The Dialectic Lurking Behind the Brutality

Ieva Jusionyte digs into Greg Grandin’s “America, América: A New History of the New World.”

By Ieva JusionyteApril 23, 2025

• History

“THE UNITED STATES will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, […] and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” President Donald J. Trump said in his inaugural address at the US Capitol on January 20, 2025. This territorial expansion into “new and beautiful horizons” can only happen by seizing lands that belong to other nations. Trump talked about taking back the Panama Canal. He repeated his plans to annex Canada and turn it into the 51st state. He informed Denmark about his wish to buy Greenland, and assured Congress that “one way or the other, we’re going to get it.” The part about Greenland is not even new. During his first term in office, Trump said he would trade Greenland for Puerto Rico. In 2019, the National Republican Congressional Committee raised funds using a limited-edition T-shirt featuring a map that showed Greenland as part of the United States.

Many may have shrugged these ideas off as bad jokes, but a cursory look at our nation’s history shows us that such fantasies are as old as the US itself. Even Trump knows this. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he said that January day, reminding the audience of the importance of “Manifest Destiny” in the making of the United States. “Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West,” he noted. Only, of course, he didn’t recall that this “untamed wilderness” was the homeland of Indigenous nations who had to be removed, contained, or eliminated to make room for the United States of America. And beyond those deserts and mountains lay the United Mexican States, which the United States of America invaded and dismembered, and then incorporated its parts to satisfy the growing nation’s voracious appetite for land.

Trump’s ascension speech worried leaders of the Western hemisphere. If international cooperation, which has—in theory if certainly not in practice—underpinned global world order since the end of World War II, was ending, what would come in its wake? Latin American countries unequivocally rejected this rekindled American imperialism in the form of Trump’s “America First” agenda. Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum responded to the designation of several Mexican criminal networks as terrorist organizations, a designation that could be used to justify military action against them, by saying that “the Mexican people will under no circumstances accept interventions, intrusions, or any other action from abroad that is detrimental to the integrity, independence or sovereignty of the nation.” Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino responded to Trump’s push to retake control of the Panama Canal by issuing a statement declaring that “every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent area belong to PANAMA.” Other Latin American countries, including Chile and Colombia, rallied behind Panama, demanding that the United States comply with international agreements and respect territorial sovereignty.

A lone, expansionist United States pitted against a collective of sovereign American nations—this rivalry has played a key role in creating the modern world, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Greg Grandin argues in his sweeping new book, America, América: A New History of the New World. The two Americas—the North and the South, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin—developed in relation to one another, adjusting laws and institutions by looking at each other as if gazing at a distorted mirror. English America sometimes saw the happenings in Spanish America as an inspiration or validation, other times as justification for doing the opposite. And the other way around. When Simón Bolívar gave a speech calling for Venezuela’s independence, on the eve of July 4, 1811, he timed it to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the American Revolution. Occasionally, the United States was an example for the rest of the Americas to follow; more often, it was a threat to warily behold.

The moral center of gravity of Grandin’s book is tilted toward Latin America. It is the lesser-known story, and one that offers crucial insights to the United States and the wider world. Grandin admits he wanted to start his story with the Monroe Doctrine, but his editor told him to begin with the Spanish conquest. The conquest of the Americas was violent: torture, mutilations, massacres. Spanish conquistadores raped women, roasted babies using their swords as spits while their mothers watched, and fed the broiled corpses to dogs. In the 1500s, people in Hispaniola were so horrified by the cruelty of the Europeans that mothers killed their children in collective suicides. Then came the microbes: measles, smallpox, typhoid, cocoliztli. More than 15 million people lived in Mexico in early 1519, when Hernando Cortés began his assault on the Aztec (Mexica) Empire. By 1600, only about two million remained. According to current estimates, around 90 percent of the American population died within a century and a half of European colonization.

How could this mass murder be justified? By what right did Spain wage this cruel war on the peoples of the New World? These questions became an obsession for Spanish philosophers, jurists, and theologians, whose disagreements over who was human and who was less than human, as well as why it mattered, Grandin meticulously recounts. One of these thinkers was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican priest who participated in at least one Spanish incursion into Hispaniola and was granted an encomienda (a consignment of land with Indigenous laborers) for his service, but later gave it all up, dedicating his life to humanist advocacy in defense of Indigenous Americans. “So many massacres, so many burnings, so many bereavements, and, finally, such an ocean of evil,” he wrote of what he witnessed in the Caribbean during the Spanish conquest in his famous account Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552). Las Casas called the conquest unjust and illegal and “worthy of the fires of hell.” His book—a detailed description of colonial gore and a powerful indictment of those who engaged in atrocities—was quickly translated into English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian, becoming a bestseller in Europe. In Mexico City, Spanish officials threw his books onto a pyre. His primary opponent, theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, referred Las Casas to the Inquisition. The debates between the conquest’s critics and its apologists went on for decades.

Things looked different in the north. When the Pilgrims reached the shores of New England, they found communities decimated by an epidemic. The place appeared sparsely populated, which the settlers interpreted to mean they could take it without scruples. This is where the paths of the Spanish and English settlers (and the states they would later establish) began to diverge. Grandin writes:

The Spanish encounter with colonial death, the catastrophe heralded by the arrival of Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquistadores, their mastiffs and horses, provoked a near century-long process of obsessive moral introspection. Few doubted the Conquest’s righteousness. But, confronted with cruelty supreme, a significant number of clergy on the front lines and jurists and theologians in Spain led a revolution in legal and ethical thought: an acknowledgment, at least as official policy if not practice, that Native Americans were humans, all humans were equal, and no one was born a “natural slave.” The Spanish Crown and most of its court lawyers […] knew their conquest was a conquest of people living in society.

Plymouth’s settlers experienced something different. They came on their ships thinking of the ancients, imagining themselves the new Adam, the new Noah, the new Moses, leading the chosen into an empty—or empty enough—Canaan.

Rather than wringing their consciences over the justness of conquest, as the Spanish did, English settlers developed a legal philosophy that justified dispossession. Taking land was legal when it was considered “vacuum domicilium” (empty place). It didn’t even have to be completely uninhabited. What mattered was whether it was cultivated. According to the theory popularized by English philosopher John Locke, property was created by mixing land with labor; therefore, unworked land was up for grabs. This definition of property suited settlers. When, in 1763, King George III issued the Royal Proclamation prohibiting settlement west of the Alleghenies, British colonists considered it a violation of their right to move west. Their hunger for land, for unlimited expansion, motivated them to take up arms against the British Empire.

But the founding of the United States was just the beginning. Spain, which supported the rebels during the American Revolution, came to regret this decision. By then, despite the efforts of Spain’s chief diplomat, Conde de Aranda—who suggested breaking up the Spanish colonies and creating an alliance of Catholic kingdoms to have a “force sufficient to block the aggrandizement of the American colonies”—it was too late to contain the United States. Nothing was off-limits: Anglo settlers poured into Florida, Texas, California. Expansion toward the receding frontier became the defining feature of the young, growing nation. It also became a solution to its domestic problems. Social conflicts could be mitigated by offering free land for those willing to move west and south. The frontier worked as a “safety-valve.” This didn’t end with the US reaching the shores of the Pacific and the demarcation of the boundary with Mexico. Expansionists dreamed of the Amazon, Panama, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Cuba. “It is our duty to have Cuba, and you cannot prevent it if you try,” US Senator Stephen Douglas said in 1858, adding that “its acquisition is a matter of time only.”

Following their northern neighbors, Spanish Americans revolted against laws that restricted their freedoms, such as a prohibition on new encomiendas. When Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal, they seized the opportunity created by the reconfiguration of power in Europe. From Mexico in the north to Argentina in the south, with Colombia and Venezuela at the center, insurgent armies fought for years. The first Spanish American republic—the American Confederation of Venezuela—was founded in 1811. From the start, these new republics enshrined in their laws values that set them apart from the United States. While the US Declaration of Independence is mute about conquest and colonization, Venezuela’s independence manifesto acknowledges that the new nation was built on stolen land, conquered through bloodshed. The word “society” appears 15 times in the Venezuelan Constitution, Grandin notes, while the US Constitution doesn’t mention it once.

That doesn’t mean that the new republics in Spanish America were all about peace and equality. Virtuous ideas glossed over a more violent reality. Chile waged war against Bolivia and Peru for the coastal lands, and both Chile and Argentina engaged in extermination campaigns against the Indigenous peoples in Araucanía and Patagonia. “But, unlike in the United States,” Grandin argues, “their dispossession, and their disappearance, wasn’t integral to territorial aggrandizement nor a requirement for the realization of national sovereignty.” The distinction likely appeared meaningless to the Indigenous peoples who were targeted during these military campaigns all over the Americas, from the Pampas to the Pacific Northwest. Still, Grandin shows that Spanish American countries were not like the United States. Bolívar and other statesmen rejected the right of conquest and did not consider the doctrine of discovery legitimate. They refashioned the theory from the Roman law known as “uti possidetis”—“as you possess”—to keep the boundaries that existed during Spanish rule. Administrative lines drawn on old colonial maps were not always clear. They had to be surveyed and arbitrated and were sometimes fought over, but the uti possidetis doctrine helped settle border disputes. In his previous book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019), Grandin summarized this contrast between the United States and Spanish America:

Spanish America, starting in the 1820s, formed in effect the world’s prototype league of nations, the first cooperative confederacy of republics: a community of sovereign, bounded, non-imperial, anti-colonial, formally equal and independent countries that rejected the legitimacy of aggression and vowed to resolve conflicts through multinational diplomacy. Having been born into a large litter and raised, as one republican put it, in a shared New World household, Spanish American nations were socialized at an early age.

The United States, in contrast, was created lonely and raised thinking it was one of a kind. It was, Thomas Jefferson said in 1809, the “solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom.”

When Bolívar called leaders of American nations to a Continental Congress to be held in Panama in 1826, opposition in the United States was strong. Some feared that this gathering would preclude the possibility of occupying Mexico, or at least seizing Texas; others worried that Spanish Americans would issue a resolution abolishing slavery. Slavery was, of course, a sore point for the US. Bolívar called slavery “the negation of all law.” Spain (and later Mexico) refused to return slaves who managed to escape to Florida or Texas. A senator from Virginia worried that US delegates attending the summit in Panama would have to sit down and negotiate, as equals, with “the native African, their American descendants, the mixed breeds, the Indians, and the half breeds.”

It didn’t matter, since US delegates never made it to Panama, but Spanish America’s acceptance of formerly enslaved people was later seen by the United States as a solution to its domestic racial problems. In the summer of 1862, meeting with a group of free Black leaders, President Abraham Lincoln suggested that emancipated people of color could relocate to Central America. Lincoln told his secretary of state to ask the governments in the region if any would be willing to take them. The plan didn’t work. Lincoln abandoned the idea of mass removal of formerly enslaved people after the colony on a small island off of Haiti failed and survivors had to be brought back to the United States. It also wouldn’t work much later, when Latin American countries refused to participate in the extraordinary rendition program and hold the captives in the US War on Terror. Reading this book in 2025, as the US government is loading migrants detained in the United States onto planes bound for Panama, El Salvador, and Honduras, shows that the US hasn’t changed. Latin America did.

The United States did not pretend to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of other countries, persistently refusing to sign on to resolutions and treaties that outlawed conquest. Washington wanted to keep its options open. The doctrine of conquest justified its wars against Native Americans and against Mexico, and even as it began participating in Pan-American conferences, the US wanted to have that right at its disposal. In its view, the Monroe Doctrine was “a warrant that granted the United States mandatory power to use as needed, to project its authority and protect its interests” in the Western hemisphere. This meant that Washington often stood one-against-all in multilateral meetings. Time and again, the United States expressed its opposition to the Calvo Doctrine (named for an Argentine diplomat), which held that foreigners have the same rights as nationals but don’t have extra rights. US businessmen didn’t like “Calvo clauses” in company contracts, preferring to have the option to call on gunboats as backup to defend their interests. This happened regularly. In the name of protecting US property, marines landed frequently in Cuba, Guatemala, and Honduras, and occupied Nicaragua (1912–25 and 1927–32), Haiti (1915–34), and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). The history of the Panama Canal started with Theodore Roosevelt pressuring Colombia to give up Panama and, when that didn’t work, dispatching three ships to support the insurgents hired by the US-owned New Panama Canal Company.

While it was invading other countries, the US was also participating in the construction of a system of international law. A system of global rules, especially one that the US managed, was beneficial to Washington. “This wasn’t hypocrisy,” Grandin writes. “It was carburation, figuring the most efficient mix of fuel and air, of empire and law, domination and arbitration—of going alone and working together.” This tension between nationalism and internationalism continues to define US foreign policy to this day: Washington refuses to sign treaties (including UN conventions on the protection of migrant workers’ rights and the protection of persons against enforced disappearance), signs some that it never ratifies (the American Convention on Human Rights, the Kyoto Protocol, UN Arms Trade Treaty), and withdraws from others as soon as they become inconvenient. This last list is getting longer. In 1985, when the International Court of Justice found the United States guilty of waging a war against Nicaragua by supporting the Contras, the Reagan administration withdrew from its jurisdiction. In 2002, George W. Bush removed the US signature from the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court. In 2018, during his first term in office, Trump withdrew the US from the UN Human Rights Council. In 2025, on the first day of his second term, he did it again, in addition to announcing that the US would leave the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords.

It may appear that Grandin’s is a story of the United States perpetually occupying the villain’s role. But the US hasn’t always been the bully of the hemisphere. Its relationship with its southern neighbor, Mexico, illustrates both the worst and the best that the US has done. Throughout the 19th century, during the conquest of the frontier, the US eagerly advanced into Mexico, first annexing Texas, and then, after waging a war known in Mexico as “intervención estadounidense” (the US Intervention), taking over the lands that today make up California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of other states, as well as buying a chunk of southern Arizona. Walt Whitman, who welcomed the US invasion of Texas, wrote in 1846 that “Mexico will be a severed and cut up nation” (Whitman later abandoned his imperialism). General Ulysses Grant later described the war he led as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” By wielding guns and money, the US wrested from Mexico about half of its territory. But even that wasn’t enough. The US continued to meddle in Mexico’s affairs as US investors poured over the border, buying up land and mines and building railways to transport copper and cattle. The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) confounded US leaders, who, as the armed conflict continued, changed their mind about which rebels to support. President Woodrow Wilson recognized the revolution’s legitimacy and resisted calls by some in his circles to turn Mexico into a vassal state, yet he still sent marines to occupy the port of Veracruz and later ordered Major General John Pershing to enter Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa.

It was FDR and his Good Neighbor Policy that finally changed how the United States engaged with Latin America. When Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas began expropriating land to distribute it to Indigenous and peasant communities, and nationalized the petroleum industry, confiscating foreign oil rigs, Roosevelt felt enormous pressure to intervene to protect the interests of US companies. But the US ambassador to Mexico, Josephus Daniels, backed Cárdenas and pleaded with FDR to support Mexico’s social reforms. Daniels was an unlikely advocate on Mexico’s behalf: as the secretary of the navy two decades earlier, he had presided over the invasion of Veracruz and the occupation of Haiti. Yet now it was due to his efforts that, for the first time in history, a US president endorsed the Calvo Doctrine. Instead of escalating conflicts, FDR asked the Treasury Department to buy silver, which served two purposes: it placated owners of mines in the United States who had property claims against Mexico and it allowed Mexico to acquire cash to begin payouts to owners for the expropriated lands.

FDR also looked at Latin America as a model for postwar reconstruction. After World War I, Wilson’s plans for the League of Nations drew on the principles of sovereign equality and territorial integrity that had defined the relationships between Latin American states since Bolívar’s calls for a confederation of peoples. But Wilson, who during his reelection campaign talked about “America first, last, and all the time,” attributed these ideas not to Latin American statesmen like Bolívar but to US “Founding Fathers.” In the end, the United States didn’t join the League of Nations. By the time Roosevelt presided over an inter-American peace conference in Buenos Aires in 1936, in the shadow of the looming conflict in Europe and Asia, times had changed. His opening speech was titled “The Faith of the Americas.” FDR’s internationalism was directed at strengthening hemispheric unity in the face of rising fascism and an active German “economic diplomacy” in Latin America. (Like China today, Germany was offering Latin American governments financing for steel factories and better terms for credit and trade.) Throughout the war, Latin American countries provided critical materials, such as zinc, aluminum, graphite, mercury, copper, cinchona, hemp, rubber, and petroleum. The “rough draft of what would become the United Nations” that FDR presented at the conference drew heavily on the vision of Pan-Americanism developed by his special adviser to Latin America, Sumner Welles: a system based on “sovereign equality, on liberty, on peace, and on joint resistance to aggression.” At the founding meeting, Latin American countries advanced proposals that pushed for the equality of women, aid for refugees, right to work, and access to food, healthcare, and education—many of which made it into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But that opening in the relationship among the American states didn’t last. With the onset of the Cold War, the United States switched from aggressive anti-fascism to even more aggressive anticommunism. In Latin America, this shift meant Washington’s turn away from encouraging democracy to supporting authoritarianism in the name of stability. By the early 1950s, when the Cuban Revolution began, the attitude in Washington had shifted dramatically. Grandin writes that the demands of the revolutionaries were not that different from those previously called for by the Mexican rebels (land reform, control over natural resources, sovereignty), but the US was different. The Cold War national security state became single-mindedly focused on rooting out communist sympathizers, real or imagined, an agenda that resulted in slaughter all over Latin America. In Colombia, the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Gaitán provoked a civil war between leftist guerillas and government forces, aided by the paramilitaries. In Guatemala, land reforms that angered the United Fruit Company led the CIA to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, plunging the country into a civil war that culminated in a scorched-earth campaign against the country’s majority Indigenous Maya population. In Chile, the United States helped overthrow Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government and then backed Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. All this violence, repression, and poverty, exacerbated by neoliberal reforms, gave rise to a new form of humanist opposition. Like Las Casas, who stood up to defend the humanity of Indigenous Americans during the Spanish conquest, Camilo Torres and a movement of priests practicing liberation theology aligned themselves with the poor and fought for social justice.

Where does this leave us? With the Cold War over and US priorities continuing to shift, from chasing the specters of terrorism to quarreling over tariffs, Latin America has become that region on the other side of the border wall that keeps sending migrants and drugs to threaten US national security. Meanwhile, Latin America has seen both left-wing and right-wing leaders come and go. There were Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and then Jair Bolsonaro. There were Felipe Calderón and then AMLO, and now there is Claudia Sheinbaum. There were also Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, but there is Gustavo Petro too. Writing the book on the eve of Trump’s second term in office, Grandin notes that Latin America again teeters between the dark and the light:

One would think that, after all the region has suffered, from the tortures and terrors of the Spanish Inquisition to the death squads and disappearances of the Cold War, Latin Americans would have given up on the idea that history is redeemable. Yet centuries of violence have had an effect other than despair, searing into activists an irrepressible ability both to recognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and to answer every bloody body with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity.

Onto this eclectic stage enters the United States with its reawakened expansionist fantasies. Among the stack of papers Trump signed on his first day back in power was an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. When Trump says “America,” he means the United States. But we should not forget that this wasn’t always the case. The US appropriated the name that was once shared by all the nations in the hemisphere, nationalized it, and has been aggressively policing its use. Grandin recounts that, bothered by Mexico’s official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Alexander Hill Everett, John Quincy Adams’s ambassador to Spain, accused Mexicans of stealing half of the United States’ name. When Paraguay, in a commercial treaty, referred to the United States as the United States of North America, President James Buchanan sent a fleet of gunships to deliver a revised document with the word “North” crossed out.

But no matter how much Washington objects, America doesn’t belong to the United States. As Puerto Rican artist Residente raps, in a song aptly titled “This Is Not America” (translation in italics):

Desde hace rato, cuando uste’ llegaron
Ya estaban las huella’ de nuestro’ zapato’ […]

América no es solo USA, papa
Esto es desde Tierra del Fuego hasta Canadá

For a while, when you arrived
The prints of our shoes were already there […]

America isn’t only USA, dude
It goes from Tierra del Fuego to Canada

The idea threading the book’s nearly 800 pages is that the Americas have been, since the landing of the conquistadores and settler colonists, “an arena of ideological struggle, a battle over how to justify dominion.” Perhaps we should call the waters, heavily polluted by the extractive oil industry, and located in the middle of the hemisphere, ripe as ever with debates about the meaning of humanity and the international order, the Gulf of the Americas—both Americas.