Not long after he arrived in Ireland over the weekend, President Donald Trump declared that it would be “fantastic” and a “cool thing” if the island were to be politically unified, offering an unexpected boost to the Irish republican cause. This came just a few weeks after the administration announced it was “reviewing” its position on the British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, long claimed by Argentina. This statement galvanized the Trump-allied Argentine president, Javier Milei, to ratchet up pressure on Britain over the contested territory.
These aren’t the only instances in which the Trump administration looked ready to dismantle the remnants of old world empires. During the crisis occasioned by the influx of migrants into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, there was speculation that Trump, who is friendlier with Rabat than Madrid these days, might back the former’s claims over those territories. Then there is Trump’s desire to end Danish rule over Greenland, which stands with the Falklands among the few territories in the Western hemisphere still owing fealty to a European monarch.
What is peculiar here is that, in other contexts, leading members of the administration have expressed wistfulness about the waning of European overseas empires. In his speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio fondly recalled the lost era when the West was sending “its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” He went on to lament the “terminal decline” of Western imperialism after World War II, which he said was “accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map.”