaza.
This is just a remarkable posture. Not because it’s good trolling, but because it reaches way back into the rootstock of American motivation. This idea - “Manifest Destiny” - feels like a theme uniting everything this administration wants to do both domestically and abroad. But it could also be something more audacious: restoring a very old synthesis that energizes and mobilizes the American angst of needing to have our cake and eat it too.
America was founded out of reactionary isolation and opposition to the European balance-of-power system, which drew its legitimacy from Richelieu’s “Raison d’État” principle. If you don’t remember your European history here, Cardinal Richelieu helped create modern Europe in a strategic master-stroke: bringing France (a Catholic monarchy) into the bloody stalemate of the 30 Years War, on the Protestants’ Side; because it was in the national interest for France. Richelieu established the idea that nations, unlike individuals, are judged by results rather than by actions: “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter. The state has no immortality; its salvation is now or never.” In contrast to individuals, who are moral beings judged by God for their actions, states don’t have souls. They have a practical obligation to act in their national interest, whatever actions or alliances might be called for in the moment.
The legitimacy of the “national interest” not only survived the French Revolution, it was perfected in the 19th century by European leaders like Metternich, Bismarck, Palmerston and Disraeli who explicitly ran Europe as a pragmatic “balance-of-power” system where alliances shifted all the time, but the overall effect was reasonably peaceful. America, meanwhile, hated this idea. America has always thought of herself in moral terms. We call it “American Exceptionalism”: the idea that American values are in fact universal ones, the American purpose in the world being to spread those values, and our actions subject to judgement on moral grounds.
At the same time, mostly as a privilege of geography, America was really committed to the idea of isolation. We made a big show of refusing to get dragged into in the affairs of Europe. And yet, it proved progressively harder to ignore the temptations that present themselves when you become a powerful country. Robert Tucker & David Hendrickson described the dilemma in their work on Thomas Jefferson: “The great dilemma of Jefferson’s statecraft lay in his apparent renunciation of the means on which states had always ultimately relied to ensure their security and to satisfy their ambitions, and his simultaneous unwillingness to renounce the ambitions that normally led to the use of those means. He wished, in other words, that America could have it both ways - that it could enjoy the fruits of power without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise.” In other words, the American energy source in the late 19th and early 20th century, when its growth was most accelerant, was the drive and the unsettled energy of needing to have our cake and eat it too in the international arena. We wanted to throw our weight around and get things, but we didn’t want to compromise our self-image of being morally above European grubbiness.
All of that manic energy found an outlet: the concept of Manifest Destiny, and the related Monroe Doctrine, which resolved that American angst in an audacious way: “everything in the Americas (and anything else we feel like) is ours if we please, and therefore, a domestic matter.” American Exceptionalism remained untainted by Raison d’État. Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy paints a remarkable picture of this magic trick, and it resonates just a little too well with what’s unfolding now:
“[19th century] America was at one and the same time turning its back on Europe, and freeing its hands to expand in the Western Hemisphere. Under the umbrella of the Monroe Doctrine, America could pursue policies which were not all that different from the dreams of any European king - expanding its commerce and influence, annexing territory - in short, turning itself into a Great Power without being required to practice power politics. America’s desire for expansion and its belief that it was a more pure and principled country than any in Europe never clashed. Since it did not regard its expansion as foreign policy, the United States could use its power to prevail - over the Indians, over Mexico, in Texas - and to do so in good conscience.”
Of course, we’ve had a whole twentieth century since, where we did in fact assume responsibility for some consequences. Woodrow Wilson recast American Exceptionalism into a higher gear, where “American Values Apply Globally” brought us into two World Wars, sustained the struggle of the Cold War, following which America suffered from crippling anxiety of overthinking everything from the 90s onward. It took a populist revolt president who exudes the idea of selfish success to even suggest self-interest as a valid national theme, but even Trump’s first term wasn’t all that trajectory-changing in the grand scheme of things.
This time is different though. Any kind of organized opposition is in absolute shambles; the real test of Trump and the Republican Party is to what degree they can get themselves aligned. We have a president who absolutely does want to practice power politics, and a national vibe shift explicitly evoking an older time, where throwing power around in bombastic national interest in no way conflicted with the American psyche. “If Canada wants to avoid tariffs, it should simply become the 51st state!” is interpreted as more like the incantation of a magician than as serious diplomacy. But in invokes something important: an earlier, more confident version of America that wasn’t afraid of its own shadow, and that justified its international actions as domestic expressions of self-sovereignty.
The Mar-a-Lago accord
The hardest thing for Trump here is creating the conditions by which he can twist arms internationally, and be “the dealmaker president”, without compromising on the meaning of American power as something greater than Raison d’État. What happens to the American Dollar is the crux of the challenge.
More or less everyone agrees on the premise: the 20th century is over; it isn’t a unipolar American-policed world anymore, and we have to figure out what’s next for the dollar at a time when America has backed itself into a tight fiscal corner. The question is, of course, “What other moves are there?” Scott Bessent has stated “There will be a new Bretton woods”, both before and after starting the job, which suggest he feels pressure to try and solve multiple problems at once.
A recurring theme in Bessent’s interviews is how much he cherishes imagination. I personally appreciate the degree to which he always repeating a message: “The possibility space is so much bigger than you can imagine.” It’s not inconsistent with my assumptions about macro traders, which is that they style themselves as guys who twice a decade hit the biggest swinging dick trade of the year, and then just constantly lose money the rest of the time. Still, just like reading Freud or Graeber, the observations can be really valuable even if the conclusions fall over.
Meanwhile, I get the sense that the “Trade Wars are Class Wars” thesis - which goes, “The exorbitant privilege of the US Dollar is also a burden. It forces America to absorb the world’s excess savings, which is why we have asset bubbles and unfixable trade imbalances” - is taken at least somewhat seriously over there. (Apparently JD Vance likes the book, I can’t remember the source.) At a 30,000 foot level, it’s hard to argue that: 1) the United States exports dollars, in exchange for stuff; 2) this has benefited American consumers and investors at the expense of American manufacturers and certain classes of workers; and 3) this is because the world saves in dollars. The notion that the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar is playing out in a less-than-ideal way for America right now is probably right.
But there is no way - absolutely no way - that Trump will accept “de-dollarization” in any form. The understands, correctly, that the “exorbitant privilege” is a privilege, and he’s not going to throw it away. The right question to ask is this: “Today, we advantageously export bonds and import cheap consumer goods. Is there another way we could reap the privilege of the US Dollar?”
Which all brings us to what’s going on with tariffs. I’m not super smart in this department but I am guessing that Bessent and Lutnick’s goal goes quite a ways beyond “we’re gonna use tariffs to protect American manufacturers”; it’s probably more like, “We’re gonna use tariffs as leverage to change how we enjoy the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar; specifically, in a way that gives American companies not only protection, but a genuine competitive advantage in making things over the rest of the world.”
Specifically, could we shift the balance towards something that looks like: “We advantageously export bonds in exchange for importing cheaper inputs?” Oil, metals, commodities, all the stuff that really matters in a balance-of-power world: that’s what Trump really wants; and it’s what he’s going to get. If we could start sucking those things into the country at a massive rate, not only do we flood American business with a cheaper floor on input costs (yes, to the dismay of American resource producers - but Trump has shown little patience for this. He’s not a Texas Oil Man!), we also start accumulating the kind of stuff that could actually back Dollars should a Mar-a-Lago agreement get hammered out. The perception of movement in that direction might be reflexively interesting enough to give them leverage beyond “we’re gonna buy base metals on the global market and stockpile them in order to eventually back the US dollar with them”; that would take a million years and convince nobody, not to mention that we can’t afford it unless Elon fixes the entire deficit and then some. Some real financial alchemy will be required for a new Mar-a-Lago agreement, but this feels directionally promising to me. Bessent understands reflexivity well, and I’ll bet you the goal is approximately right.
“This is about border security”
Everyone expected some sort of tariff announcement by the incoming Trump presidency, but I don’t know how many people foresaw Canada and Mexico - who Trump only recently praised as partners in his North American economic engine - on the receiving end of a 25% slap in the head. The supposed reason given - “border security” - drew howls of are-you-kidding-me exasperation, made worse by the seeming pointlessness of the tariffs themselves.
While the execution of that messaging was certainly clumsy, I believe it accomplishes something very important. Getting Canada and Mexico to do a song-and-dance about border guards in order to postpone tariffs and negotiate concedes the most valuable point in the negotiation right off the bat - that this is somehow an American domestic issue, and will be framed as such.
If they can get tariff negotiations framed as an extension of American domestic authority - first with neighbours but shortly after with Europe and beyond - what this accomplishes is that America gets to negotiate to its trade advantage while maintaining a strange but effective moral clarity in its messaging at home. And, make no mistake here, the primary audience for that message isn’t the people we’re negotiating directly against; it’s Americans and sympathetic allies who actually want to see forward progress on the Trump themes. The overall effect, which is already happening, is that Americans are getting more comfortable with talking about what they want, which is kind of a remarkable achievement to change the vibe of a country so quickly and definitively.
Kissinger remarks later on in Diplomacy: “American foreign policy is rarely approached from the point of view of an overall concept. Ad hoc departmental approaches have more - and more passionate - spokesmen than does an overall strategy, which often has no spokesman at all. It takes an unusually strong and determined president, skilled in the ways of Washington, to break this pattern.” The best chapters in Diplomacy are the ones where Kissinger talks about Nixon and Reagan, contrasting their styles and the different ways in which they effectively led America to think of itself in new ways. Somewhere in the overlap between his open admiration for Nixon (who Kissinger found supernaturally good at diplomatic dealmaking) and his frustration with Reagan (who he thought had an eighth grade reading comprehension at best, yet grudgingly admitted was a seriously great communicator) lies an excellent description of what makes Trump’s leadership style work.
Trump certainly has an overall concept. Someone once gave me a definition of leadership: “Getting a group of people to act along the same vector of force without needing to explicitly tell each person their role.” I think what we’re seeing now with this opening foray of tariffs on America’s allies is best understood as a posture designed to get Team America all pointed in the same direction. Analyzing it from the point of view of the table stakes in question will only take you around in frustrating circles. “The reaction is the content”, the old rule goes. I see no signs this time is any different.
If you’ve made it this far: thanks for reading! I’m back writing here for a limited time, while on parental leave from Shopify. For email updates you can subscribe here on Substack, or find an archived copy on alexdanco.com.