(CNN) — The Roman Emperor Titus has one. Napoleon Bonaparte ordered up the world’s most famous example. And the Duke of Wellington’s iconic version is the gateway to London’s Hyde Park.
Now, Donald Trump wants his own ceremonial arch. And his latest architectural passion project may tell history rather more about the 45th and 47th president than other examples of his second-term Washington makeover blitz.
The Arch of Titus in Rome marks the capture of Jerusalem in AD 70. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris honors the dead of Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars and France’s subsequent fallen warriors. The arch honoring Wellington celebrates the French emperor’s eventual defeat.
This history reveals one problem.
Trump so far lacks the triumph to justify a triumphal arch. The US stalemate with Iran has revealed deficits in US power rather than demonstrated its dominance. And he recently dismissed the conflict as “small potatoes.”
To finesse this problem, the president billed his planned arch near Arlington Cemetery — which would obliterate sight lines for famed Washington monuments — as celebrating the Declaration of Independence, with a foot of elevation for each year since 1776.
But Trump has admitted his building spree is an attempt to impose his persona on Washington in perpetuity. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone,” he recently confided to New York magazine.
Even by his standards, the president’s decision to spend so much of his time on monuments is extraordinary. He’s flexing brazen power and revealing a sense of political impunity that midterm election voters might punish if they judge him indifferent to their economic plight.
But Trump is not only trying to redesign Washington. This is about more than blinging up statues; building a ballroom/drone launchpad that will overshadow the White House; or botching the renovation of the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool.
Trump isn’t just into the trappings of empire. He wants the empire itself.
His foreign policy — bristling with gunboat diplomacy, naval blockades, grabs for other nations’ resources, and a map fixation — recalls Victorian-age adventurism in which military might was matched with trade and finance dominance.
Trump is also tapping into America’s own colonial heritage, copying his 19th-century role model President William McKinley’s tariff wars. And he’s expanded the 1828 Monroe Doctrine to lodge a US claim over the Western Hemisphere.
The difficult questions raised by Trump’s 21st-century imperialism
Trump’s hardly a history buff. His foreign policy emerged through osmosis from a personality wired for confrontation, life lessons that monetary wealth equals power and a sense that the strong can bully the weak.
But America First ideologues have also tried to encode his populist nationalism in documents like his administration’s national security strategy. Top White House official Stephen Miller notably argued on CNN that the “iron laws” of the world mean America must rule with strength, force and power.
Of course, this is a stark breach with the US foreign policy creed based on alliances and international institutions that made the US the world’s preeminent power and prevailed over fascism, Japanese imperialism and Soviet communism. Trump aspires to a world of autocrats ruling geographic spheres of influence, with the ascendant US lording over lesser powers like Canada or the EU.
This all raises some difficult questions.
The sins of empires are embedded in the ideology of the left. And the West has for decades been trying to divert the question of what restitution is due to nations once under the colonial yoke.
But does Trump have a point — albeit a politically incorrect one? Is this America First power play a reasonable approach to a world in which the postwar consensus was fraying well before he arrived? In the race with China for contested resources, could a more muscular US posture and a narrower, more nationalistic definition of American interests make sense?
Or has Trump misjudged America’s power, and the willingness of foes and allies alike to wilt before it?
And does his anachronistic worldview mean he’s fighting 21st-century geopolitical battles, including a growing bond crisis and a Beijing-Tehran-Moscow-Pyongyang axis — with a 19th-century approach?
What is behind the ‘Donroe Doctrine’?
The White House is looking to the distant past to shape the future.
Last year, with an eye on China, it appended a Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, updating the 200-year-old eviction notice for European colonialists in America’s hemispheric backyard. Its support for right-wing nationalists in Latin America and extrajudicial killings of supposed drug boat operators in the Caribbean and the Pacific are an implicit statement that Trump’s America is so powerful that no law or rival can stop it doing exactly as it likes.
Empire vibes also cloud Trump’s deal with Venezuela to jointly exploit 17 oil fields. The plan is to fill depleted US reserves, lower gasoline prices and ease dependence on vulnerable Middle East export routes like the Strait of Hormuz.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sunday made clear who dictates Venezuela’s destiny.
“We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela. We control the sale of oil outside of their country,” he told ABC News’ “This Week.”
“So right now, they are forced to work in partnership with us and they are working in partnership with us,” Wright said. “It’s drawing billions of dollars in investment and it’s transforming that region from a region of conflict to a region of commerce.”
But at what cost?
Trump’s deal legitimizes the repressive election-stealing regime left behind when he ousted dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. It recalls empires that plundered resources from vassal states to swell their wealth. He’s hardly shying from the comparison, saying on September 1 that Venezuela’s oil was “unbelievable value.”
“We’re going to be taking that oil out,” the president said.
And Trump now poses as the distant viceroy who will decide when Venezuelans get to decide their own futures. Asked when elections would take place, he said, “I just don’t think they’re ready yet. You know, it’s very new.”
Former Venezuelan oil minister Ricardo Hausmann told CNN’s Richard Quest last week the deal “is a scandal.”
“I think this is criminal” Hausmann said. “I think this is abusive. I think this is the most imperialistic thing the US has ever done in its history.”
Venezuela is critical to understanding the administration’s theory of power. The daring special forces raid that ousted Maduro left it hungry for new conquests.
“Nobody is going to fight the United States, militarily, over the future of Greenland,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper after the raid, stating that the US “should have” the vast island, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Such hubris also led the US into the kind of war Trump promised he’d never fight. Now in its seventh month, the Iran war flared up again this weekend with US strikes on Tehran’s tankers and reprisal attacks.
The Iran war is a study of military might and its limitations
Tehran’s conventional forces are shredded. Previous Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Yet the revolutionary regime built on resistance to perceived US imperialism survived through asymmetric warfare and drones. Its resilience stretched US naval forces and challenged assumptions about Washington’s power beyond the Middle East. Who, for instance, now really believes the US could win a maritime war against China over Taiwan?
The administration might have finally stumbled on a way to get oil through the Iran-threatened Strait of Hormuz and to choke Tehran economy. But perpetually shepherding tankers would be massively costly. Many analysts believe regime change in Tehran is a pipe dream. And reopening the strait would simply be restoring a pre-war status quo.
Back home, Americans faced their highest-ever Labor Day gas prices. Diesel hit all-time highs Friday — hiking transportation costs and auguring yet more inflation. Consumer anger is deepened by another of Trump’s 19th-century fancies — tariffs, which haven’t revived US industry but have hit every wallet.
These are hardly the triumphs to justify a Trump arch.
‘Land to bury our dead’
The critique of Trump’s infatuation with empire is not that American might is worthless. It’s more about how he’s using it.
American hard power — a military shield over Europe and Japan, and policing of the seas — has protected the industrialized world for 80 years. But it was matched with soft power like the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe while Americans came as liberators rather than colonizers. “You know, the only thing America’s ever asked for, particularly after World War II, was no land, no empire, just give us enough land to bury our dead,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell often used to say — in a now-archaic Republican era.
Trump is right that Europeans took advantage of America by investing in generous welfare states rather than defense. But by endlessly attacking US allies, he’s also loosening the foundations of American global power. A combined US-North American and EU trade front against China, for instance, would be far more effective than Washington alone.
Meanwhile, the US struggles in Iran and what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called Trump’s “rupture” with the West suggest Trump’s imperial ambitions are built on caricatures. He’s wielding a big stick rather than understanding what made empires strong. Rome’s wasn’t built in a day; nor were those of Paris and London. It called for a mix of force and diplomacy, forging new alliances and the mastery of localized global politics.
Alan Lester, a British historian and critic of the Empire, says Trump sees power “purely in terms of economic leverage or violent, military-force leverage — and sometimes that works.” Thus, in Venezuela, Trump’s regime replacement could yield profits for the US, no matter the moral compromises he’s made.
Yet, in the long term, his imperialism is doomed, argues Lester, a professor at the University of Sussex. “Even at its peak, (Britain) was able to project power in so many places simultaneously because it rationed out its military force very carefully, and because of the framework of exactly the kinds of agreements with other powers that Trump finds anathema,” Lester said.
Britain kept its grip by dodging wars that would drain its power, through alliances with the Ottoman Empire; via its use of the Indian army to project force; and because of the Royal Navy’s dominance, which the overstretched and under-shipped US Navy may not be able to emulate.
Britain’s empire was only bankrupted by two world wars. Trump seemed to understand the peril of overreach after America’s post-9/11 quagmires, pledging in his inaugural address last year that his second term would be defined by “the wars we never get into.”
But, stunningly, he fell into the same old trap, and his multibillion-dollar Iran conflict may have already squelched his imperial ambitions.
So America’s excursion back to the 19th century may be short-lived. If so, Trump’s new arch may come to stand as not a shrine to personal power but a monument to presidential folly.
The-CNN-Wire
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Why Trump’s dream of an arch is his most revealing legacy play 2026
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