Axios reports:

MAGA is pressing the Trump administration to write a new chapter in America’s expansionist history — one that adds territory and influence as part of a new Western empire.

Why it matters: On its face, MAGA’s imperial turn is a head-spinning reversal for a movement built around hostility to “endless wars” in the Middle East.

• But reframed as hemispheric dominance, the right’s expansionist impulse fits a civilizational worldview: America as the enforcer of the West, bending weaker nations to its will.

What they’re saying: In the days after President Trump’s stunning capture of Nicolás Maduro, even some of MAGA’s loudest non-interventionists began casting strategic lands in America’s hemisphere — including Colombia, Cuba and Greenland — as ripe for colonization.

• “How can you get more ‘America First’ than Manifest Destiny 2.0?” “War Room” host Steve Bannon told NBC News.
• “Expansion is the American way. It has been since literally the first moments of its existence,” wrote The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh. “If Americans in the 1800s were as timid and weak as some of the naysayers today, we never would have even reached the Pacific.
• “[I]t’s up to us to keep pushing for the orderly governance of the world via American imperialism,” MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich said this week on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.

Zoom out: At its core, MAGA thought leaders are animated by the belief that America is the heir to ancient European empires — and thus the central guarantor of Western power. [Continue reading…]