Meet the original MAGA imperialist
January 25, 2025 6 mins
Amid all the hand-wringing about Donald Trump Making Greenland Great Again, it’s worth noting that #47 was hardly the first president to envision America as one great swath of global real estate, rightfully his. For as it turns out, imagining geography has been a longstanding American obsession.
Since the California Gold Rush of 1849, territorial expansion has been driven by a lust for minerals. And today the case is no different. As has been widely noted by the gob-struck press, Greenland conceals all sorts of big grey rocks underneath its mile-long layer of ice, within which lurk fortunes in gallium, cerium, and lanthanum — essential ingredients for iPhones, jets, and nuclear weapons. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have already invested untold sums in KoBold Metals, which will use AI to figure out where all those goodies are hidden. Not to mention the fresh-water riches locked in icebergs — a few of which might have come in handy during the Los Angeles fires. Poland Springs and Evian may soon face stiff competition from those massive chunks of ice, which hold one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water.
Yet to be honest, even before the present brouhaha, America was already brandishing its military supremacy in Greenland. For the past 60 years or so, the US has essentially ruled the frozen land from an outpost on the northwest coast, a United States Space Force base called Pituffik (in local Inuit, “the place the dogs are tied”). The natives are too busy staying alive during sunless winters to care about what goes on at the northernmost tip of their island. Just across the North Pole from Russia, Pituffik is home to a large and extended family of squadrons, satellite control networks, and ballistic missile early warning sensors.
The base was established in secret under the code name Operation Blue Jay after the Germans occupied Denmark in 1940. An armada of 120 ships, 12,000 men, and 300,000 tonnes of cargo was needed to build it, plus a brutal schedule of continuous work through the endless daylight of summer. The project was comparable to the Herculean efforts to construct the Panama Canal half a century before — yet another strip of land presently tempting MAGA.
The only hiccup in America’s show of snow-globe supremacy came in 1968, when a cabin fire doomed a B-52 bomber with four B28FI nuclear bombs on board, which crashed in Baffin Bay. The conventional explosives onboard detonated the nuclear payload, resulting in widespread radioactive contamination. The good news is that not all of the H-bombs exploded. The bad news is that one still rests at the bottom of the bay.
Not that Americans care much about radioactive fallout near the North Pole. Or popular sovereignty, for that matter. When did Americans ever shed a tear over displaced Algonquins, Comanches, or Iroquois — much less Danes, Norsemen, Paleo-Inuits, or any other Greenlander lost to frost-bitten history? Thankfully, the Trump administration already has a scheme for reparations in mind. When Don Jr showed up in the territory’s capital, Nuuk, right before his dad’s second inauguration, reports came in that the contingent had enticed a crowd of homeless people to the event with the promise of a free lunch and MAGA hats. It is unlikely that the grub was sensitive to native tastes, as Don Jr probably had no interest in suaasat, national dish of Greenland — a delectable stew that can feature seal meat, whale, caribou, or seabirds. But one 11-year-old did apparently come home to show his daddy what the nice Americans had given him as a souvenir — a $100 bill.
Many reasons lie behind such historical hubris. The Greenlandic Inuits dubbed their island “The Land of Great Length”, and it’s an appellation that might apply just as well to America — a country bordering on the Allegheny mountains, the Mississippi River, and the vast swamps of Florida that was so large and diverse that it was impossible in the 18th century to envision it as any sort of union. As a result, maps became essential political tools to forge national identity in the early republic, as the secrets of mathematical surveying were known only to the settlers. Only the settlers had the power to draw those magical lines on paper. And only they, by examining their folded and coloured scraps, could define trespass or, for that matter, taxation.
Maps were in particularly high demand in 1784 when Jedidiah Morse, a Yale student in need of a little extra cash, published his first geography textbook for elementary school students — and sold out the print run. His American Geography not only became required reading at his alma mater and in every classroom in America, but a huge best-seller throughout the nation.
Morse was the first enabler of what has become MAGA dogma: “You can’t have a country without borders.” For the would-be imperialist, however, the best country of all would be one without any borders whatsoever — a sentiment that would eventually be turned into the poetic sublime by the great Transcendentalist, Walt Whitman, who famously “contained multitudes”.
Global hegemony was locked into the American mind early, with generations of students consigned to memorising Morse’s geography textbooks — reprints of which were making him rich. The second edition of his opus was the two-volume American Universal Geography, expanded to 1,250 pages, featuring more than 7,000 articles that included a history of the ancient Israelites, Egyptians, and Greeks, a summary of all the earth’s climates and ethnic groups, various mathematical formulae, and a description of the creation of the universe. Name after name of mountain, town, lake, and sea fell from Morse’s imperial pen, as if he were Adam at the dawn of a new creation, at the centre of which lay America.
At Yale, Morse had snagged as his thesis adviser Professor of Theology Jonathan Edwards the Younger, son of the legendary Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards, whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had detailed the hair-raising horrors of hell. And it turned out that geography was fertile soil for Calvinist doctrines of pre-destination, as Morse declared that climate not only decided the political but the personal. New England was a “high, hilly, and in some parts mountainous country, formed by nature to be inhabited by a hardy race of free, independent republicans”. Further south, however, the warm weather of Georgia produced “a general relaxation of the nervous system”, which, in combination with slave labour resulted in an “indolence” that was the “parent of disease”. Americans couldn’t get enough of such wisdom. Morse had made it clear: geographical determinism trumped self-determination.
One unfortunate result of this philosophy was that once America’s borders had been established, the worst threat to the country always came from within. It’s a belief that aligns well with the MAGA fear of the Deep State. Thus did Jedidiah Morse rise to a pulpit outside of Boston in 1798 and warn his congregation of those who might seek to “root out and abolish Christianity and overthrow all civil government”. “We have in truth secret enemies,” he declared, “…insinuating its members into all positions of distinction and influence, whether literary, civil, or religious.”
Morse’s nightmare was that his enemy, the “globalist”, would replace America’s national government with a European-style political union, a bloated bureaucracy that nominally honoured national borders, but secretly wished for international power. “The future does not belong to globalists,” Trump insisted to the General Assembly of the United Nations. “The future belongs to patriots.” Morse could only have dreamed of a Trump and his serial withdrawals from the World Health Organisation, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, UNESCO, and the UN’s Human Rights Council. For Morse, like Trump, possessed a deep-seated scepticism of Europe. Moreover, Morse’s fears of international contagion sparked by the liberal enemy within align perfectly with Trump’s insistence on a deep state, on the dangers of the woke media, and a federal court system dedicated to lawfare.
By the end of his life, Morse’s investments in stocks had tanked, his land speculations had yielded nothing but debt, and his liberal congregation in the Boston suburbs had fired him. All the more reason for him to remain convinced that there was a plot against the country hatched by a cabal of globalist child-murderers aided and abetted by Satan worshippers, radicals, sexual deviants, and people of colour, all of which he believed were the result of the secret workings of the Bavarian Illuminati.
The answer to such pervasive anxieties? More real estate! In long and enthusiastic forewords to ever-growing editions of his life’s work, Morse insisted that the uncharted spaces to the north, south, and west of the early Republic must become part of America. He envisioned a realm larger than all of Europe, “about twice the size of the Chinese Empire, and if we except Russia, … by far the largest territory on earth”. It would be called Fredonia.
And as fate would have it, it was around the time Morse retreated in disgrace from liberal Boston to conservative New Haven that the 1814 Treaty of Kiel was signed — an agreement that languished in obscurity until last week. This was the document that officially stripped Norway of its colonies, thereby allowing the Danish monarch to declare Greenland terra nullius — Latin for “nobody’s land”. Which is precisely how Trump sees Greenland.
“We do not want to be Americans,” lamented Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte Egede. Nor Fredonians, for that matter. His snow-covered, mineral-rich island bristling with intercontinental missiles may dwarf Mexico, but what is that compared to the moon and Mars? To Americans, who have long suffered from full-blown geographical megalomania, it’s all the same.
Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism at the College of Staten Island. His next project is a book about the world’s first political reactionary.
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