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The year after fascist Italy forcibly seized Ethiopia’s capital, in 1937, Benito Mussolini’s minister of national education said, “A geographical revival is always correlated with a political revival.” Few statements so pithily capture what the MAGA project thinks it’s doing with foreign policy in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean—a revival of the supposed greatness of an imagined past at the expense of everyone else.
In recent weeks, U. S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick needled Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, about separatism in Alberta. In justifying tariffs on Canada, Trump himself asserted, “They [Canada] think they’re a state, but they’re not a state.” For good measure, Trump also posted an AI-edited image of himself lecturing European leaders in the Oval Office with a map in the background that showed Cuba, Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada as U. S. territory.
The year after fascist Italy forcibly seized Ethiopia’s capital, in 1937, Benito Mussolini’s minister of national education said, “A geographical revival is always correlated with a political revival.” Few statements so pithily capture what the MAGA project thinks it’s doing with foreign policy in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean—a revival of the supposed greatness of an imagined past at the expense of everyone else.
In recent weeks, U. S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick needled Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, about separatism in Alberta. In justifying tariffs on Canada, Trump himself asserted, “They [Canada] think they’re a state, but they’re not a state.” For good measure, Trump also posted an AI-edited image of himself lecturing European leaders in the Oval Office with a map in the background that showed Cuba, Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada as U. S. territory.
While the Trump administration’s revival of the imperialist Monroe Doctrine in Latin America has drawn critical attention, it is but a part of its hemispheric vision. Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and his economic and political war against Canada are not ad hoc; they are part of the administration’s neofascist vision for America’s “near abroad.”
On March 5 in Florida, Washington assembled the full complement of pro-U. S., right-wing Latin American states for a confab called the “Americas Counter Cartel Conference.” Sweating before a crowd of officials from Argentina and Honduras but not Mexico, and from Ecuador and El Salvador but not Brazil, U. S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared: “Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War, we call this strategic map the Greater North America.”
In the popular mind, fascism is thought of as a domestic political project. But fascist great powers of the 20th century all championed imperialist campaigns in their regions that were distinct in their violent ambition as compared to their liberal imperialist counterparts. Scholars like Paul Sweezy and Aimé Césaire even saw fascism as a mutation of imperialism. Fascists and imperialists alike engage in military buildups, expand territory through conquest, construct exclusionary spheres of influence with other great powers, and impose settler colonialism and unequal exchange on foreign territories. Fascist foreign policy is imperialist. But it also has a violently counterrevolutionary edge.
MAGA can be understood as an elite counterrevolutionary project that serves the interests of capital by using the state to impose violence on its enemies and redistribute wealth upward. The goal is to overturn the legacy of the New Deal order and the civil rights that came with it. MAGA’s Greater North America is the overseas extension of this project: providing aid to reactionary governments, subverting progressive and socialist ones, and repressing organized labor by any means across the hemisphere.
Every empire lies to itself about what it’s doing, but the engine of fascist empire is a stab-in-the-back myth that treats conspiratorial grievance as its motor fuel. It accounts for real suffering in the present by blaming often-fake political betrayals in the past.
The Nazis insisted that Germany only lost World War I because of Jews, socialists, and liberals at home—enemies within. Mussolini’s Italy similarly accused liberals and the Western alliance of vittoria mutilata (mutilated victory), sacrificing Italian troops in the “Great War” while being denied the spoils of victory. In Francisco Franco’s Spain, it was the same—liberals and their kooky Enlightenment ideas caused the decline of the Spanish Empire. More recently, Aleksandr Dugin, an ultranationalist who rose to prominence as a crackpot geopolitician, argued in 1997 that Russia’s greatness had been spoiled by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms helped end the Cold War. For Dugin, Russia’s problems flowed from the treason of reformers under Gorbachev and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Greater North America is built on this same template, scapegoating politicians past for deficiencies in the present. At a meeting two days after Hegseth’s declaration, Trump justified his campaign of violence and foreign interference by telling regional leaders that cartels had taken over the continent because it had “been abandoned by the United States for so many years.”
Hegseth, fingering the stab wounds, decried how “previous leaders … reduced our power and presence in this hemisphere, opting for a benign neglect that was anything but benign. … Millions of illegal aliens invaded our borders. … They raped, they poisoned, they murdered innocent Americans. They terrorized our cities, our towns, and our neighborhoods like they do yours.” Elbridge Colby, one of Hegseth’s deputies, amplified the stab-in-the-back myth by blaming “[h]ard-left regimes” in the now-Greater North America for having “failed in their own countries and exported that failure” in the form of mass migration.
This mythmaking all fuels the administration’s agenda of ethno-religious chauvinism, civilizational conflict, and political warfare against left-coded regimes and parties. True to form, Hegseth argued that making Greater North America requires acknowledging “what was lost and … what needs to be restored.” Expressly identifying the right-wing governments present as “offsprings of Western civilization,” he defined the stakes as “whether our nations will be and remain Western nations with distinct characteristics, Christian nations under God.” To forge Greater North America, the United States and its allies must violate the sovereignty of others, must impose regimes of secrecy and extrajudicial murder, must extinguish progressive forces in society. According to Hegseth, building Greater North America in this way will “defend our national interest and restore our national identities.”
The results of such rhetoric can be seen clearly over the past 18-plus months: an invasion of Venezuela, the kidnapping of its president, and the large-scale theft of its energy resources. A bombing campaign in Ecuador with U. S. support. An illegal blockade of Cuba. A murder spree in the Caribbean—at least 70 strikes killing 234 people suspected (but not confirmed) of drug smuggling. A CIA assassination campaign in Mexico, accompanied by extensive lawfare targeting officials from the progressive-leaning Morena, Mexico’s ruling party. A $20 billion currency swap extended to Javier Milei’s crypto-fascist regime in Argentina, which Trump publicly threatened to provide only if Milei’s party won reelection. And a deportation program in which not only the majority of third-country nationals have been dumped in the “Greater Norther American” perimeter (Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, and El Salvador) but also, according to Human Rights Watch, hundreds have been tortured and disappeared in El Salvador in particular.
What’s more, understanding Trump’s Greater North America on fascist terms suggests the worst is yet to come. America’s ongoing blockade of Cuba—which has already more than doubled Cuba’s infant mortality rate in less than a year—has led many to fear that an invasion of the island is in the works. Nothing can be ruled out, but there is reason to think that Greenland and Canada are more profitable targets for the politics of counterrevolution.
First, fascist geopolitics is obsessed with the “perimeter.” As Hegseth has explained, imagining a Greater North America matters precisely because it directs America’s power against its “immediate security perimeter”—where Canada and Greenland are the northern flank of this imagined boundary.
There is also the material payoff of looking north. The fascists of old rationalized the dispossession and territorial conquests of their empires with reference to living space. Nazi Germany sought lebensraum; Italy sought spazio vitale; and Japan sought hakko ichiu and the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” All refer to a geographical revival that grows out of domestic counterrevolution.
A section of the MAGA coalition has been incubating its own idea of living space since Trump’s first term. For advocates of the so-called network-state, Greenland is the crown jewel. The ideology of the network-state—sometimes dubbed “freedom cities”—follows the venture-capital logic of success as disinvestment or exit, which translates politically into escaping from the strictures of the nation-state system. Advocates are supposed to physically relocate to real territories that they can autonomously govern as super-empowered special economic zones with their own political community (complete with diplomats, cryptocurrency, and security arrangements). Network-state advocates have vocally fantasized about Greenland as the ideal “frontier” for tech-sector capitalists to “settle,” forging new sovereignties within the existing Rand McNally version of the world map.
As a practical matter, though, the leading edge of an assault against Greenland and Canada will not be tanks in the streets but rather forms of political subversion that seek to create circumstances for either military escalation or an ultimatum. You might call this gray-zone tactics with U. S. characteristics. Some of these network-state boosters are actively trying to establish a beachhead in Greenland. There is already a U. S. military installation in Greenland (Pituffik, formerly known as Thule Air Base). In August, a Texas-based company with connections to Trump that was only created in 2025—Greenland Energy—was reported to be moving drilling equipment into Greenland without permission or notification.
It’s not hard to imagine this mix of frontier chauvinism, oligarchic wealth, and natural resources coming together to create new pretexts for increased military pressure. Throughout much of America’s own history, territorial expansion involved mobilizing the power of the state to provide cover for the acts of dispossession carried out by brazen American cowboy capitalists. It is conceivable that the U. S. state would use claims of protecting American “interests” to demand dramatic concessions of sovereignty in the name of “security.”
This risk has only risen with the newly signed tripartite agreement among the United States, Greenland, and Denmark. Washington and Copenhagen have competing interpretations of what they agreed to, with Trump insisting that he has the right to set up as many military bases as he deems necessary while simultaneously controlling foreign investment in Greenland, sovereignty be damned.
U. S. allies can’t simply wait out the Trump administration, hoping for the restoration of something resembling sanity. Fascist geopolitics has become embedded in America’s far right, creating an enduring intellectual underpinning for Trump’s irredentism toward Canada and Greenland. As a result, countries in the region must prepare accordingly.
Over the past 80 years, U. S. policymakers have frequently invoked the specter of Munich and warned against the dangers of appeasing fascist aggression. Often, these warnings were exaggerated. But for America’s neighbors, they might now offer valuable insight for dealing with Washington’s threats.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.
Van Jackson is an associate professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, and author of five books, including The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (with Michael Brenes, Yale University Press, 2025). He also writes the Un-Diplomatic newsletter and co-hosts the Un-Diplomatic Podcast with Matt Duss and Julia Gledhill. X: @WonkVJ
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Donald Trump’s dangerous fixation with imperial aesthetics.
The commentariat persists in misrepresenting the U. S. president and his actions.