Empire Logic Returns to International Relations

by David Townley

By asserting dominance over the Western Hemisphere, it appears that he is drawing from a playbook associated with figures such as Lincoln’s assassin and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

It is said that General Nathan Bedford Forrest, before founding the Ku Klux Klan, was a leader of the “Knights of the Golden Circle.” According to Slate critic Matthew Dessem, Jack Kershaw—the sculptor of the 25-foot monument erected in 1998 to the “Grand Wizard”—“was better known as part of the legal team for James Earl Ray [Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin] than as an artist, and it shows in the work.” The statue stood along Interstate 65 in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1998 to 2001 before being removed when the land changed ownership. Photo: CBS.

One year into his second presidential term, Donald Trump’s foreign-policy ambitions have produced a series of territorial claims ranging from Canada and the Panama Canal to—most controversially—Greenland. He has also effectively abducted the head of state of Venezuela, asserting that the United States is capable of governing the country and exploiting its oil, while issuing threats to the sovereignty of Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba.

Whatever motivates the forty-seventh president, his expansionist vision echoes a relatively obscure organization that flourished briefly in the mid-nineteenth century: the Knights of the Golden Circle. This secret society was founded in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1854 by a Virginia physician named George W. L. Bickley.

Because of its clandestine nature, much of the group’s membership remains hidden from historians. Accounts nevertheless suggest that its leaders included figures such as Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest—who later became the first “Grand Wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan—and John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

The society’s name was chosen to reflect the wealth expected from creating a slave-based empire initially comprising Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The imagined “Golden Circle,” centered in Havana, Cuba, would have controlled a substantial share of the global supply of cash crops such as tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar, and coffee—commodities dependent on large-scale enslaved labor.

The Knights’ ambitions were not merely territorial but ideological, rooted in the preservation of slavery and framed through the lens of “Manifest Destiny,” the belief that white Americans were destined to expand their dominion across the continent at the expense of Indigenous peoples.

Although the organization’s actual influence was limited, it embodied a broader nineteenth-century American assumption that territorial expansion could permanently secure a social order based on hierarchy and human bondage.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Vision

In the present day, American imperial impulses no longer wear the cloak of secret societies like the Knights of the Golden Circle. Instead, they emerge through presidential rhetoric, policy signaling, and deliberate ambiguity.

Under Trump, U.S. ambitions in the Western Hemisphere have been framed as annexationist gestures driven by regional dominance. Trump has even referred—without irony—to what he calls the “Donroe Doctrine,” a personalized and transactional reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, whose core premise asserted that the Americas lay exclusively within the U.S. sphere of influence.

Where the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned European powers against further colonization while professing American restraint, Trump’s version abandons any pretense of mutual sovereignty. Neighboring states are treated not as equals but as strategic assets or bargaining chips. The language is distinctly Trumpian—blunt and improvisational—yet it reinforces the notion that external powers have no role in the Western Hemisphere and that the United States alone holds ultimate authority.

Cuba sits at the center of this vision. Though Trump has not explicitly called for annexation, he has pursued coercive pressure as a substitute for territorial control. Efforts to disrupt Cuban energy supplies and renewed regime-change rhetoric reflect Washington’s longstanding treatment of Cuba as an unfinished project. Trump’s policy thus resembles the construction of an informal American empire.

The Knights of the Golden Circle envisioned Cuba not merely as within America’s orbit but as a territory to be absorbed outright. Their fixation on Havana as the center of the Golden Circle reflected a belief that Southern power depended on Caribbean dominance. Trump’s approach is less overt but strategically similar: Cuba remains a prize within reach, yet perpetually denied.

The same logic extends across the Americas. Trump’s threats toward Mexico blur the line between cooperation and coercion. Sovereignty becomes negotiable when framed as a U.S. national-security concern. Pressure on Venezuela and Colombia likewise reflects a readiness to treat political outcomes in the hemisphere as American entitlements.

What distinguishes this so-called “Trumpian annexationism” from earlier forms of U.S. dominance is its tone. It is unapologetically hierarchical and dismissive of multilateral norms, recalling an era when the United States acted first and justified later. Whereas Cold War policymakers cloaked interventions in ideological language, Trump’s rhetoric is nakedly transactional. Influence is something to be purchased, extracted, or imposed.

Here the parallel with the Knights of the Golden Circle becomes clear. The Knights pursued a hidden imperial vision sustained by slavery and racial hierarchy. Trump’s ambitions unfold openly through state power. Yet both rest on the same premise: that geography confers entitlement, and that the Americas belong to a fundamentally different moral category.

Seen in this light, Trump’s policies do not represent a radical break from U.S. history but rather a blunt revival of its imperial impulses. Maps may no longer be redrawn through formal conquest, but the logic that once animated the Golden Circle—the notion of hemispheric domination as destiny—has not disappeared. It has merely learned to speak the language of modern populism.