🧠 Inside the Mind of Trump: Empire, Restraint, and the Hemispheric Gamble

As an aside the latest FP’s post “India’s Great-Power Delusions” will make an interesting future post

Ten years ago, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator and upended American politics. He entered the White House not as a politician, but as a brand. Today, as the world stands at multiple geopolitical flashpoints—Israel–Iran, India–Pakistan, China–Taiwan—the question is not just what will Trump do, but what kind of world does Trump want to preside over?

Comeback King or New Emperor?

The interlude of Biden’s presidency—whether viewed as rightful or rigged—has only intensified Trump’s mythos. He is no longer just the comeback kid; he is the comeback king in a time when cries of “no king” echo through a fractured republic. A decade on from his initial successful run, he should be an elder statesman but in fact he’s just getting started with another 3 years to go. It’s unparalleled influence in the American Republic since FDR who managed to dominate the 30’s through to the mid 40’s; Trump will be the dominant force in US politics from mid teens through to at least 2029.

But what does he want to rule?

The MAGA worldview has always leaned inward. Hemispheric security, not global dominance. In this vision:

• The Panama Canal, the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America are priorities.

• Greenland and the Arctic matter more than Gaza or Kyiv.

• The Indo-Pacific exists to contain China—not to transform it.

This is not new. It’s a debate that dates back to the Founding Fathers: Should America remain a fortified republic or become an imperium?

A Global Moment, a Personal Choice

Right now, Trump faces a defining choice. If he holds back while Israel is pressured into a ceasefire with Iran, he affirms a restrained America, one that no longer leads every conflict from the front. But if the U.S. pushes for regime change or escalates toward open war, he recommits to imperial overreach.

It’s not just about geopolitics. It’s about narrative. Will Trump be remembered as the man who solidified a smaller, defensible empire—or as Julius before Augustus, paving the way for a post-American world?

Empire and the Arithmetic of Scale

Strongmen are rising globally because scale—and its control—remains the central prize. MAGA knows its demographic moment is closing. Hence the need for power that transcends votes: something more enduring than consensus.

But history isn’t static. Iran is not Iraq. India is not a fractured Raj. China is not Qing. These are civilizations with internal legitimacy, imperial memories, and national borders born of millennia, not maps drawn in Whitehall or Langley.

America, by contrast, is a nation built on abstraction—freedom, democracy, opportunity. These ideals may inspire, but they do not insulate. The age of asymmetry means that even when military supremacy is maintained, moral legitimacy is harder to sustain.

The Fog of Empire

Every empire eventually learns the same truth: scale is a blessing when it is organic, and a curse when it is imposed. The Islamic world, Africa, and Latin America were broken into fragments. The Indo-Persian-Chinese worlds, by contrast, endured. Even when invaded, they did not dissolve. A line from the Persian series Jeyran captures it well—“Herat is not just a place. It is part of our soul.”

Trump may not care about Herat. But he understands loyalty, legacy, and loss. He knows that once you show your hand too often—militarily or diplomatically—you start to lose the game. And so, the world waits—not just on policy, but on personality. Not just on MAGA’s logic, but on Trump’s instinct. In his head right now is not just the future of America. It is the scale of its ambition.

🧩 Addendum: The Irony of Empire in the Americas

There’s a historical irony that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Pre-colonial Latin America was home to two of the most formidable indigenous empires the world has known—the Aztecs and the Incas. By contrast, North America, particularly the land that would become the United States, had no comparably centralized imperial structures. Its indigenous societies were complex, but fragmented.

Yet today, the outcome is inverted. North America, once politically decentralized, is now dominated by just two vast nation-states—the United States and Canada. Meanwhile, the lands of the former Aztec and Incan empires have been splintered into dozens of smaller republics, each tracing its origin to a Spanish or Portuguese colonial province rather than to the indigenous scale that preceded conquest.

The lesson is stark:

Independence is not always scale. And coloniality often outlives the colonizers. In the Americas, imperial scale survived not through the inheritors of empire, but through those who learned how to aggregate under new rules. Scale, it seems, is either favoured—by history, by geography, by systems of power—or painfully, violently won.