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manifest destiny
'WTF?' World Reacts to Trump's Vow of US Expansionism
One former Swedish prime minister called the Republican president's pledge to grow U.S. territory "a recipe for global instability."
Jan 20, 2025
While the global far-right cheered President Donald Trump's return to the White House on Monday, world leaders, elected officials, activists, and others from across the rest of the political spectrum reacted with trepidation as the Republican vowed to expand the nation's territory for the first time in nearly 80 years and threatened the sovereignty of a U.S. trade and security partner.
In his second inaugural address, Trump promised a foreign policy that "expands our territory," as well as the renewed pursuit of "Manifest Destiny"—the 19th-century belief that God intended the United States to control the continent from coast to coast—beyond Earth by "launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars."
"That's a dangerous statement in itself, but then others around the world might also be inspired to do the same."
In the United States, Monday's inauguration coincided with the federal holiday honoring the assassinated civil rights champion Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Trump mentioned in his speech. Some observers noted the incongruity of Trump's message with King's anti-war ethos.
"How dare Donald Trump invoke Dr. King," pan-African studies professor and Black Lives Matter Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah fumed on social media. "Trump IS the embodiment of the three evils that MLK warned of: racism, materialism, and militarism."
Indigenous voices reminded listeners that belief in Manifest Destiny fueled genocidal violence against Native Americans.
"Trump is really going after Native Americans with references to Manifest Destiny, the frontier, Wild West, and erasing Denali's name," attorney Brett Chapman, a direct descendant of the Ponca Cshief White Eagle, said on social media. "This anti-Indigenous inaugural address sounds like one from the 1800s when presidents deployed the U.S. military on Native Americans seeking rights."
In his speech, Trump falsely accused China of "running the Panama Canal," said that Panama—which was last invaded by American forces in 1989—is overcharging U.S. ships to use the crucial waterway, and warned that "we're taking it back."
As angry demonstrators rallied outside the U.S. Embassy in Panama City, right-wing Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino issued a statement refuting Trump's threats and accusations and declaring that "the canal is and will continue to be Panamanian."
Trump's threat follows his refusal earlier this month to rule out the use of military force in order to conquer the Panama Canal or Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark.
South American progressives were left stunned by parts of Trump's address.
"In his inauguration speech, Donald Trump made it clear that reality surpasses fiction," Carol Dartora, a leftist lawmaker in the lower chamber of Brazil's National Congress, said in a video posted online. "Then the U.S. president exuded machismo, imperialism, and xenophobia, especially against immigrants."
Across the Atlantic, former center-right Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said: "Now we know that President Trump wants to 'expand our territory.' That's a dangerous statement in itself, but then others around the world might also be inspired to do the same. It's a recipe for global instability."
German author, filmmaker, and journalist Annette Dittert
responded to Trump's expansionist pledge with a popular three-letter internet acronym: "'We will become a nation that expands our territory?' WTF?"
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Rebrand 'Mass Shootings' as 'Second Amendment Celebrations'
When people hear the term, they will know that somewhere a true patriot is expressing his God-given Constitutional right.
May 13, 2023
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really bummed out by all of these mass shootings. One after another, day after day, more than one a day since the beginning of the year. Something has to change. This is America after all. The United States has a long history of dealing with challenging problems.
So, what’s the solution? Simple, rebranding.
America has a long history of rebranding, of changing the terms we use when dealing with unpleasant issues.
When slaughtering Indigenous people and stealing their land started to sound bad, we rebranded. We called it “Manifest Destiny” and said it was about spreading freedom from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This made it sound noble.
Clearly, we Americans have a long history of successfully rebranding difficult issues. Or more accurately, I should say that conservatives have a long and successful history of rebranding troubling issues.
When enslaving and dehumanizing the people stolen from Africa started to get bad press, slave owners knew they had to do something. So they rebranded. They began calling it “The Peculiar Institution.” Peculiar, sort of like your weird Uncle Phil, with his handlebar mustache and old MG, who affects a British accent. Although, as peculiar as old Phil was, he never whipped anyone to death or bred them like cattle.
After the South lost the Civil War, Southerners knew they needed to change the terms of the debate. They knew that if everyone thought they had simply been fighting to maintain slavery they would lose sympathy. They knew they had to do something to preserve any vestige of their traditions (you know, white supremacy). So they rebranded. They starting to refer to the war as “The Lost Cause.” This just sounds mundane, non-offensive. It made it sound not much different than the loss of a hard-fought, though honorable, soccer match. Simply a “Lost Cause,” never mind the fact that they were seeking to preserve the enslavement and systematic brutalization of millions of human beings, or the fact that Confederate soldiers routinely and summarily executed Black Union soldiers on the spot. Reality often is bad, and so sounds bad. Much better to hide behind banality, behind “The Lost Cause.”
When systemic and frequently violent racism in the 1950s started to get bad press, Southerners wisely rebranded it from white supremacy to “States’ Rights.” This sounds so much more noble, and hearkens back to the nation’s founding. Who could argue with a state simply seeking to preserve its own rights?
Perhaps the most recent example of rebranding involves “Parental Rights.” This is how conservatives now sell book bans and restrictions on medical care for transgender youth. After all, what kind of monster doesn’t support the right of a parent to protect and safeguard their own child? “We’re not banning books,” they say, “we’re not discriminating against gay or transgender children,” conservatives add, “we’re simply protecting the rights of parents to safeguard their children.” That just sounds so much better, doesn’t it?
Clearly, we Americans have a long history of successfully rebranding difficult issues. Or more accurately, I should say that conservatives have a long and successful history of rebranding troubling issues.
Now there are nearly daily news reports about mass shootings. And in nearly every news story there is also someone, a liberal politician or a grieving family member, demanding a solution. More often than not they call for restrictions on access to guns.
“Mass Shooting” has such a negative connotation, particularly when paired with “Mass Casualties.” The term is scary, and frankly it almost seems as if the biased liberal media has coined the term to embarrass gun rights advocates, and to make them look callous and uncaring. This must change.
I’ve batted the idea around in my mind for a while now, trying to come up with something more palatable or benign. And I think I’ve finally got it. Here’s my proposal.
Let’s changed “Mass Shooting” to “Second Amendment Celebration.” That shifts the tone from scary to laudatory, and when people hear about it (for example on Twitter at the hashtag “Active Shooter”) it will put a smile on their faces. They will know that somewhere a true patriot is expressing his God-given Constitutional right. This will also change the unwilling victim (“victim” is another downer of a word) from a casualty to a patriot, since they are nobly sacrificing their lives to preserve one of the primary rights in our revered Constitution.
This way, at each mass shooting… sorry, old habits die hard… at each Second Amendment Celebration, Americans can be reminded of what the Second Amendment means to all of us.
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The Case Against Manifest Destiny
Jun 02, 2015
The disastrous consequences of the recent aggressions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine, to name just a few, show the urgent need to revive the principle of non-intervention into another state. This principle of international law includes, but is not limited to, the prohibition of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, according to Article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nations.
The Swiss legal philosopher Emmerich de Vattel is credited with being the first to formulate the principle of non-intervention in his Droit de gens ou principles de la loi naturelle (The Law of Nations) published in 1758. Essentially, the principle establishes the right of territorial sovereignty possessed by each nation. The scope of the principle, however, has been subject to debate.
For example, what constitutes intervention in practical terms? Does it include only the use or threat of military force, or it also includes economic sanctions, cyber warfare or other kinds of non-military intervention such as propaganda campaigns or control of media messages to other countries?
According to Michael Wood, a member of the UN International Law Commission, one of the earliest treaty formulations of the principle was included in the Article 15 (8) of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States of 1933, which precluded "interference with the freedom, the sovereignty or other internal affairs, or the processes of the Governments of other nations," together with the Additional Protocol on Non-Intervention of 1936.
Later on, the UN General Assembly issued a Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Domestic Affairs of States (UNGA resolution 2131 (XX) 1965). According to Oppenheim's International Law, the prohibition of intervention "is a corollary of every state's right to sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence."
A paradigmatic case in which this principle was applied was that of Nicaragua vs. United States, following the U.S. support for the "contras" fighting the Nicaraguan Government and the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The case was decided in 1986 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The ICJ ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States, and awarded reparations to the Nicaraguan Government. According to the ICJ, the actions of the U.S. against Nicaragua violated international law. The U.S. refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case.
In a move that did no honor to the country, the U.S. later blocked the enforcement of the judgment by the UN Security Council, thus preventing Nicaragua from obtaining any compensation. In 1992, under the government of Violeta Chamorro, the Nicaraguan government withdrew its complaint.
According to the Court's verdict, the U.S. was "in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State", "not to intervene in its affairs", "not to violate its sovereignty", "not to interrupt peaceful maritime commerce", and "in breach of its obligations under Article XIX of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the parties signed at Managua on 21 January 1956."
Furthermore, the ICJ determined that, "...the laying of mines in the waters of another State without any warning or notification is not only an unlawful act but also a breach of the principles of humanitarian law underlying the Hague Convention No. VIII of 1907."
The principle of non-intervention has obvious limits in case of grave violations of human rights. For this reason, a norm called Responsibility to Protect (R2P or RtoP) was developed. The origin of this norm was the international community's failure to respond to tragedies such as the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.
According to this norm, sovereignty is not an absolute right, and states forfeit aspects of their sovereignty when they fail to protect their populations from mass atrocities crimes and human rights violations. However, to avoid abuses of this principle, any international action to curb mass crimes should have the approval of the United Nations.
Although the principle of non-intervention is extremely difficult to enforce in today's complex world, its principles should be revived again. This is particularly pertinent if one considers the tremendous loss of lives due to the violations of international law that recent interventions into other States have caused.
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