Don't Be James K. Polk
There are good reasons why the United States has given up on territorial expansion since 1898
In many ways James K. Polk was one of America’s most successful presidents.
Elected in 1844, Polk had one overriding goal: the expansion of the territory of the United States. To do this, he took three bold moves in quick succession. First, he followed through on the previous administration’s controversial plan to annex the then-independent Republic of Texas. Second, his annexation of Texas provoked a war with Mexico, which he prosecuted with a ferocity that saw the U.S. Army occupy Mexico City and the United States annex the whole of what was then northern Mexico. Third, through a mixture of bellicose rhetoric (“Fifty-four forty or fight!”), military brinksmanship, and savvy negotiation (he accepted the 49th parallel as the border rather than the that of 54 degrees 40”), he pushed the British out of what would become the Pacific Northwest. Within four years, he had added the the territory of the future states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Oregon, as well as parts of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho to the United States. Having achieved all of his goals in four years, he went home to Tennessee and did not seek reelection. All and all, it was one of the most impressive and consequential administrations in American history.
I think that Donald Trump would like to be a modern James K. Polk.
He has a portrait of Polk hanging in the Oval Office, and Trump is the first U.S. President since McKinley to seriously contemplate increasing the territory of the United States with his announced desire to annex Greenland, the Panama Canal, and (maybe?) Canada. This is bad. It misunderstands Polk’s historical legacy in ways that are dangerous and diminish the United States.
Don’t be James K. Polk.
The doctrine of prescription, which is the legal idea that the brute passage of time can extinguish legal rights, is key to all legal systems. Some systems, like Roman law, had relatively short periods, and some systems, like English and American common law, have relatively long periods. No functional legal system, however, lets parties litigate long-ago wrongs in the present. I think that a similar principle makes sense when it comes to historical injustices. Americans tend to have very short historical memories, and often this leads us be naive and at bit obtuse. However, one has only to look at places where people continue to press centuries old and sometimes millennia old claims, to see the virtue of short American memories. Putin invaded Ukraine in part to assert Russian “rights” based on complex stories about Tsars and the Kievan Rus that purport to go back centuries, and right-wing Israelis help to keep alive the festering violence of the Middle East by building settlements in the West Bank because that land — Judea and Samaria in right-wing Israeli argot — formed the heartland of the ancient Kingdom of David. Seen in this light, America’s gold fish memory looks pretty good.
Hence, as a United States citizen who was born and grew up in the Mexican cession, I am “happy” that Polk’s project was successful. In the very long term, it was “good.” My problem with Polk, is that politics cannot really be conducted in the very long term, and there are few ideas that have been more pernicious, especially in modern times, than the idea that a far distant and speculative millennial future justifies a lot of concrete violence in the here and now. Ultimately that is the logic of Stalinist purges and the Cambodian killing fields. The reality is that it is very difficult to understand the world, and the farther that we try to peer into the future the more likely we are to be wrong.
James K. Polk is a good example of this.
Polk didn’t set out to create the thriving United States of the 21st century. He had no vision of the Wasatch Front world I grew up in or Silicon Valley or any of the other aspects of the modern American West. He didn’t even conquer Mexico because he imagined the rising industrial colossus of the post-Civil War United States. Rather, his vision for the territory that he conquered for America was the extension of the Southern system of slave-owning plantation agriculture. Abraham Lincoln, for example, opposed the annexation of Texas, writing “[W]e should never knowingly lend ourselves, directly or indirectly… to find new places for [slavery] to live in.” Lincoln and other Whigs warned that Polk’s conquests would create intolerable stresses within the Republic over the expansion of slavery. They were right. Polk’s dream of Arizona cotton plantations was always doomed by climate, but the Whig concerns about the expansion of slavery exploded into fights over Bleeding Kansas, and slaveowners, emboldened by the success of Southern expansion under Polk, pushed ever more extreme claims for slavery in the territories. In the end, this resulted in the Supreme Court’s dreadful decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford declaring that no Black person could be a citizen in the United States. Less than two decades after Polk’s victory, Americans would be slaughtering one another on the battle fields of the Civil War in no small part because of the way that massive territorial expansion supercharged the politics of slavery.
The last effort at American territorial expansion came in the Spanish American War of 1898. While the fact is almost totally forgotten by contemporary Americans, that war led to the American occupation of the Philippines and an insurrection against the United State by Filipino nationalists. The suppression of that insurrection led to a years long, dirty guerrilla war that claimed thousand of American lives and tens of thousands of Filipino lives. There is a reason why the United States got out of the business of territorial expansion after 1898. It’s a brutal and dangerous activity. Furthermore, the great discovery of American statesmen after 1945 was that the United States didn’t need to annex territory to project power and remake the world order in ways that benefited the United States. Crude territorial annexation creates unforeseeable complications and destroys the good will toward the United States that can be a potent geopolitical asset. The America of Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush had power and influence of which crude imperialists like James K. Polk couldn’t even dream.
There are real strategic and economic issues surrounding Greenland. There is absolutely no reason, however, that the United States needs to annex Greenland to protect and advance its interests. The same is true of the Panama Canal. Trump’s rhetorical and economic aggression against Canada is, if anything, even more egregious. Canada, along with the United Kingdom, has been the USA’s closest ally for the better part of a century. After 9/11, Canada sent its soldiers to fight and die in our war in Afghanistan. Their economic “aggression” consists of the outrageous effrontery of selling goods to American consumers at reasonable prices. They have their own history, culture, and institutions. There is no evidence that any appreciable number of Canadians wish to see their country annexed by the United States. The fact that the longest demilitarized border in the world lies along the 49th parallel is a testimony to the fact that the American-Canandian relationship has been working very, very well for a very, very long time. That’s not to say that the U.S. and Canada can’t have trade disputes over a percentage here or there on steel or timber tariffs, but the notion that America has been a victim of vicious Canadian protectionism is an illusion. The idea that an American president would suggest destroying the sovereignty of one of our closest allies is obscene.
Ultimately, Trumpian fantasies of territorial expansion have no geopolitical or economic logic. Rather, they are fueled by dreams of James K. Polk-like greatness, the idea that if more of the earth’s surface is colored American on future maps, Donald Trump will be remembered as a great American president. This is a destructive fantasy, and America’s own experience with Polk’s expansion shows the dangers of such adventurism. There is, however, one area where I do think that Trump should take a lesson from America’s eleventh president.
James K. Polk was a devoted free trader who lowered American tariffs.
Until next time.
PS — I am experimenting with opening comments. If you want to, feel free to drop your thoughts over at http://nateoman.substack.com. If it turns into a nasty scrum, I will deem the experiment a failure.