On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump shocked the world with a proposal that was, even by his standards, totally out of the blue: that all Palestinians should be removed from Gaza so that the US could take it over as a territory.
What’s behind Trump’s colonial dreams?
What Trump wants in Gaza and elsewhere is recolonization.
Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.
There was instant debate about whether Americans should take Trump at his word, and on Wednesday, many in his orbit tried to soften his proclamation, but the fact remains that Trump suggested — again — that the US unilaterally take over a foreign territory without any regard to what the people currently living there think.
First, it was Greenland that Trump said the US should seize. Then the Panama Canal, Canada, and now Gaza — Trump’s territorial wish list seems to be growing by the day.
Many observers have seen this as a call back to American imperialism, part of a growing disregard for borders seen everywhere from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to China’s menacing of Taiwan.
But I think a better way to think of it is as a negation of one of the great forces of geopolitics in the latter half of the 20th century: decolonization, the fundamental idea that peoples everywhere should have the right to self-determination and self-government.
The push for decolonization has been mostly very successful: When the United Nations was established in 1945, it had 51 member nations, many of whom governed vast colonial areas in Africa and Asia.
Today the UN has 193 member states — the latest being South Sudan, which joined in 2011 — as well as a number of other territories that aren’t full members (including, notably, the State of Palestine). In many ways the story of the last 70 years is the story of decolonization, as independence movements across the world fought for liberty and self-determination, and colonial nations withdrew — sometimes voluntarily, and sometimes with a great deal of blood.
Trump is calling for that progress not just to be rejected, but to be thrown in reverse. Call it a kind of recolonization — if not literally, then in spirit.
What makes the push for recolonization so striking is that, with some large exceptions and with a great deal of foot-dragging, major powers ultimately recognized that colonialism was fundamentally wrong. The original UN Charter states that relations between nations are meant to be based in part on the “self-determination of peoples,” and by 1960 the UN was declaring that colonialism was “a denial of fundamental human rights.”
What Trump is proposing in Gaza and elsewhere is a return to geopolitics run by the law of the jungle. That, after all, is what colonialism is in its most fundamental form. Your fate is decided not by you, but by some ruler in a foreign capital, simply because they are stronger, and there is nothing you can do about it.
It’s notable that two of the territories Trump has fixated on, Greenland and Gaza, are in some ways two of the last remaining holdovers of the colonial age. That’s not to say they’re the same: Greenland is an autonomous territory with meaningful self-rule, albeit ultimately under Danish sovereignty, while the status of Gaza is, to say the least, highly contested. (Hamas still largely controls internal governance; Israel maintains external control, while the UN and many human rights groups view it as occupied territory.) But both are home to a recognized people with a long claim to the land. And both are considered in some circles to be examples of the unfinished business of decolonization.
It’s become a cliché to argue that Trump views geopolitics through the lens of the real estate developer he once was; in his remarks on Tuesday, he mused on Gaza becoming the “riviera of the Middle East.” And just as a real estate developer tends to care little for the wishes of those affected by their projects — they can just move somewhere else! — nor does Trump seem to care about what Greenlanders or Palestinians in Gaza want.
But we should call this what it is — not empire with all its grand ambitions, but “recolonization.” That gets at the grubby truth of the matter, the way the dirty reality of colonialism taints everything it touches.
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