A Man, a Plan, and a Long History of Overplayed Hands
Trump did not invent hardball U.S. diplomacy with Panama. Then, as now, it is doomed to backfire.
In March, during a joint address to Congress, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that the United States would be “reclaiming” the Panama Canal and “taking it back.” The remarks prompted outrage in Panama, a small country with a history of U.S. incursion.
Behind Trump’s rhetoric lay a series of demands. He accused Panama of overcharging U.S. shippers. The Defense Department floated the idea of reviving U.S. military bases in the country, which had lapsed late last century alongside U.S. control of the canal. Washington also flagged northward migration through Panama as a concern.
But the real flash point was China. Trump falsely claimed that Beijing controlled the canal, while other officials zeroed in on nearby port facilities operated by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate. In February, on his first overseas trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio pressed Panama to curb its economic and diplomatic ties with China.
At first, the pressure seemed to work. Facing U.S. threats of territorial takeover, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino conceded to a slate of U.S. asks. Panama’s government agreed to detain people deported by the United States in a remote jungle camp and tighten controls on migration through the Darién Gap, a dense borderland with Colombia. Panama also cooled ties with China, becoming the first Latin American country to exit Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. And despite Chinese protests, the Panamanian government placed lucrative port-management contracts under review, prompting a sale to U.S. investor BlackRock.
The Trump administration claimed a swift victory. But U.S. presidents have a history of overplaying their hand in Panama. Threats to canal sovereignty—only fully exercised by Panama since 1999—strike a raw nerve in the country, which until the late 1990s hosted thousands of U.S. troops and was invaded by the United States just a generation ago. As before, Washington’s heavy-handed approach risks provoking public backlash and undermining U.S. interests throughout the region.
If Trump Is Neither Hawk nor Dove, What Is He?
The president’s recent moves don’t fit the usual binary of U.S. foreign policy—but there is a historical precedent.
The last few weeks have been a roller coaster for U.S. policy in the Middle East: from diplomacy to military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and back. Though the president himself mused briefly about regime change on social media, in practice the strikes threaded the needle between nonintervention and all-out war—surgical strikes against a few targets followed by immediate de-escalation. The result was a policy that pleased neither the hawks nor the doves within Donald Trump’s coalition and left observers even more confused about whether Trump is a traditional Republican hawk or a noninterventionist.
Yet Trump’s actions on Iran are not out of step with how he talks about and has typically pursued foreign policy. Circumscribed but forceful military action to advance U.S. interests—often described as “Jacksonian,” but perhaps better described as a modern kind of punitive expedition—is entirely consistent with this worldview. It’s just out of step with the last few decades of U.S. foreign-policy practice.
The term “Jacksonianism” comes from the scholar Walter Russell Mead, who argued that there are four broad schools of U.S. foreign-policy thought. Wilsonians—named after the president who gave us the League of Nations—believe in advancing liberal and democratic values around the world. Hamiltonians focus more on commercial affairs, pushing the United States to take an active lead in protecting international commerce, such as when then-President George H.W. Bush sought to protect international oil markets during the Gulf War. Jeffersonians, in Mead’s telling, tend to avoid foreign engagement and focus almost exclusively on domestic affairs; this tendency has been largely unrepresented among recent presidents.
Jacksonians focus inward, taking a profoundly nationalist approach that prioritizes domestic over foreign policy. But they are also perfectly happy to spend on the military and entirely willing to fight over issues that they perceive to be central to U.S. interests. As the historian Hal Brands describes it, “their aim in fighting [is] American victory, not the salvation of the world.”
Why Compare the Present to the Past?
Thinking via historical analogy has become the preferred way to confront our anxieties.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, several prominent thinkers focused their minds on the shape of the world to come. Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” (1989), Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993), Ken Jowitt’s “After Leninism: The New World Disorder” (1991), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Civil Wars (1994) were all prognostications about a new world order. In the three decades since, irrespective of the accuracy of their predictions, many of their contentions have become embedded in the general policy discourse.
In our current geopolitical reality, visions of the future have been substituted with analogies from the past. Thinking via historical analogy has become the preferred way to confront the anxieties of the present. A day hardly goes by when we aren’t transported back to Europe’s tragic interwar period or the turbulent (but far less tragic) 1970s or even ancient history. Elon Musk confesses that he can’t stop thinking about the fall of Rome. “Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans,” Musk enjoys repeating. For him, Rome’s birth rate decline in the first century B.C. tells you everything you need to know about the global conjuncture today—namely, that demography is destiny.
Some commentators envisage U.S. President Donald Trump as the 21st-century version of Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century populist counterpart. Across Eastern Europe, the radical upending in the United States is contrasted with the bittersweet experience of Soviet convulsion that led to the Cold War’s demise—and thus many extrapolate that today’s disorder represents a crisis of U.S. power. Sinologists are haunted, naturally, by Chinese analogies. Esteemed China specialist Orville Schell wrote in February that while Mao Zedong, “who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection.”
Yet are historical analogies truly useful in making sense of the current moment? And are we able to make the correct analogies in the first place?
How Trump Will Be Remembered
No other president has made his time in office so nakedly about himself and his legacy.
U.S. presidents have big egos—if they didn’t, their chances of reaching the Oval Office would be slim—and they want to be remembered favorably after they are gone. A few presidents, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, enjoy an exalted status in part for their exceptional qualities but also because they overcame challenging circumstances that required extraordinary leadership. Presidents who govern in more normal times, or whose actions in office are tainted by obvious failures, can only hope they don’t end up near the bottom of one of those lists ranking presidents from best to worst.
As in so many other things, Donald Trump’s obsession with his own place in history is in a class by itself. No other president has made his time in office so nakedly about himself or been as transparent in his desire to be remembered as one of the greatest U.S. presidents. Indeed, he seems to believe that he has already earned this accolade.
The signs of Trump’s desire for personal glory are everywhere. In his first term, he told reporters that delays in filling key positions were irrelevant because he was “the only one” who mattered. He has repeatedly expressed his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, which he covets in part because his predecessor Barack Obama got one. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he made it clear that he saw himself as the greatest president ever—even better than Lincoln or Washington. He boasts about his own intelligence, and he expects cabinet members and other top officials to engage in ritual acts of fawning admiration in public. Cultish MAGA Republicans are already working to venerate Trump; there’s even a congressional bill proposing that his face be added to Mount Rushmore.
Trump’s problem, however, is that his record in office is at best mediocre and at worst a disaster. During his first term, he mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic, increased U.S. debt by more than $8 trillion, made the U.S. trade deficit worse, failed to end the war in Afghanistan, couldn’t persuade North Korea to reduce its nuclear arsenal, and roiled relations with long-standing U.S. allies to no good purpose. After that performance, the electorate quite properly turned him out of office. He won a second term largely because Joe Biden didn’t leave the race soon enough, and he’s now attempting a radical transformation of U.S. domestic and foreign policy that has raised legitimate fears of a recession, threatens to destroy the country’s world-leading scientific and academic prowess, and has caused his approval ratings to plummet faster than any U.S. president in 80 years. Call me old-fashioned, but that doesn’t look like Mount Rushmore material to me.
But don’t count Trump out yet because his entire career both before and after he entered politics has been based on a remarkable ability to create the illusion of achievement, even when the facts say otherwise. He started his business career having inherited a sizable fortune, only to suffer repeated bankruptcies and other business failures while committing multiple frauds. Despite this mediocre record, a combination of relentless self-promotion, adroit and shameless lying, and a fortuitous gig as a reality TV star convinced millions of people that he was a business genius and a master dealmaker.
An American Caesar
Comparing two leaders, two millennia apart.
In April, as the world economy reeled from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X, “Nero fiddled. Trump golfed.” Schumer joined a long history of comparing Trump to ancient Romans. Trump is Augustus concentrating the power of the Republic in a single authoritarian individual, a cruel and capricious Caligula, a demagogue in the model of Tiberius Gracchus or Publius Clodius Pulcher.
But most often, he’s compared to Julius Caesar, who in 49 B.C. led his soldiers across the Rubicon, the river marking the border between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and the area directly controlled by Rome. In bringing a legion across the Rubicon, Caesar broke the laws limiting his power. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, on crossing Caesar declared, “The die has been cast.” After five years of civil war, he was declared dictator for life in 44 B.C. and famously assassinated soon after.
The parallels between Caesar and Trump have proved so attractive that the comparison has collapsed under its own weight and inverted itself. Caesar is now compared to Trump, with a 2017 production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and a 2023 BBC documentary series about Caesar’s dictatorship both explicitly conflating the two figures.
We don’t know the exact date when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, nor do we know precisely where. But Trump’s Rubicons have been many, as psychologist and writer Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has pointed out. Every few weeks, a pundit declares that Trump has crossed some Rubicon or other. The references are so frequent that, just days after Schumer’s post comparing Trump to Nero, historian Michele Renee Salzman published an impassioned piece in Zócalo Public Square titled “Stop Comparing Trump’s Lawbreaking to Caesar Crossing the Rubicon.”
Use of the Rubicon metaphor isn’t limited to critics of Trump. Rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, carried banners with the popular hashtag #CrossTheRubicon, hinting at the ubiquity of Rubicon rhetoric in far-right online spaces that I describe in my 2018 book, Not All Dead White Men. In 2022, Newt Gingrich explored in Newsweek whether the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was a Rubicon moment, and in 2024, the Washington Times published an editorial titled “Democrats cross the Rubicon with Trump guilty verdict.”
Salzman’s critique of the Rubicon metaphor is that it doesn’t go far enough. Caesar, she argues, wanted to basically maintain the Roman political system with himself in charge: “When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, his goal was specific and limited. Caesar had no desire to remake the republic nor to destroy the way Roman politics worked. He simply wanted to bring his army with him to run for election for consul.”
Trump’s ambitions, Salzman writes, are far wider-ranging: “Unlike Caesar’s limited goals in 49 B.C.E, Trump desires to bring widespread change to our republic—overturning everything from decades of foreign policy and lawfully constituted federal agencies to medical research, education, and the law.”
It isn’t difficult to pick apart a comparison between Trump and Caesar, if you so wish.
How a Nazi Jurist Captured Imaginations on the U.S. Left and Right
It’s Carl Schmitt’s world, and we’re all just living in it.
When I started writing on Carl Schmitt in the 1990s, the reaction in U.S. academia was often that you could treat a Nazi jurist with extraordinary capacities as a historical figure but not as a theorist to be invoked in present debates. Little could I have imagined that a quarter century later, a soon-to-be U.S. vice president would do precisely that: Last summer, J.D. Vance charged liberals with having learned from Schmitt how to hide political warfare behind a legal facade.
Since then, the tables have been turned. Schmitt is regularly brought up by critics of the second Trump administration. They charge President Donald Trump with declaring emergencies to grab ever more power, referencing Schmitt’s notion that a state of exception reveals who is truly sovereign. Schmitt further held that the true sovereign could claim unlimited power—even declare a dictatorship—to defeat a political community’s enemies. No less relevant in populist times: Schmitt taught that a dictator like Benito Mussolini, if he enjoyed sufficient public support, could claim to embody democracy while pluralistic liberal institutions, such as parliaments, trying to work out compromises threatened to undermine it.
But Trumpism isn’t only concerned with constructing an authoritarian order at home, of course. Schmitt’s Nazi-era thinking on international law and global order may likewise illuminate Trump’s actions in ways that haven’t received nearly enough attention. U.S. foreign policy today has disconcerting parallels with not just Schmitt’s advocacy of a pluralistic, multipolar world but also his insistence that lasting legal orders need to be literally rooted in the appropriation of territory. Schmitt potentially offers a legal-theoretical justification for Trump’s seeming preference for spheres of influence dominated by great powers.
Schmitt claimed that the resulting “pluriversum” would be more stable and peaceful than liberalism’s approach to international order. It’s an argument that is belied by the incomparably destructive outcome of the Nazi era but one that today nevertheless can prove attractive not just for Trump supporters but also for some on the left.
Is This an American Cultural Revolution?
Liberal critics charge Trump with creating a cult of personality not unlike Mao Zedong’s.
As liberal critics of the Trump presidency have scrambled for traction since January, one historical analogy seems ubiquitous: “If you want a model for what’s happening to America,” economist Paul Krugman wrote in April, “think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” From the New York Times to the Guardian to a slew of Substacks, commentators have presented Donald Trump as the U.S. incarnation of the Great Helmsman.
Like Mao Zedong, these pundits say, Trump is mobilizing an insurrectionary base to destroy bureaucratic and cultural elites, has created a cult of personality in which the leader’s will overrides all else, and is brutally intolerant of his ideological enemies.
How robust is this comparison, though? Are Department of Government Efficiency interns really the Red Guards reborn? A brief historical recap may be helpful. The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution traumatized almost every school, university, and workplace in China. Mao mobilized millions of Chinese people to smash rivals whom he deemed counter-revolutionary. Rule by one man ousted rule by law or by party.
In the campaign’s earliest, most radical phase, between 1966 and 1969, a series of violent power seizures by students and workers swept away political institutions at almost all levels of society. Red Guards—mostly school and university students thoroughly indoctrinated in the Mao cult—terrorized and sometimes imprisoned and murdered intellectuals and anyone perceived as tainted by European or American culture. The country teetered on the brink of full-blown civil war, scarred by mass killings (the campaign’s total death toll may have approached 2 million) and even cannibalism as revenge against “class enemies.”
The second Trump presidency and the Cultural Revolution present a few superficial likenesses: the veneration of the leader at the head of a movement, the attacks on state and nonstate institutions (bureaucrats, the media, universities), the framing of political battles as culture wars. Both Mao and Trump fashioned themselves as outsiders with a love of insurgent chaos.
But the points of divergence are more compelling. China in the 1960s (a young Leninist dictatorship reeling from civil wars and political campaigns) was a vastly different society from the contemporary United States. The Cultural Revolution flooded Chinese society with horrifying levels of brutality, from the central leadership to the grassroots peripheries, which the United States has so far been spared.
How Low Can the Dollar Go?
It took a decade for the U.S. economy to recover from Nixon. This time could be worse.
In terms of shaking up the global exchange rate system, there is little question that Richard Nixon serves as the closest analogy to Donald Trump in his second term. Nixon’s decision to suspend the convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold on Aug. 15, 1971, upended the global monetary system and presaged a disastrous decade of high inflation, low growth, and the weakening of the dollar as European countries delinked from the U.S. currency. Although the final chapter is yet to be written on Trump’s international economic policies, the uncertainty triggered by his tariff war suggests a high risk that the dollar, inflation, and growth will once again be casualties. This time, it will be a renminbi bloc—China and the many countries for which it is the major trading partner, particularly in East Asia but also in Latin America and Africa—that separates from its tight links to the dollar, with the already existing euro bloc gaining market share at the dollar’s expense. Cryptocurrencies are already eroding the dollar’s preeminence in the underground economy, which represents perhaps much as 20 percent of global income.
To be fair, both Nixon and Trump were facing challenges to the status quo for the dollar even before they decided, each in their own way, to blow things up. When Nixon became president in 1969, the dollar had been riding high for 25 years since the Allied powers agreed to a new exchange rate framework in a historic 1944 meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. (The meeting also led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.) Famously, British delegate John Maynard Keynes proposed a supranational currency, the bancor, as an alternative to the dollar but was beaten down by the Americans, who were, after all, holding all the cards given that the U.S. economy towered above all others by the end of World War II.
Instead, the so-called Bretton Woods system placed the dollar at its center and required all other currencies in the system to peg their exchange rates to the U.S. currency. Washington was free to run its monetary policy as it saw fit, with the one giant caveat being that if foreign central banks or finance ministries wanted to tender their U.S. dollar holdings (mostly in the form of interest-paying Treasury bills, not physical currency) for gold at $35 an ounce, the United States had to accommodate them. It should be noted that a large part of the world, including not only communist countries such as China and the Soviet Union but also much of the developing world, stood outside the system.
The arrangement worked remarkably well despite the occasional need for a modest currency realignment as well as recurrent debt crises in the United Kingdom that required a string of bailouts. The major economies prospered. However, the postwar system of pegging the dollar to gold had deep underlying vulnerabilities. As Europe and Japan grew, so too did their need to hold reserves of U.S. dollar assets; they needed the firepower to take on speculators who might try to topple their exchange rate pegs. Although the U.S. government generally obliged by pumping out debt, its gold reserves did not grow at the same clip, implying that the gold backing for the dollar became thinner and thinner. Indeed, Yale University economist Robert Triffin famously predicted in a 1959 congressional testimony that if foreign governments lost confidence in the dollar and started trying to trade in their Treasury bills, the result would be a classic bank run that would blow up the system.
The Human Rights Presidency
Jimmy Carter made foreign policy feel moral again, but that era might be over.
In historical perspective, it is a new thing for U.S. presidents to say they are shaping foreign policy with human rights in mind. Jimmy Carter redefined the presidency in this way only a half century ago. And in the subsequent era, human rights exerted gravitation powerful enough that no presidents escaped it—including Donald Trump in his first term.
But there’s reason to think the human rights era may be over. The Trump administration has already moved to eliminate one of Carter’s practical legacies, the undersecretary position overseeing human rights, while pushing the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to a lesser and subordinate place in the State Department’s organizational chart as a minor office for “democracy, human rights, and religious freedom.” Even after Trump departs, it’s hardly obvious that the U.S. commitment to universal human rights can ever recover the policy consensus it enjoyed.
But if Trump is changing the presidency’s relationship to human rights, it’s also time to consider whether the human rights presidency amounted to much while it lasted. The historical verdict is unlikely to be kind.
Carter’s gambit was to make foreign policy feel moral after Henry Kissinger’s realism and the Vietnam War had left Americans distraught over the sullying of their global reputation. Human rights, just then coming into their own globally as popular principles, were also the ones that Carter offered up for American redemption. (Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize the same year that Carter gave his classic speeches calling for a new foreign policy.)
Of course, even Carter applied human rights selectively. But it was a departure for them to be applied at all. The effect was powerful enough, and not just for Democrats, that when Ronald Reagan trounced his predecessor electorally and attempted to nip the idea of human rights in foreign policy in the bud, he failed. He offered up a declared enemy of the new policies, Ernest Lefever, as their new State Department steward, but the nomination was defeated in the U.S. Senate.
From then on, the tradition stuck. It wasn’t just that new nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch pushed—often, together with the U.S. government, in a kind of pincer move—for foreign states to do better across a range of areas from false imprisonment to free speech. (Sometimes NGOs even challenged the United States’ own policies.) The State Department was institutionally transformed, Carter having created high-level positions there to advance human rights principles.
Ranking the Strongmen
In an era defined by vanity, the U.S. president outdoes all his populist peers.
Men in power are often animated by the desire to retain and consolidate their power—but not always by that alone. Sometimes, personal aggrandizement goes hand in hand with a sense of personal destiny that embraces a world larger than oneself. Consider in this regard Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. All three populist strongmen have been ruthless in their exercise of power and in their suppression of any threats to its perpetuation. At the same time, each is also propelled by the wish to make his country a more powerful and respected voice in global affairs. Whether they have, or can, is another matter. (I myself think not.) But that they have this ambition is indisputable. Erdogan, Modi, and Putin each believe that their once great countries lost their way due to external pressure and internal decay and that history has sent them to redeem their homelands and restore them to their past glories.
At first sight, Donald Trump may seem to fit this bill, in so far as his professed aim is to “make America great again.” Yet, as his actions in his first term as U.S. president and even more so in his second show, unlike Erdogan, Modi, and Putin, Trump is animated almost exclusively by personal vanity. In this, the current leader of the world’s richest and most powerful nation is strikingly akin to a past leader of a country with which it shares a so-called special relationship. Indeed, perhaps the best way to understand Trump is to view him as Britain’s Boris Johnson on steroids.
Historians are tempted to use analogies from the past to understand the present. Hence, the frequent references to the 1930s in seeking to explain the resurgence of authoritarian populism today, as well as the rather too regular use of that dreaded F-word, fascism. Others seek to go much further back, to ancient Rome even. However, to this historian, the roots of the authoritarianism of our moment lie in the events of the past few decades. One need not look further back. Modi, Putin, Trump, et al. are a response to the end of the Cold War and the failed promises issued thereafter of one happy, integrated, united, and allegedly “flat” world. These men—and they are all men—have ridden to power stoking a nativist nationalism that seeks to repel a globalization gone rampant, even as they have done so using the new media technologies that have been created and enabled by this globalization.
To understand Trump better then, look at his political contemporaries, not at his political ancestors. Which of his peers does he most resemble? All the populist strongmen of today profess an abiding love of their countries, coupled with a suspicion of the intentions of other countries. They claim that they shall make their nations strong (or at least stronger) by keeping out people and noxious cultural influences from other nations. However, while the xenophobia—shading into paranoia—of Erdogan, Modi, and Putin is deeply felt, that of Trump and Johnson is largely instrumental. Trump is married to an immigrant, has business interests in many countries, and would like to have business interests in more countries still. Johnson has ancestral roots in Turkey and was for many years married to a woman of Indian descent. And, most damagingly, before writing a widely noticed column in favor of Brexit, Johnson drafted an unpublished column arguing the case against Brexit.
Is Trump’s Use of Executive Power Really So Different?
Presidents of both parties have relied on expansive authority to achieve their goals.
The Founding Fathers of the United States were terrified of monarchy. They designed a constitution that separated and fragmented power, hoping that no single individual would ever amass the kind of authority that Britain’s king had enjoyed. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence decried the history of the British monarchy as a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations.”
Yet in 2025, Americans are experiencing an aggressive deployment of presidential power that many observers fear looks exactly like what the Constitution was meant to avoid. U.S. President Donald Trump has used his office to threaten and intimidate opponents. Federal funds have become a bludgeon wielded against law firms and universities. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has imposed severe cuts on vital agencies and eliminated other programs altogether.
Individuals have been deported to overseas prisons without due process. Trump has attacked several federal judges and even defied their orders. Based on thin constitutional grounds, Trump deployed Marines and federalized the National Guard to send into Los Angeles despite California Gov. Gavin Newsom adamantly opposing his decision to do so.
The president also keeps joking about running for a third term regardless of the 22nd Amendment. When asked by a reporter if he had to “uphold the Constitution,” Trump responded: “I don’t know.”
Trump’s supporters dismiss the criticism by pulling the “everybody does it” card out of their hat. And it’s true that for decades, both parties have relied on expansive executive power to achieve their goals. In that sense, all Americans are imperial presidentialists. Is Trump really so different from the presidents before him?