 "Head-on | Why Trump’s vision of ‘imperial’ America is doomed")
Author and investor Ruchir Sharma heads Rockefeller International, a bastion of Western financial imperialism through the 1900s along with the Rothschilds and other wealthy European and American families.
Sharma was earlier employed for 25 years by Morgan Stanley, yet another storied New York-based American financial enterprise. That long experience has equipped Sharma with the ability to project future geopolitical and geo-economic trends.
So what does Ruchir Sharma think of the “tariff terrorism” US President Donald Trump has unleashed on the world? In a word, he thinks Trump will fail in his mission. In an op-ed for The Times of India on January 28, 2025, Sharma concluded: “The risk of wider tariffs may be less about triggering trade wars than undermining US relevance as a trading power, and eventually sapping its economic prowess.”
In other words, Trump’s carrot-and-stick tariff threats against America’s trading partners could end up damaging the US and turning the “America First” slogan on its head.
What Trump has not fully grasped is that the pattern of global economic trade has changed since he was in office four years ago. As Sharma points out: “America may be increasingly dominant as a financial and economic superpower but not so much as a trading power. Its share of global equity indices has exploded to almost 70%. Its share of global GDP has inched up to more than 25%. Yet its share of global trade is under 15%, and has declined significantly in the last eight years.”
Trump’s imperial agenda goes beyond trade. He harks back to the presidency of William McKinley in 1897-1901. Under McKinley, the US waged war on Spain, seizing the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. Like Trump, McKinley was a fierce protectionist. He raised tariffs on imports and had imperial ambitions. He was assassinated during his second term in 1901.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsTrump wants to buy Greenland from Denmark not only for its mineral resources but because it adds to US territory, making it overnight the world’s second largest country by land mass after Russia. The threat to make Canada the 51st state of America is driven by the same territorial imperial impulse.
In medieval Europe, land was always in short supply. Several dozen tribes — Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Gauls, Franks, Vikings, Visigoths and Slavs — battled one another for territory. From these battles, European nation-states eventually emerged.
Britain became a nation when the perennially warring kingdoms of England and Scotland merged to form a new country, the United Kingdom, in 1707. Germany was established as a sovereign nation following the merger of Prussian kingdoms and principalities in 1871.
But these were still tiny nations by the standards of Asia, Africa, North America, South America and Australia. It was the desire for more territory that drove Europe’s seafaring powers — Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal — across oceans to invade other continents.
Landlocked Germany was content to cast its eyes eastwards to continental Europe. That led to Adolf Hitler’s demand for “Lebensraum” — loosely translated as “living space” — for the expanding German population. From this arose imperial Germany’s ambition to annex land to its east in Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland.
Hitler used the term “Sudetenland” to describe parts of Czechoslovakia which had a significant German-speaking population. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, six months before the beginning of the Second World War.
Anglo-German template
Trump’s vision for a territorially larger United States is not unlike Germany’s ambition to make central and eastern Europe a part of a larger German continental Empire. Hitler was an admirer of the British Empire and told his Nazi Generals to emulate British colonial troops in India who, he said, “lord over Indians”.
Trump’s mother Mary Anne MacLeod was British. Born in Scotland, she applied for a visa to the US when she was 18 years old. Her aim was to find work in America.
According to Scottish newspaper The National, Mary MacLeod worked “as a domestic servant in New York for at least four years” before marrying Trump’s father, Fred Trump, and becoming a naturalised American citizen in 1942.
Trump’s father Fred was the son of a migrant as well. Fred’s father Friedrich Trump had emigrated to the US from Germany in 1885. President Trump’s fixation with immigration has a familial history.
What about Trump’s imperial ambition — from Canada to Greenland? It is manifest in renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and threatening to take over the Panama Canal by force.
The NATO threat
Trump’s immediate problem, however, is dealing with two countries with their own territorial ambitions: Russia and Israel. Russia invaded Ukraine because NATO, over a period of 30 years, crept eastwards to Russia’s doorstep. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev received a solemn commitment from Washington that NATO would not expand “an inch east” of Germany.
That commitment was broken within a year. In 1991, NATO had 16 members. In 1999, it had 19 members. By 2004, NATO had expanded to 26 member-nations. In 2025, NATO has 32 member-states, including nearly a dozen countries which were part of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The relentless expansion of NATO is the genesis of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Unlike former US President Joe Biden, Trump is not favourably disposed towards Ukraine. But his negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be easy. Neither will talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who visits the White House on Tuesday, February 4.
For Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a wealthy real estate developer, Gaza is a trillion-dollar, once-in-a-century infrastructure opportunity. But Trump needs Saudi Arabia on board to settle the Gaza issue. Riyadh says it will establish diplomatic relations with Israel only if the formation of a sovereign Palestinian state is formally accepted by Tel Aviv.
Netanyahu is viscerally — and publicly — opposed to a sovereign Palestine. Trump leans towards an independent Palestine but would be happy if Palestinians established their state in Egypt, Jordan or even the Negev desert. The silence of the leaders of the Muslim and Arab world is deafening.
As the US and Israel proceed, in all but name, to colonise the Middle East, they echo the ambitions of imperial Britain and expansionist Germany a century ago. Both those projects failed. So likely will this.
The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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