Trump can learn a lot from this forgotten – Latest News
President Donald Trump has a portray of Andrew Jackson within the Oval Office, however as he tries to browbeat Denmark into coughing up Greenland, perhaps he ought to add a portrait of a Jackson acolyte — James Okay. Polk.
If cold-eyed American expansionism is the theme, there are few higher representatives than the eleventh president.
He added more than 1 million sq. miles to US territory and prolonged the nation all the way in which to the Pacific, making him essentially the most profitable president not celebrated as half of the American pantheon.
Trump’s impulse to throw his weight round and assume control of sparsely populated, strategically fascinating territory remembers Polk.
A thoroughgoing Jacksonian populist, he unexpectedly received the Democratic nomination for president in 1844 (a lot of what I relate right here, by the way in which, is drawn from my e book “The Case for Nationalism”).
He ran on a platform urging what Democrats referred to as the “re-annexation” of Texas and the “re-occupation” of Oregon.
Texas was a flash level: Anglos settled there when it was a province of Mexico, rebelled in opposition to the dictatorship of Santa Anna, and received independence.
Texans wished to be half of the United States, however a Mexican risk to combat over annexation helped keep our hand.
When the United States ultimately moved to annex Texas in 1845, Mexico was livid — and insisted that its border with Texas was on the Nueces River, 200 miles north of the Rio Grande.
When Polk despatched troops into the world between the 2 rivers, Mexican cavalry ambushed a social gathering of US dragoons.
We ended up occupying Mexico City and forcing a deal.
Mexico conceded to the United States a border on the Rio Grande, working all the way in which to the Pacific — giving us California inclusive of San Diego — in exchange for the belief of Mexico’s money owed and the price of $15 million.
There’s no doubt that Polk had been spoiling for a combat, however the generally held view of what’s now referred to as the Mexican-American War as nothing however US plunder is way too simplistic.
We have been within our rights to deal with an unbiased Texas, which had achieved independence through a simply revolution, and Mexico — within the grips of a silly warfare fever — fired the primary pictures.
In his e book on the warfare, “A Country of Vast Designs,” Robert W. Merry describes the underlying dynamic.
Mexico, he notes, “was a dysfunctional, unstable, weak nation whose population was insufficient to control all the lands within its domain.”
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists
Subscribe to our each day Post Opinion publication!
Thanks for signing up!
The United States, however, “was a vibrant, expanding, exuberant experiment in democracy whose burgeoning population thrilled to the notion that it was engaging in something big and historically momentous.”
This created a drive “toward expansion into largely unpopulated lands that seemed to beckon with irresistible enticement.”
Today, it’s Trump personally, moderately than the nation at giant, tempted by historic acquisitions of territory.
He, too, could possibly be a Thomas Jefferson, or a William Seward — or a Polk, though hopefully with out the warfare.
But there’s a distinction between a younger Nineteenth-century nation surging into loosely ruled territory round its perimeter — or shopping for territory that European nations are desperate to sell — and a mature Twenty first-century world energy invested in secure borders and important alliance systems.
Mexico circa 1846 wasn’t a treaty ally of the United States, and there have been monumental advantages to truly buying the Southwest.
Today, the United States can presumably get the army bases and mineral extraction we wish out of frozen Greenland with out formal possession.
If Trump goes to look to Polk, a more apt antecedent is Polk’s handling of the dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon territory.
After making maximalist calls for, Polk agreed to an equitable compromise on the forty ninth parallel.
Trump’s withdrawal of his threatened tariffs and speak of a deal at Davos on Wednesday recommend this is simply the place he’s headed.
Polk’s instance is value marking in one other respect: He actually did play 3D chess.
There’s no means he’d let ego or emotion get in the way in which of pursuing the national curiosity — which in this case contains not needlessly alienating long-time allies when different means can be found to attain our strategic ends.
X: @RichLowry
