Empire? Yes. 19th Century? Not So Much.
John Williams and Dennis R. Schmidt explore Trump’s Multilateral Imperialism – and why the future looks like the 20th century.
Commentary on President Donald Trump’s attacks on multilateral institutions increasingly reaches for the language of empire. The analogy is familiar: a return to nineteenth-century European imperialism, marked by great-power politics, control over foreign territory, informal international institutions embedding privilege, and far weaker restraints on the use of military force.
This is a common analogy amongst US foreign policy and national security elites. For decades, they have drawn seemingly clear and timeless lessons from the balance of power politics of nineteenth-century Europe, particularly the Congress of Vienna. They have been favoured at least since Henry Kissinger famously brought them to the White House and Foggy Bottom.
This, however, is the very foreign policy elite the Trump Administration lambasts as both non-strategic and subservient to a globalist elite, blaming it for dragging the United States into ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East and 30-plus years of failed policy towards China. In this telling, the very architects of America’s balance of power orthodoxy are not champions of stability but authors of decline.
If that indictment holds even partially true, then understanding today’s emerging international order may require looking beyond the familiar great-power playbook that has so thoroughly dominated US strategic thinking for a generation.
So what frames Trump’s foreign policy posture? The charge of imperialism is not wrong – but the history is. The best analogy is not the imperialism of the nineteenth century but a later, and more unsettling, model: the multilateral imperial order of the early twentieth century. That institutionalized and justified empire through racialized claims about civilization and fitness for self-government. It was managed not through unilateral conquest, but through international bodies that coordinated racialised domination while insulating great powers from political, let alone moral, accountability.
That distinction matters. The nineteenth-century analogy is not only misleading, but also self-servingly comforting: because it feels distant and finished, there is no need to confront how the racialised political structures and practices of empire continue to underpin the global North’s contemporary power and prosperity.
Why the Nineteenth Century Misleads
The nineteenth-century looms large in discourse about international relations. It is often imagined as the peak of both European imperial expansion and balance-of-power politics. But this framing obscures two inconvenient facts.
First, European empires did not peak in the nineteenth century. They expanded well into the twentieth. Britain and France acquired major new territories after World War I. Imperial governance became more bureaucratic, more internationalised, and more explicitly justified through international institutions and bureaucratic expertise.
Second, the most elaborate multilateral management of empire was constructed not in the age of Metternich, but in the aftermath of World War I. If today’s order is fragmenting and reforming simultaneously - if hierarchy is being rebuilt through institutions rather than discarded altogether - then the better historical guide lies between 1919 and 1939.
That period is typically remembered through a narrow, Eurocentric lens: the failure of the League of Nations to stop fascist aggression leading to World War II. But the League succeeded in something else entirely. It stabilised a hierarchical international order in which empire and colonial possessions remained the badge of great-power status; and ‘standard of civilisation’ defined the principles of the international legal order.
The Interwar Template: Multilateral Empire
The League of Nations’ mandate system was the institutional core of this order. Former German and Ottoman territories were redistributed to Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, and white-settler outposts such as Australia charged with a ‘sacred trust of civilization’ to exercise authority whilst, where possible, preparing the local population for eventual self-government.
Territories were graded according to supposed capacity for self-government. “A” mandates, mostly in the Middle East, were judged nearly ready for independence. “B” mandates, largely in Africa, would require prolonged supervision. “C” mandates, including Pacific islands and Southwest Africa, were treated as inherently incapable of sovereignty requiring permanent civilising oversight.
This was empire made multilateral. Authority was exercised collectively, justified legally, and morally insulated by claims of technocratic expertise and superior civilization. The system did not reject international cooperation but depended on it.
That architecture – not nineteenth-century conquest – is the more revealing analogue for Trump’s emerging worldview.
Trump’s Order: Hierarchy Without Apology
Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric and practice, from Venezuela to Greenland, consistently reject post-1945 principles of sovereign equality and legal restraint. But they do not reject multilateralism per se. Instead, they reimagine it as a tool for managing hierarchy.
Ad hoc great-power coordination mechanisms—what Trump has described as a “Board of Peace”— were part of the November 2025 US proposals on ending the war in Ukraine as well as within the Gaza peace framework endorsed by the UN. They signal a willingness to bypass established institutions in favor of selective, personalized arrangements. This is not isolationism. It is managed dominance.
The logic is visible across regions graded by their civilizational status. Europe is not treated as an equal partner but as a wayward subordinate. Administration rhetoric frames the continent as suffering civilizational decline. European states are becoming “non-European,” a thinly veiled racialized charge, and for abandoning the values of European Christendom that once justified their global influence.
Yet Europe is salvageable. With US guidance, particularly through empowering far-right populist movements, it can be restored to its proper place in history. This is the language of an “A mandate”: conditional autonomy under supervision.
Latin America occupies a different tier. When Trump invokes the Monroe Doctrine, the reference point is less James Monroe than Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which asserted Washington’s right to intervene against “chronic wrongdoing or … a generalized loosening of the ties of civilised society.” Venezuela fits this logic: a state requiring prolonged oversight, justified through claims of disorder, corruption, and incapacity. This sounds like a “B mandate”: long-term direct management facilitating US interests including resource extraction, rather than imminent independence and self-governance.
Iran sits outside even this framework. It is portrayed not as a civilization with political agency, but as ‘the [Middle East’s] chief destabilising force’. Trump’s rhetorical support for protest movements and military build-ups emphasises a logic of compliance or coercion. Unlike the open-ended trusteeships of the interwar period, this rejects responsibility without relinquishing judgment. Iran is neither partner nor ward, but simply a problem to be contained. The ‘C mandate’ analogy has its limits here, but the hierarchical logic holds.
Race, Civilization, and the Return of Hierarchy
What unites these cases is not geography but hierarchy. Political units are differentiated by perceived civilizational worth, capacity, and usefulness. Perceptions of cultural or racial characteristics confirm who belongs where in the order. Authority flows downward. Responsibility flows upward only selectively.
This logic has deep roots in twentieth-century international order. The “standard of civilization” once determined which political communities enjoyed full legal personality and which did not. Although formally dismantled after 1945, most notably through UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 on decolonization, its rhetoric and practice never fully disappeared. They reemerged in the language of capacity-building, good governance, reform, and developmental readiness.
Trump’s contribution is not invention but revival. His administration strips away liberal euphemism and reasserts hierarchy without apology. The insistence on a nineteenth-century analogy conveniently obscures this continuity. It allows commentators to treat imperialism as something external to modern Western institutions, rather than something historically embedded within them.
Why the Analogy Persists – and Who It Protects
The nineteenth-century frame is also self-serving. It places empire safely in the past. It suggests a clean break in 1914, as though imperial balance-of-power politics collapsed and were replaced by something entirely new.
More importantly, it insulates the United States. America’s formal colonial moment at the turn of the twentieth century appears anomalous rather than constitutive. The myth of an empire of liberty and moral progress, rather than subjugation, remains intact.
That narrative falters under scrutiny. Slavery, settler colonialism, and racial segregation were not peripheral to US development; they were foundational. The Civil War and Reconstruction supposedly ended the ‘original sin’ of chattel slavery and refitted the United States to move into the 20th century better aligned with the universalism of its founding declarations of rights, liberty, and equality. The early twentieth century, though, was also a peak period for racial hierarchy, eugenics, and racialized exclusion from the protections of the law. As W.E.B. Dubois famously argued in 1903, racial division – what he termed the ‘color line’ – is the defining problem of the twentieth century, shaping both US society and history and humanity at large.
The failure to reckon with that history is not accidental. Efforts to foreground it provoke intense political backlash precisely because they challenge the moral insulation the nineteenth-century analogy provides.
Not a Throwback, but a Resurrection
What is emerging in 2026 is unmistakably imperial. It embraces hierarchy, great-power privilege, and differentiated sovereignty. It proposes new institutional forms to manage these relationships, while side-lining the UN’s core commitments to equality, self-determination and legal restraint.
But it is not a return to some distant nineteenth century. It is a resurrection of a twentieth-century order that many would prefer to forget: a multilateral imperial system in which domination was cooperative, legalized, racialized, and normalized through institutions.
The analogy has its limits, of course. Contemporary technologies of domination are different. The global economy is more integrated. The environmental stakes are immeasurably higher. But the underlying ethos – the belief that some societies are fit to rule and others to be ruled – remains hauntingly familiar.
Trump’s imperialism is not an anachronism. It is a reminder that the past we failed to confront is still readily available for reuse.
John Williams is Professor in International Relations in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University.
Dennis Schmidt, is Assistant Professor in International Relations in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University.
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