Dead, But Not Gone: Manifest Destiny in the 21st Century

Injecting nostalgic rhetoric into politics is nothing new, but it usually serves as a ‘gimme putt’ for applause, or to inspire a triumphant return of bygone glories and timeless values. They rarely lead to offence, and it is even rarer that those national myths are called into question nearly as often as the politicians who hope to capitalize on them. This was the case, however, when former U.S. President Donald Trump proudly urged Americans to “reaffirm our heritage as a free nation” and be ready to “embrace the next frontier: America’s manifest destiny in the stars” during his 2020 state of the union address. In short order, various commentators began the familiar finger-pointing routine. Chiraag Bains, a director at the think-tank Demos, argued that Manifest destiny was “used to justify the killing and removal of Native peoples” and its glorification was outrageous and offensive. Right-leaning viewers, including NASA deputy administrator Jim Morhard, simply viewed it as “the belief that the United States was destined to promote democracy and free enterprise across North America.” The debate was centred around how to view the past, and which eras (or terms associated with them) should still be used to inspire us. An important question not considered, however, was whether manifest destiny (or remnants of it) still perseveres in the 21st century.

When John O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ in 1845, it was in reference to President James K. Polk’s platform of westward expansion. This included a claim to the southern portion of the Oregon Territory, and plans to annex northern Mexico and the upstart Republic of Texas. O’Sullivan decreed that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” while spreading the “great experiment of liberty” Westward. Though first used midway through the 19th century, the origins of manifest destiny arguably dated to John Winthrop’s “City upon a hill” sermon in 1630. Envisioning a unique land ordained by God, divinity would play a considerable role in the concept of manifest destiny. The landscape of America, it was believed by most, rightly belonged to European settlers. In his second annual address in 1830, Andrew Jackson summarized the view of most Americans on the frontier and in the political hubs of the east:

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion.

As described by Albert K. Weinberg in his 1935 book Manifest Destiny, strategic and economic concerns also drove westward expansion, in addition to the desire to spread Christianity and democracy across the continent. The price of this expansion was paid in toil, agony, and gold - indeed, those offended by the modern glorification of manifest destiny are far from revisionists or Trump reactionaries. It’s existence, however, is not up for debate: through a series of wars and major land purchases, the United States avoided the fate of their republican forebears in Europe. Rather than a balkanized continent full of counties, they had a single continent-sized country stretching “from sea to shining sea”. The midwestern heartland and the great Mississippi offered efficient transportation and agricultural self-sufficiency, in addition to strategic depth from powerful European fleets roaming the Atlantic. American democracy, Christianity, and enterprise had followed wherever and whenever their political borders grew.

In their book American Foreign Relations Since 1600, historians Kurt Hanson and Robert Beisner argue that the purchase of Alaska in 1867 marked the end of the “age of manifest destiny”. Others argue it had certainly ended by 1890, when the US Census Bureau declared the end of the ‘frontier line’, and settlers had poured into the new territories to capitalize on (or exploit, depending on one’s perspective) America’s immense riches. These views, however, conceive manifest destiny with blinders - relegating it to the spread of America across the continental U.S. only. Though this has been its traditional interpretation, the distinction that manifest destiny must have halted at the Pacific is a parochial one. The inertia of American expansion lurched forward across the Pacific and Caribbean, with similar justifications and methods used to occupy their continental territories. Should, then, the definition of manifest destiny be an arbitrary game of dates and semantics? If the same practices took place for the same reasons, not identifying American expansion past 1867 as a continuation of manifest destiny is to indulge in both inconsistent and arbitrary historical thinking.

The Monroe Doctrine, American’s foreign policy which affirmed their intention to be the only major power in the Western Hemisphere, was amended in 1904. It allowed the US to “exercise international police power” anywhere in the entire Western hemisphere that was plagued by “flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence”. Known as the Roosevelt Corollary, it was under this heading that they occupied or invaded Caribbean and South American countries dozens of times around the turn of the century and beyond: Nicaragua in 1909 and 1912, Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Guatemala in 1920, Honduras in 1924, and numerous others in the first quarter of the twentieth century alone. Though promotion of democracy was an aspect of these incursions, they also served to protect business interests, and to ensure a strategic foothold. Their seizure of the Panama Canal Zone in 1905 (and again in 1925) gave America immense power as the gatekeeper in the Pacific. Through these efforts, in the words of Andrew Roberts, “the Caribbean gradually became an American lake”. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana, America’s casus belli for the Spanish-American War of 1898 (dubious circumstances aside), also served to ideally position America in the Pacific. Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii were all absorbed in less than six months. Spreading democracy, exporting settlers, protecting business interests, and rooting out strategic competitors – in short, manifest destiny.

The isolationism and consolidation which characterized America during the Great Depression and early portion of World War II was shattered in late 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbour. This ushered in a new era of American expansion and global involvement, not by claiming new territories for themselves, but helping to liberate and rebuild former allies and foes alike. Then on, manifest destiny became intertwined with confronting communism and grew into something larger still: exporting democratic capitalism not only across their landmass or even their continent - but across the globe. During the Cold War, it became America’s duty to “keep alight the torch of freedom” as Churchill had predicted they would in 1938. As Patton tanks faced T-62s at the Fulda Gap and along Korea’s DMZ in a decades-long staring contest, it was American institutions, finance, and culture which reached where their tanks could not. If ‘soft power’ failed, America created (and still maintains) over 800 military bases overseas, from ‘Little Americas’ to covert installations. They stand as bastions of American power from Canada to the Congo.

But can America’s Cold War efforts and their dozens of foreign interventions be considered as manifest destiny in the same way that ‘settling the frontier’ was? To Albert K. Weinberg, manifest destiny was the expansion of America’s political, commercial, and strategic scope across the plains. To Harvard historian Frederick Merk, it was “a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example… generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven”. More recently still, Robert Miller stresses it is intangibility: “The special virtues of the American people and their institutions, the mission of the United States to redeem and remake the West in the image of the developed East, and an irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty”.

Regardless of various historians' particularities, it is clear that these defining characteristics did not disappear in 1867 or 1890. Manifest destiny certainly flew under a different banner since its original conception (simply replace Miller’s “west” with “war-torn Europe and Asia”), but its chameleonic nature does not hide its existence. Despite American overseas troop deployments at 60 year lows, perhaps Trump was correct, after all, when he characterized America’s efforts to colonize Mars and establish a Space Force as manifest destiny. Trump is hardly a 21st century Jackson riding a metaphorical spaceship into the frontier, but it appears increasingly likely that space has become a new theatre for military and resource competition. The outrage at Trump’s glorification of manifest destiny makes one thing clear, however. Charles Baudelaire was right - “the prettiest trick of the devil is to make us believe he doesn’t exist”.

Works Cited

Armus, Teo. “Trump’s ‘manifest Destiny’ in Space Revives Old Phrase to Provocative Effect”. The Washington Post, edited Feb. 5, 2020.

Jones, Steve. “American Manifest Destiny and Modern Foreign Policy” ThoughtCo Humanities, updated December 6th, 2020.

Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. Harvard University Press. 1963.

Miller, Robert J. Native America, Discovered And Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, And Manifest Destiny. Greenwood. p. 120. 2006.

Roberts, Andrew. A History of The English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. Harpercollins, 2007

Vine, David. “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?” Politico, August 2015.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of The United States. Harpercollins, 1980.