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The year after fascist Italy forcibly seized Ethiopia’s capital, in 1937, Benito Mussolini’s minister of national education said, “A geographical revival is always correlated with a political revival.” Few statements so pithily capture what the MAGA project thinks it’s doing with foreign policy in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean—a revival of the supposed greatness of an imagined past at the expense of everyone else.

In recent weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick needled Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, about separatism in Alberta. In justifying tariffs on Canada, Trump himself asserted, “They [Canada] think they’re a state, but they’re not a state.” For good measure, Trump also posted an AI-edited image of himself lecturing European leaders in the Oval Office with a map in the background that showed Cuba, Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada as U.S. territory.

The year after fascist Italy forcibly seized Ethiopia’s capital, in 1937, Benito Mussolini’s minister of national education said, “A geographical revival is always correlated with a political revival.” Few statements so pithily capture what the MAGA project thinks it’s doing with foreign policy in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean—a revival of the supposed greatness of an imagined past at the expense of everyone else.

In recent weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick needled Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, about separatism in Alberta. In justifying tariffs on Canada, Trump himself asserted, “They [Canada] think they’re a state, but they’re not a state.” For good measure, Trump also posted an AI-edited image of himself lecturing European leaders in the Oval Office with a map in the background that showed Cuba, Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada as U.S. territory.

While the Trump administration’s revival of the imperialist Monroe Doctrine in Latin America has drawn critical attention, it is but a part of its hemispheric vision. Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and his economic and political war against Canada are not ad hoc; they are part of the administration’s neofascist vision for America’s “near abroad.”

On March 5 in Florida, Washington assembled the full complement of pro-U.S., right-wing Latin American states for a confab called the “Americas Counter Cartel Conference.” Sweating before a crowd of officials from Argentina and Honduras but not Mexico, and from Ecuador and El Salvador but not Brazil, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared: “Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War, we call this strategic map the Greater North America.”

In the popular mind, fascism is thought of as........

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