Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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U.S. apologist?

Chris Cutrone

Letter published in the CPGB Weekly Worker 1522 (January 23, 2025).

Paul Demarty’s article, “Rise of lifeboat imperialism” (Weekly Worker 1521, January 16, 2025) cites my essay published in Compact Magazine (January 9, 2025) on the prospects of U.S. expansion into Greenland, disputing my assertion that the U.S. has treated its opponents as “Slave States”: repetitions of the fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War. 

Demarty raises Cambodia as a disproving counterexample. But the U.S. did not simply “carpet-bomb Cambodia” but targeted Vietnamese Communist forces operating there during a larger war. The Cambodian government was not the opponent of the U.S., nor of course were the people of Cambodia — or of Vietnam: certainly, they were not the enemies of the people of America. The U.S. did not demand “unconditional surrender” of them but a negotiated settlement. That says something. 

Even so, the U.S. war in Southeast Asia was a crime, and one that was opposed by many people and for many good reasons — including vociferously and notably by the original “containment” Cold War strategist himself, George F. Kennan. Still, the Communists committed many crimes of their own against the people of Vietnam, Laos and, needless to say, Cambodia. 

It’s long past time for us to remember this history differently, and no longer somehow as still a live issue when it is not. The Cold War is over, for over a generation now. After suffering millions of deaths and the permanent poisoning of its territory to last through the generations as effect of its war, Vietnam now depends for security on a military and economic alliance with the U.S. against threats from its ancient neighbor and enemy, China. 

There was a broad Anti-Imperialist League that was formed to oppose the U.S. governing let alone fighting a horrific counterinsurgency in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, on entirely liberal and democratic grounds, and in the name of American freedom. As Mark Twain indelibly wrote, “Shall we give those poor things a rest?” But Aguinaldo, the great Filipino nationalist, admitted that their historic choice was not actually independence but dependence on either Japan or the U.S. 

Socialists in the U.S. have a responsibility, but not for a historical moral balance sheet of U.S. government actions, but for the future course of society and politics, a long-term task for which we only have the barest rudiments of resources with which to begin building today. 

As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living — not the dead, who have no claim on us. As Fanon said, we bear no guilt and owe no reparations for crimes committed before we were born. 

We must, as Thaddeus Stevens said, transform the heritage of slavery (and worse) to free the world — and thus honor the sacrifices that have brought us to the place and opportunity we inhabit now, and only now. We must wake from what Marx called the “traditions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living” and heed the “poetry of the future.” It’s long past time. 

There will be a future for capitalism. Will there be for socialism? 

January 23, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on Greenland, Trump and American Revolutionism

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain discusses his Compact Magazine article on Greenland, Trump and American Revolutionism. Amid renewed calls for his cancellation Chris Cutrone addresses his critics about an essay that was to be titled “Why not Greenland?” Also discussed: How can we understand this moment without tailing any capitalist party? What about the Labor Theory of Value? And did Fonzie even “jump the shark” in the sense the phrase is usually meant? Chris Cutrone continues to discuss his Compact article and its reception, discusses his career as a video artist, and the death of a certain kind of literacy.

Why not Greenland?

The future belongs to America — so should Greenland.

Chris Cutrone

Recently, in a scene recalling the X-Files, NASA satellite imagery discovered the ruins of an old U.S. nuclear weapons base, Camp Century, under the permafrost in Greenland, an abandoned relic of the Cold War. Its resurfacing is an apt metaphor for Donald Trump’s proposal to expand U.S. territory into the circumpolar North, which seems to have come out of nowhere, but in fact draws upon a long history. 

When Nazi Germany conquered Denmark in 1940, Britain and later the United States invaded and occupied Iceland. Four years later, Iceland ended its union with Denmark and became an independent republic. Greenland could certainly have followed. Both islands remain of strategic importance for NATO, which makes Trump’s proposal to acquire Greenland for military reasons seem redundant: Doesn’t Greenland already occupy a forward position regarding the Arctic and Russian threats? But perhaps Trump aims to abolish NATO — as he has threatened and his critics have accused him of planning to do—after all. Maybe it is not merely a ruse or negotiating position, but a real prospect. Greenland seems to be part of the calculation. 

Trump’s suggestion has prompted the indigenous people of Greenland to demand their independence. Meanwhile, the King of Denmark has added Greenland and the Faroe Islands to his Royal Coat of Arms, but Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has sent out mixed signals. Don Jr. is visiting Greenland as I write this. 

Trump’s calling Canada the “51st State” caused the downfall of its “governor,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The president-elect has since declared the benefits of a union with Canada that would erase the “artificial border.” But political frontiers represent history and its after-effects. The early Scandinavian — Viking — contact with the New World informs the Danish claim to Greenland. (The Inuit who make up most of the population now actually arrived later.) 

The U.S.-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin demanded Canada from the British in the treaty settling the American War of Independence. After the Civil War, the victorious Union offered to take Canada as the compensation the British owed for their support of the Confederacy. Secretary of State William H. Seward had to settle for purchasing Alaska. Canada, then, remains the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars. It remains the most European part of the Western Hemisphere. This has not been a good thing. 

Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again. Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative. Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America. Perhaps saying so blatantly what is nonetheless a fact is in bad taste. Whether literally or figuratively, the gesture is unmistakable. This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States. It is an evergreen promise. America is revolutionary or it is nothing. The United States of America liberated the world twice — three times with the Cold War. Its mission continues. 

(This is no time of abandon the Monroe Doctrine, which was not about U.S. supremacy but protection of American freedom.)

Ever since the Civil War, the United States has demanded unconditional surrender from its enemies. It has treated all its opponents as it did the Confederacy — as echoes of the counterrevolution, the threat of undoing the revolution. The Confederates regarded the values of the revolution — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the inalienable rights of all equally — as mistaken. So have all of America’s opponents. They have been and remain Slave States.

But the revolution cannot be undone. The question is how Greenland or Canada or Panama or Mexico or the rest of the Americas — the rest of America — might still follow and not oppose it. 

The real question, though, is how America still follows the revolution. Trump seems to accept its call. The United States does not desire to rule but only to free people and places. How it does so has come now to be in doubt. But there will be no retreat to Little America. The sheer scope of American power won’t allow it. Can America find itself again — re-found itself — on these frontiers? 

The alliance between Washington and Beijing forged by Nixon and Kissinger ended with the defeat of the Soviet Union. It was supposed to shape the next century, and it has done so. Unfortunately, the original intention of the pact for the two countries — both victors of World War II, but one more damaged by it — to keep each other honest, has failed, as did that of the original Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union. 

Vladimir Putin, in interviews he conducted with Oliver Stone before Trump’s first term and after the Russian seizure of Crimea, stated that while he accepts American predominance, Washington cannot possibly govern the world. Recalling that throughout U.S. history, Russia has been its ally in all wars except one (namely, the War of 1812 — the Napoleonic Wars), he advised that regional powers such as Russia and China be allowed their own domains. The problem is that their neighbors won’t consent, hoping instead for American protection. 

Trump is decried by his political opponents in both the Democratic and Republican Parties as an “isolationist” — the old pejorative from the pre-World War II era. But ever since Woodrow Wilson’s War to End All Wars, to “make the world safe for democracy,” which was forced on America by Europe (that is, by the counterrevolution), American involvement in global affairs has been a given. Theodore Roosevelt had already negotiated the end of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and had warned against America coming into conflict with either Japan or Germany, which he saw menacing on the horizon.  

Trump has promised to end the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza; to launch no new wars; and invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his Inauguration, extending the hand of friendship to the only potential rival of American power. Xi politely demurred, not needing the reminder of the vitality of American democracy. 

Trump has not ruled out a military solution to either the Greenland or Panama Canal issues that he has identified. He did, however, rule it out for Canada — ironically enough, considering its origins as the redoubt of America’s foes in the Revolutionary War. Is Trump’s audacious overture to his second term a prelude to a new geopolitical competition — a new Cold War or even World War III? Or is it rather a preview of a restored American world leadership, as Trump apparently intends? 

The key to hard bargaining is willingness to walk away from a deal rather than accept bad terms. Trump is wagering that his negotiating partners are at least as in need of peace as America, and that in the wake of both the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, the world depends on American recovery. 

The danger is that the United States might overplay its hand. It might not be a time for brinksmanship or confrontation. It might not be a matter of tests of strength. But it might require a match of wills. 

Washington has been bogged down by policy impasses and decided lack of vision in the new millennium. Former Rep. Joe Walsh, who briefly opposed Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2020, speculated at the 2024 never-Trump Republican counter-convention in Milwaukee that winning the Cold War had doomed America. He might have meant that China was the ultimate beneficiary of the fall of the Soviet Union. But such pessimism is unrealistic. The post-Cold War crisis is indeed being met — however undesirably to Walsh and the GOP old guard — by Trump. Unlike China or Russia, America has greater resources for political change in direction and leadership. There is a refusal to see the obvious regarding Trump: that he represents the “hope and change” that was merely a marketing slogan for Obama before him. 

The gravitational attraction of the United States is in its social and not merely its economic power. This extends to its political capacities. There are many sources of power, not just one, and this creates a much more resilient polity than one finds in America’s would-be enemies. 

Over the course of American history, every 40 or 50 years has seen a crisis that called for renewal. Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, Jackson’s 1828 election, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Reagan Revolution all changed the political parties and the nature of their competition, fulfilling Jefferson’s estimation that a revolution would be needed every generation or so. We are living through such a shift now. 

While there might not exactly be a plan, there is a vision. Trump setting his sights on Greenland might seem to prove his critics right about the danger of his folly. It symbolizes the apparent absurdity of the moment. But it would be wrong to fall back on the lack of imagination that has afflicted U.S. politics for far too long. 

The neglected and forgotten Danish colony in the Western hemisphere captures something of the nature of Trump’s character, which is bombastic but not empty. Where others have been complacent to let spaces lie unutilized, he has set to building. Could this be done on the mostly vacant territory of the world’s largest island? Where others now see a barren wasteland, Trump finds not only possibilities but necessities — the necessity for American growth and change. 

In this and other fields, Trump sees the need for a broader American future. Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again. | §

Originally published in Compact (January 9, 2025).