President Trump's capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and his flirtation with using the military to capture Greenland has sparked an embrace within the MAGA movement of backing the U.S. as a global imperialist force.
But the revival of "Manifest Destiny" is brushing up against other factions on the political right that have preached foreign policy restraint and slashing spending, even on the U.S. military.
The faction that sees "America First" as a primarily non-interventionist sentiment — still burned by the failures in the Middle East — takes to heart America's origin story as a republic that rebelled against an empire.
"I object to empire," Megyn Kelly said on fellow conservative commentator Tucker Carlson's podcast last week. "I much prefer the way we started with the original George Washington, let's avoid foreign entanglements. Let's not cozy up too much to any one country. Let's enjoy the beautiful blessing of the two huge oceans on either side. I don't want to have to take care of Venezuela."
Carlson said he is "totally opposed to empire," and preferred the idea of an "agrarian society with no electricity" — but acknowledged that there is a lot of support for a notion of an empire at the moment.
In a monologue, Carlson warned about the pitfalls of imperialism, and warned against not fixing domestic problems before tackling those overseas.
"If you can't fix Baltimore, you don't really have a shot of making Caracas functional," Carlson said.
Both conservative commentators expressed alarm about Trump last week calling for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget to fund his "'Dream Military' that we have long been entitled to" — a massive increase from the nearly $1 trillion military budget for this year. The Pentagon takes up the bulk of the entire federal government's budget.
"That's the kind of budget that a country that anticipates a global or regional war has for its military," Carlson said. "That's not a peacekeeping budget. It's a war budget."
Kelly said if the money was going to be used against the Ayatollah in Iran, "that's alarming."
The prospect of that major military spending increase is giving fiscal hawks heartburn, too.
Republicans have historically been huge supporters of increasing the military budget. But even some of them are surprised by the massive 50 percent increase Trump is calling for, particularly given the administration's early focus on cost-cutting and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Republican lawmakers are publicly taking a "let's-wait-and-see" approach to the Pentagon budget.
"We certainly know the defense is one of our, one of our, one of the things we have to do in the Constitution, but we're waiting to see what the plan is and it needs to be paid for," said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), a key fiscal hawk and chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
Another GOP fiscal hawk said they would not accept Trump's promise of using tariff revenue as a means to pay for the increase, particularly with uncertainty about the tariffs in the Supreme Court, and would not vote to increase the deficit.
"I welcome that conversation, and I think, in fact, we probably do need defense resources, but we have too much unnecessary and wasteful spending that we ought to be bringing alongside of that to offset it," said House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas).
Trump, for his part, told Fox News host Sean Hannity last week that the military already made "the best equipment in the world," but more was needed because "there are some real threats out there."
For now, those expressing alarm about the new embrace of American imperialism seem to be on the outskirts of the MAGA movement — with even former intervention skeptics backing his Venezuela and Greenland moves.
"How can you get more 'America First' than Manifest Destiny 2.0?" former Trump adviser and "War Room" host Steve Bannon told NBC News.
And that sentiment is certainly taking over the social media propaganda coming from the Trump administration.
"This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened," the State Department posted on X last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment