Support for America’s manifest destiny is part of the traditional American foreign policy.

Donald Trump’s speech included an embrace of national glory:

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

Several readers and other commentators (including Jonathan Chait) dinged me for Trump Derangement Syndrome because I gave some rhetorical consideration to expansionism to Greenland. As I covered in the podcast with Charles C. W. Cooke, my preference is that we obtain Greenland peacefully — and make some aggressive investments there in the meantime in order to endear and bind its people to us. But, a more coercive approach is not unthinkable, at least not in the broad view of America’s history of expansion. This isn’t an exception to my general thoughts on American foreign policy but an integral part of them, and part of an identifiable tradition.

Support for America’s manifest destiny is part of the traditional American foreign policy. It is different from the more activist, alliance-driven Cold War foreign policy that Buckley championed in this magazine, and which has been subject of recurring conservative debates since 1991.

Pat Buchanan’s 1990s polemic history on foreign policy, A Republic Not an Empire, was written to caution against adventurism and entangling alliances, but celebrated American westward expansion. And Buchanan wrote columns throughout the 1990s imagining a new century of expansion into the Yukon and Greenland if, perhaps, Quebec voted to secede from Canada (which it nearly did). That’s the tradition out of which my thinking comes. John Quincy Adams, who developed the Monroe Doctrine, understood it wasn’t just about preventing new empires from expanding into the Western hemisphere, but also about subtracting the existing influence of empires already here. That’s why, when Jackson exceeded his orders and chased the Seminoles into Florida, Adams put the screws to the Spanish Empire and told them they had to get control of their colony or the United States would do it for them. So it came to pass.

Denmark’s possession of Greenland has never really been a threat to us, but it remains a strategically important piece of land, and has underdeveloped resources while it remains in Denmark’s hands. It has been an occasional subject for American expansionists dating back to the American Civil War era. And it will remain so.