Trump's Role Model McKinley Tariffed His Way to Imperialism
Reviving the Monroe Doctrine and 19th century Republican adventurism is not a shortcut to peace.
Hardly a day goes by during the frenetic first fortnight of his presidency that Donald Trump does not lavish praise on his late-19th century predecessor William McKinley, a.k.a. the "Napoleon of Protection."
"President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent — he was a natural businessman," Trump enthused during his inauguration speech. At a rally in Las Vegas Saturday, the president asserted that the high-tariff era of 1870–1913 was "the richest our country ever was," attributing those protectionist policies to the man who wrote the major tariff increase of 1890 and then signed another into law in 1897. And most symbolically, Trump on his first day in office re-re-christened North America's tallest peak as "Mount McKinley."
But the text of that executive order, coupled with the president's promiscuous daily threats of punitive tariffs, illustrate the recklessness of hewing too closely to McKinley's mercantilism.
Trump's declarative re-mounting of McKinley begins not with the 25th president's performance as "Tariff Man," but rather with some straight-up imperialism: "[He] heroically led our Nation to victory in the Spanish-American War. Under his leadership, the United States enjoyed rapid economic growth and prosperity, including an expansion of territorial gains for the Nation." Not subtle, that.
For McKinley and his Republican Party, whose stranglehold on the White House from 1870 to 1912 was interrupted only by the non-consecutive terms of Democrat Grover Cleveland (1885–89, 1893–97), industrial protectionism and colonial expansionism were logical sides of the same coin. Trade rivals were viewed with zero-sum wariness, less-developed countries were treated with paternalistic disdain, and deep-water ports along plum shipping routes were eyed greedily for the plucking.
"We demand such an equitable tariff on foreign imports which come into competition with the American products as will not only furnish adequate revenue for the necessary expenses of the Government, but will protect American labor from degradation and the wage level of other lands," declared the GOP platform of 1896. (Tariffs, until the revenue-swapping adoption of the federal income tax in 1913, were Washington's dominant source of funding.) Meanwhile: "The Hawaiian Islands should be controlled by the United States, and no foreign power should be permitted to interfere with them. The Nicaragua Canal should be built, owned and operated by the United States. And, by the purchase of the Danish Islands we should secure a much needed Naval station in the West Indies."
Given that Trump seeks to reassert American control over the Panama Canal, purchase the Danish island of Greenland, and make sure that no foreign power be permitted to interfere with arctic shipping routes, all while increasing tariffs on foreign imports which come into competition with American products, it's no wonder that he's a fan of the guy who successfully ran on that platform. On the right, some otherwise skeptics of American interventionism find wisdom or even excitement in reanimating an aggressive, Monroe Doctrine-style assertion of U.S. interests in its Near Abroad.
They should rethink. The long and dishonorable tradition of America engaging in regime-change military interventions was super-charged by tariff-loving 19th century Republicans, beginning with President Benjamin Harrison and Hawaii. In January 1893, before the anti-imperialist Grover Cleveland had been sworn in to replace Harrison, an American-led group backed by U.S. Marines engineered a coup against Queen Liliʻuokalani, installed Sanford Dole (founder of what became the Dole Food Company) as provisional leader, and immediately negotiated an annexation treaty with the lame-duck president.
Cleveland, appalled, withdrew the treaty from consideration after five days in office. "It is hardly necessary for me to state that the questions arising from our relations with Hawaii have caused serious embarrassment," the president said during his first State of the Union report nine months later. A subsequent investigation showed "beyond all question that the constitutional Government of Hawaii had been subverted with the active aid of our representative to that Government and through the intimidation caused by the presence of an armed naval force of the United States, which was landed for that purpose at the instance of our minister."
No matter: McKinley annexed the territory in 1898. A centennial apology from Bill Clinton notwithstanding, the regime change of 1893 remains a festering wound in Hawaiian politics.
Still, both Hawaiians and mainlanders have derived many benefits from our shared history. Less so some of the other spoils from the Spanish-American War, beginning with Cuba. While U.S. rule was clearly preferable to the infamous atrocities inflicted on the islanders by colonial Spain, Washington proved inept at nation-building, sending the military to intervene more than a half-dozen times in the ensuing three decades.
This became America's 20th century template for mucking about south of the border. McKinley's vice president and successor, Teddy Roosevelt, who had famously charged up San Juan Hill in 1898, seized on the swelling national sentiment in the aftermath of McKinley's "splendid little war" by adding his own "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. This asserted Washington's right to "exercise…international police power" in the Western Hemisphere, "however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of… wrongdoing or impotence."
Such reluctance was not always apparent to residents of Nicaragua, Haiti, Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Panama.
By far the most atrocious of McKinley's "territorial gains" from the Spanish-American War was his seizure, purchase, then repression of the Philippines. Never even contemplated for self-rule ("The Philippines are ours and American authority must be supreme throughout the archipelago," the president stated simply in 1900), this unapologetic land-grab sparked the creation of the Anti-Imperialist League (of which Grover Cleveland was a member), and triggered a war that would lead to an estimated 200,000 deaths, including more than 4,000 Americans
Donald Trump arose to political prominence within the GOP in part by—thrillingly—slamming his own party's role in a regime-change war that led to an estimated 200,000 deaths, including more than 4,000 Americans. He has shown a proper and old-timey revulsion at going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
But in his enthusiasm for tariffs (including but not limited to his mistaken hunch that they can be swapped out with income taxes), and predilection toward forcing deals based more on America's might than righteousness, the president is demonstrating a willful blind spot about zero-sum competition in international affairs. Namely, that trade wars have a nasty habit of leading to war-wars.
Abrupt and unasked-for changes to the economic and diplomatic arrangements between allied countries is a shortcut to soured relations and unstable political ramifications among America's partners. Trump as of this writing is 12 hours away from imposing a 25 percent tariff on Canada and Mexico in retaliation for the border crossing of illegal immigrants and fentanyl. (NATO ally Canada is ready with a "forceful, immediate response.")
The president has already threatened tariff increases on Denmark if it doesn't cede control over Greenland, on Russia if it doesn't stop the Ukraine war, on the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates if they start agitating for a competing currency against the U.S. dollar.
George Washington in his rightly ballyhooed farewell address famously advocated "peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Trump has demonstrated far more interest in disentangling alliances than promoting commerce and honest friendship. That way, alas, has not been the path to peace.
