Trump Is Invoking a New Era of Western Colonialism Inspired by Netanyahu

Regardless of which way the votes are cast this weekend, the resulting 48th Australian parliament is not likely to alter our strong ties to the US, and especially our military ones, which means we’ll remain a vassal of a superpower now engaged in domestically tearing down social services and civil rights, whilst on a global scale, its president is attempting to revive the age of European colonisation.

The US president launched his vision for a new age of American expansionism pre-inauguration, when, during a 7 January 2025 presser, he stated his administration would be annexing Canada, acquiring Greenland and retaking the Panama Canal, and when quizzed on whether he’d use force, Donald Trump didn’t rule out the military for the latter two, while reserving “economic force” for Canada.

These early rumblings that hearkened back to an era when colonising other nations was considered “the white man’s burden” were dismissed as Trumpian buffoonery, but the plans were reiterated and acted upon post-inauguration, and then the most extreme demonstration that Washington is seriously attempting to revive western colonisation involved Trump’s 4 February 2025 comments on Gaza.

The US president announced to the planet whilst standing next to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “the US will take over the Gaza Strip”, and he further elaborated, while using sanitised language, that his nation would be assisting in the ethnic cleansing of the region, which would involve opening up the occupied Palestinian territory to international capital and investment.

The irony involved in the moment “the leader of the free world” signalled he was deadly serious about further US expansionism was the presence of Israeli PM Netanyahu, who, in having launched the Gaza genocide, is the actual figure whose criminal acts have led to the toppling of the edifice of international justice that has emboldened Trump to announce the return of western colonisation.

Undermining the severity of genocide

The complete denial many held when hearing the president of the US envisioning a new era of empire building was predicated upon the prioritisation of the “principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” contained in the United Nations Charter, along with the era of decolonisation and the development of international law that followed UN establishment.

However, Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, the supposedly more moderate head of state, bankrolled and supplied the arms for the initial 13 months of the Gaza genocide, which, in terms of the sheer brutality involved in annihilating a civilian population, coupled with the ability to have the mass atrocities live-streamed to the planet, had already created a new era of international lawlessness.

The 4 February delivery of Trump’s vision for Gaza involved it having been destroyed and the only reason Gazans remain there being a lack of an alternative, of which the US will be providing, and after the Palestinians are gone, Washington will take control of the Strip and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”. Yet, this vision did fail to acknowledge the Israeli genocide behind all of this.

Seeing the US president alongside an internationally wanted alleged war criminal discussing how to divvy up the spoils of a mass murder erodes international justice on many levels. It undermines UN recognised Indigenous rights, the protections set out in the Geneva Conventions and the authority of the Rome State, which established international atrocity crime prosecutions.

During an Oval Office press conference a week later, Trump was further asked about US plans to take control of Gaza, an internationally recognised strip of occupied Palestinian territory, and when one reporter inquired as to what authority his administration might be invoking in order to acquire another peoples land, the president replied that it would be taken “under US authority”.

A right established by God

Donald Trump solely invoking US authority in order to provide justification to acquire another people’s territory does not only sound belligerent but illegal too. Although, the US has asserted such authority to make claims in the past, and it’s this apparent authority that has led the US to interfere in and influence the toppling of dozens of foreign governments since World War II.

Yet, the authority that Trump claims the US has to acquire the land of other peoples does have its basis in perhaps an even higher authority.

The Doctrine of Discovery is a series of papal bulls, or official orders, issued by the pope between 1452 and 1493 that served to legitimise five centuries of western colonialisation, and this not only carries the authority of the Church but of God too.

The Doctrine of Discovery empowered European Christians, white people, to acquire lands deemed empty, or terra nullius, which could include territory inhabited by Indigenous peoples, as the pope’s edits understood non-Christians to be nonhumans.

The doctrine went on to influence the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, an agreement between the countries of Spain and Portugal that established a line of demarcation that divided the newly discovered “empty” lands, such as the continent of Africa and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean, along with sets of respective rights for each of the two crowns in respect of their future acquisitions.

Indeed, the Doctrine of Discovery was invoked when the British invaded the lands now known as the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and it has featured in the legal systems of all of those countries.

The 1992 High Court of Australia Mabo case found that terra nullius had not been established on the continent now called Australia, which had been asserted as reason for forcibly acquiring the land, via the authority of the doctrine.

And the Doctrine of Discovery became part of US federal law and was used to usurp the land of the First Peoples of Turtle Island via the 1823 US Supreme Court case Johnson versus McIntosh, which was a judgement that saw then Chief Justice John Marshall remark, “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands”.

Complicit by association

The recently deceased Pope Francis renounced the Doctrine of Discovery on 30 March 2023, which was perhaps a little late in the day for some First Peoples, while the idea that Trump could invoke the papal bulls in order to acquire Greenland likely wouldn’t cut it, because most nations no longer consider it valid to turn up in someone else’s country claiming God gave them the land.

The essence of the Doctrine of Discovery, however, continues to inform Trump or anyone else who invokes the authority of the United States, as it is a settler colonial nation based on the genocide of the First Peoples authorised by the papal bulls, which is now funding the mass slaughter of the entire population of Gaza, in order for perhaps itself, or more likely the state of Israel, to take control of it.

But as previously noted, a driving force behind Trump’s multiple assertions about taking over the lands of other people has been the blatant waging of a genocide by Israel in Gaza for the last 18 months, and this landgrab has been predicated upon the authority of Zionism, which is a mid-1880s political doctrine developed by Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl.

The European political doctrine of Zionism advocates for the establishment of a nation for the Jewish people on the historical lands of the Palestinians, which, although Argentina was too considered a site, it is also apparently based on the authority of God and the Bible.

The Zionist movement was also heavily influenced by the European colonial project, which, of course, was founded upon the Doctrine of Discovery.

And as for the Australian community, it would appear we’re so intimately intertwined in a network of westerns political obligations that our leaders will continue to provide cover for Israel in its commission of the greatest atrocity since the Holocaust of World War II, and as for US expansionism, well, the ADF’s interoperability with the US military really only means we can aid and abet it.