Commentators are loving the love the 47th president of the United States keeps showering on the 25th.
Donald Trump, who likes to call himself Mr. Tariff, deems earlier tariff advocate William McKinley a great, underrated president. Days after Trump’s inauguration last month, he restored McKinley’s name to the Alaska mountain that Native Americans there call Denali.
Most historians don’t rank McKinley among the greatest presidents, though two recent biographies portray him in a more positive light.
Trump’s fascination with McKinley has given the pundits something new to talk about. One rivulet in the flood of commentary argues that Trump reads McKinley wrong on tariffs.
Karl Rove, a Republican political operative and the author of one of those biographies, cites several convincing reasons in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.
Among them: As House Ways and Means Committee chairman, McKinley favored tariffs – but worried Congress was setting them too high. Later, as president, he championed lowering tariffs on trading partners’ goods if they lowered theirs on ours.
As Robert W. Merry, author of the other bio, has explained, McKinley understood that late 19th-century American industry was producing more than the country could consume. Exports were critical; lowering other countries’ tariffs promoted exporting. (Ag exporters are making similar arguments today.)
Merry’s book, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, is well worth reading. I’d recommend it even if he weren’t a long-time friend and colleague.
Lost in the debate over the parallels, or lack of parallels, between the two presidents’ views of tariffs is another, very different potential parallel. Under McKinley, the US acquired Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
Trump has, to the surprise of much of the world, set his sights on Canada, Greenland, the Gaza strip and the Panama Canal.
This parallel, too, may be imprecise, and not just because Trump has yet to pull off any of his coveted acquisitions. Though McKinley believed in expanding America’s territory, he agonized over snatching the Philippines from Spain after the US victory in the Spanish-American War. He wanted Cuba, another former Spanish colony, to be independent.
Trump’s lust for overseas real estate is startling in part because the age of imperialism is supposedly long since over. With only occasional exceptions, the world has accepted since the end of World War II that nations don’t take over other nation’s territories.
In McKinley’s day, the age of imperialism was nearing its height. The Spanish, Dutch, French and – especially – the British had been colonizing for centuries. The Germans and Italians were desperately trying to catch up. (My maternal grandfather emigrated to the US in 1911 to avoid being drafted into Italy’s war to conquer Libya.)
It was the age of the coal-powered steamship, which added to the perceived need for colonies. Sea power, American Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan had argued in an influential book, was the key to national security. For navies to range far from their home bases, they needed coaling stations in distant places like Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines.
Very different security concerns underly Trump’s expansionist impulses. Controlling the newly melted sea lanes in the Northwest Passage is part of the reason for wanting Canada and Greenland. Keeping China at bay is his explanation for grabbing the Panama Canal. Solving the Mideast mess is the rationale for Gaza.
Loud protests at home and abroad have greeted Trump’s expansionist rhetoric. Critics have challenged his facts and his logic. Among their contentions:
- that China doesn’t pose a serious threat to the Panama Canal;
- that taking over other people’s land isn’t necessary to securing the Northwest Passage;
- that displacing two million Palestinians to build resort hotels is cruel and unworkable.
Perhaps most cogently, critics decry Trump’s refusal to rule out military force to accomplish these acquisitions. How, they ask, can we blast Russia for invading Ukraine or China for invading Taiwan if we feel justified in invading Greenland? Might always matters. But are we back to a world where might is the only right?
I’ve heard two responses to this. One is to take Trump seriously but not literally. He often says things he doesn’t do. His threats are often negotiating tactics.
The other, more radical response is that the United States under Trump doesn’t care if Russia occupies Ukraine or China occupies Taiwan. The world order that the US created after World War II is over, some of his supporters say, and godspeed. Let Russia and China have their spheres of influence. We’ll have ours.
If this radical response is the right one, Trump will have brought back William McKinley’s world in more ways than one.
Former longtime Wall Street Journal Asia correspondent and editor Urban Lehner is editor emeritus of DTN/The Progressive Farmer.
This article, originally published on February 19 by the latter news organization and now republished by Asia Times with permission, is © Copyright 2025 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved. Follow Urban Lehner on X @urbanize.
