Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Per Ola Kristensson, Professor of Interactive Systems Engineering, University of Cambridge

Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse was meant to reimagine how we interact with each other and the world, providing us with an immersive world where we could seamlessly combine digital and physical information.

The parent company, renamed Meta along the way, had begun introducing headsets and reimagining everyday computing with its Project Orion augmented-reality glasses.

Now, however, Meta is making deep budget cuts to its Reality Labs division, which could see around 10% of the 15,000 employees working on the metaverse and related projects lose their jobs. Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth confirmed the cuts to staff in a memo on January 13.

But my years of research with colleagues suggest this apparent U-turn is far from the end of the road for the technology. In search of commercial applications that stretch beyond gaming, it is, though, likely to signal a shift from virtual reality (VR) to less-immersive ways to merge the digital and real worlds.

This augmented reality approach has already been realised through products such as Microsoft HoloLens, which present virtual information within an optical see-through display.

Such augmented reality devices give the illusion of virtual information appearing in physical 3D space. They can also allow users to interact through both gestures and gaze, using integrated hand- and eye-tracking technology.

The problem with virtual reality

After decades of research and development, VR technology is unquestionably a real product serving real needs. State-of-the-art headsets provide users with impressive immersive 3D environments along with integrated robust hand and eye tracking. Beyond gaming, virtual reality is used to train medical doctors, engineers, pilots, and many others.

But there is a conflict when it comes to more general, day-to-day applications. I and many others believe that with the advent of AI, new interfaces will be needed beyond the mobile phone to control and benefit from the applications in the work and home. At the same time, it is clear from our research that many people find VR headsets just too immersive, unsettling and impractical to use.

In a two-week user study in 2022, we compared working in virtual reality for an entire working week – five days in a row, eight hours each day – against a baseline of performing the same work using a standard setup with a regular display, external keyboard and mouse.

In this study, we asked 16 volunteers to do their ordinary office work, such as word processing, programming, creating spreadsheets, and so on. The headline result was that users could work in virtual reality for an entire workweek – but there were lots of issues in doing so.

Study participants using VR experienced a higher perceived workload as well as lower usability, lower perceived productivity, higher frustration, lower wellbeing, higher anxiety, a greater experience of simulator sickness and higher visual fatigue. In short, VR yielded worse outcomes on all key metrics.

Despite these results, in the interviews participants commented that they could see themselves using VR if headsets were lighter and if exposure to virtual reality was limited to a few hours at most.

In a follow-up research paper in 2024, we examined the video evidence we had collected in the study in detail. It showed what participants did while wearing the headset – adjusting it, managing the cable when it got in the way, eating and drinking by lifting up the headset halfway, receiving phone calls, and rubbing their faces.

Our analysis showed people did gradually get used to the VR headsets. Overall, participants adjusted their headset about 40% less frequently towards the end of the workweek, and removed the headset approximately 30% less frequently.

This tells us it is possible to work in virtual reality as we normally work with a physical desktop, keyboard and mouse. But if we arrange it so the VR setup replicates our ordinary setup then VR, unsurprisingly, performs worse. We are asking a virtual environment to perfectly replicate our physical work environment, which is impossible.

More importantly, it tells us something about trade-offs. Virtual reality provides a fully immersive virtual environment that transports users to completely different virtual worlds. But this has to be balanced against negative qualities such as poor ergonomics, nausea and fatigue.

Superhuman powers

For any form of extended reality – from augmented-reality smart glasses to something much more ambitious – to achieve mainstream success, it needs to provide more positive than negative qualities in relation to devices we are already familiar with, such as laptops, tablets and phones.

The solution, I believe, is to be bold and reimagine extended reality – not as a transplantation or extension of devices we already use in our daily lives, but as a medium that bestows us superhuman powers. In particular, it can enable us to seamlessly interact with computing systems in the 3D space around us.

In physical reality, you have to select a tool to use it: you pick up a spraycan, then push a button to spray-paint. In a desktop interface, you click the spraycan icon and can thereafter spray-paint using a mouse. But in extended reality, there is no need to first select the tool in order to use it – you can just do it with hand gestures.

Simply by forming your hand as if you were holding a spraycan and pushing down your index finger to spray, the system can automatically recognise that you wish to use the spraycan tool. It will then allow you to spray-paint the digital items, modulated by your index finger pushing down a virtual spraycan button.

Extended reality can also provide a medium for interacting with personal robotics by, for example, showing the robot’s future movements in 3D space in front of us. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in our physical reality, this will become more important.

Ultimately, any vision of a metaverse (not just Zuckerberg’s version) will only succeed if it goes beyond current user interfaces. Extended reality must embrace the fact that it allows a seamless blending of virtual and physical information within our 3D world.

Per Ola Kristensson has previously consulted for Meta. He receives funding from EPSRC and Google.

– ref. What Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse U-turn means for the future of virtual reality – https://theconversation.com/what-mark-zuckerbergs-metaverse-u-turn-means-for-the-future-of-virtual-reality-273659

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Debra Benita Shaw, Reader in Cultural Theory in the School of Architecture and Visual Arts, University of East London

The writings of H.P. Lovecraft have seen a renewal of interest in recent years, despite the fact that he was a well-known racist and xenophobe. Writing in the early 20th century, he imagined monsters that gave form to fear of difference.

Creatures like Cthulhu, probably his best-known and most borrowed invention, effectively challenge human complacency about our place in the world as the most powerful species. Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as a “huge, formless white polypous thing; a “squid-head with writhing feelers” that inhabits the lost city of R’lyeh, described as “nothing of this or of any sane planet”.

His story The Call of Cthulhu recounts a documented history of human encounters with the monster that lead only to madness and death. Such monsters, and their strange domains, led the philosopher Graham Harman to coin the term “weird realism” to describe Lovecraft’s oeuvre.

Lovecraft’s stories also reveal his fear of women and the horror he saw in their capacity to give birth to the thing he perhaps feared above all – a hybrid race that would put an end to white supremacy. As Lovecraft expert Carl Sederholm has noted, Lovecraft’s stories abound with “creatures that ooze, pulsate and drip mostly from below the waist”.

It is this fear of women’s bodies and the attendant racism and misogyny bound up in it that is confronted in the recently published novella Come Down To A Lower Place by Seoyoung Yi. The novella is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project by UK-based publisher Honford Star, in which leading Korean speculative fiction writers reimagine the works of Lovecraft.

The novel opens with Lee Seul, a team leader at Yukwang Construction, worrying about her vaginal discharge and struggling with a UTI (urinary tract infection). Seul has been tasked with investigating a smell seeping up from the basement of a prestigious department store, threatening the carefully curated ambience of the luxury goods department on the first floor. The plans for the original construction during the colonial era hint at something sinister.

The stinking slime that oozes from the basement heralds the arrival of Bin-o-Jae, a Lovecraftian monster formed from the despair of countless women subjected to misogynistic violence. It’s been created from such experiences as the suppressed pain of generations of female workers denied the breaks necessary to change their sanitary pads during their periods – “their knees twisting under bright lights, as they waited for a chance to go to the bathroom”.

Department stores in colonial Korea were known for propagating the emotional labour identified by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart (1983). Like the flight attendants that Hochschild examined, female store attendants were expected to smile constantly and endure rude and dismissive customer attitudes without complaint.

In research published in 2018, social scientists Jinseok Oh and Howard Kahm reported on the case of Paek Inbong, a worker at the Hwasin Department Store in Seoul. In 1938, after constant bullying by her manager, Inbong took an overdose of sleeping pills. Talking about the experience, she said:

“[The manager] started scolding me for fidgeting and kept going until I could hardly breathe. I thought it would be better to die than to suffer like this. In order to show the agony felt by the employees, I decided to die.”

In exploring this kind of territory, Come Down To A Lower Place is unashamedly political. It espouses a return to the socialist feminism promoted by social theorists Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, who argued for a recognition of gender roles and their expression in heteropatriarchal (straight and male-dominated) institutions, like marriage, as essential to the perpetuation of capitalism.

Yi’s book is certainly born of Korea’s 4B movement, a feminist movement with four tenets all of which start with “bi” (no) in Korean – bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating) and bisekseu (no sex). Drawing on this, the book makes the case for women’s power to withdraw their labour, both as workers in the consumer economy and as wives and mothers.

Yi’s Bin-o-jae stands for the accumulation of frustration and anxiety that gave rise to 4B and for the liberatory potential of women’s anger. This monster has been waiting impatiently for a woman like Lee Seul, to unleash its power on the world, which, Yi hints, it plans to do on her wedding day.

Bin-o-jae is, like Cthulhu, squid-like and huge with writhing tentacles, described as not “gray like a squid’s” but “more like a piece of mammalian flesh – massive, red and covered in slime”. Equally, like Cthulhu, it defies full description as it partially emerges from the depths below the department store, hinting at further horrors to be revealed. However, its effects are quite different.

While Lovecraft’s protagonists succumb to madness, chronic fevers and suicide, Seul, at the end, embraces Bin-o-jae and, “despite the pain … throughout her body … strangely [feels] at peace”. As Seul is fitted for her wedding dress, she struggles to contain the monster that now fully inhabits her body and she promises it “just a little longer” before she releases it upon the world.

Lovecraft’s legacy therefore entails a somewhat delicious irony in this book. Bin-o-jae is Cthulhu repurposed to draw attention to women’s very real pain and the potential power of unleashing their anger in collective action.

As Yi demonstrates, poking the monster doesn’t always lead to horror and death; it may just lead you to the power you need to win the fight.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

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Debra Benita Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Come Down to a Lower Place – a Lovecraftian Korean tale about the oppression of female workers and their bodies – https://theconversation.com/come-down-to-a-lower-place-a-lovecraftian-korean-tale-about-the-oppression-of-female-workers-and-their-bodies-273619

Source: The Conversation – UK – By James Brocklesby, Lecturer in History, Sheffield Hallam University

The UK formally agreed to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in May 2025. With the Trump administration’s explicit support, this move ended one of the longest-running territorial disputes in Britain’s remaining overseas territories.

The decision has been hailed by some as a long-overdue act of decolonisation, condemned by others as a strategic misstep. Unexpectedly, Donald Trump has now reignited the debate, branding the deal an “act of great stupidity”.

Why has this small chain of remote Indian Ocean islands become such a flashpoint?

The roots of the crisis lie in the dismantling of Britain’s empire in the 1960s. The Chagos archipelago was historically administered as part of colonial Mauritius, then a British colony. In 1965, three years before Mauritian independence, the UK separated Chagos from Mauritius to create a new territory: the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The creation of a new colony was an act shaped by cold war strategy. Mounting economic and strategic pressures in the late 1960s – including the devaluation of the pound in 1967 and the Labour government’s 1968 decision to withdraw British forces east of the Suez Canal – together curtailed Britain’s regional defence role in the Indian Ocean.

As Britain retreated “east of Suez”, it still wanted a secure military foothold in the Indian Ocean, particularly one that could be used jointly with the US. Diego Garcia, the largest island in Chagos, was ideal: isolated, strategically positioned between Africa and Southeast Asia, near major trade routes and capable of hosting a major naval and air facility.

The costs were met by the UK, with £3 million paid to Mauritius to cede the islands. But the price of this strategy was paid by the Chagossians. Between 1967 and the early 1970s, the islanders were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Their removal was brutal: families were separated, livelihoods destroyed, and a distinct island community effectively erased.

Why the UK changed course

By the 21st century, Britain’s legal position was increasingly untenable. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the separation of the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius had been unlawful and that the UK should “terminate” its administration “as rapidly as possible”. The UN General Assembly backed this view with an overwhelming but non-binding vote.

Mauritius has consistently argued that the islands are a stolen part of its national territory, and therefore their decolonisation is incomplete. Over time, this case gained traction – Britain’s continued control of Chagos came to symbolise the unfinished business of empire.

By 2022, James Cleverly, then the UK’s foreign secretary, opened negotiations with Mauritius to “resolve all outstanding issues” over the archipelago. In October 2024, the Labour government under Keir Starmer concluded that a negotiated settlement was preferable to decades more legal wrangling.

The deal struck with Mauritius did two things: it transferred sovereignty over the archipelago to Mauritius, while securing a 99-year lease on Diego Garcia to allow the existing US-UK military base to continue operating at a cost of £3.4 billion.

On paper, this protected British (and by extension US) strategic interests in the region while satisfying the legal argument from the UN. However, while the deal was initially supported by the US, the deal has come under attack from other UK political parties, and increasingly jars with Trump’s vision of the world.

Why the islands matter strategically

The significance of Chagos is its location. Diego Garcia is one of the most important western military installations outside Europe and North America. It has been described as “an all but indispensable platform” for US interests in the Middle East and East Africa, with B-52 bombers recently used from the base to strike Yemen.

In an era of renewed great-power rivalry, the island’s value has increased. As China expands its naval presence in the Indian Ocean, western governments see Diego Garcia as a counterweight. However, critics of the deal have raised questions about the China-Mauritius relationship, arguing this would allow China a crucial foothold in the region.

For the UK, the base also underpins its claim to still be a meaningful military actor beyond Europe. For this reason, sovereignty transfer was carefully managed. Britain was not abandoning the base, but ensuring an arrangement that kept western military access intact while removing the colonial stain.

On one level, the Chagos deal looks like a model of decolonisation. Britain accepted international law, acknowledged a historic wrong and negotiated a settlement.

Yet this is happening at a moment when global politics is becoming more overtly imperial in style. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s assertive regional ambitions and Trump’s expansionist rhetoric about Greenland all suggest a world less governed by law and more by power.

In that context, Britain’s attempt to “do the right thing” over Chagos risks looking out of step. It reflects a rules-based worldview that is under pressure.

This creates a dilemma for Britain, which on January 20 vowed to “never compromise on national security”. The UK government defended the deal, saying it had to hand over the Chagos Islands because the military base was “under threat” from international legal action.

Britain is no longer an imperial sovereign with uncontested control over distant territories. It is a mid-sized power that must balance history, law, alliances and strategy.

This situation also exposes Britain’s continued dependence on the US for its global military clout and economic advantages. Without the US, Diego Garcia would be far less significant. The US substantially provides most of the base’s military capability. Trump’s criticism underscores a deeper vulnerability: Britain’s post-imperial identity remains tethered to American power.

James Brocklesby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why Trump is attacking the UK over Chagos Islands – and what it tells us about Britain’s place in the world – https://theconversation.com/why-trump-is-attacking-the-uk-over-chagos-islands-and-what-it-tells-us-about-britains-place-in-the-world-273939

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Trott, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and History, York St John University

The US president Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policy has surprised much of the world, particularly US allies. It breaks with expectations about how the US has traditionally behaved.

This is mainly due to Trump’s speed and bluntness of decisions, his breaks with longstanding norms and his unpredictable style. But the capture of Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and the mounting tension over America’s threatened occupation of Greenland are not isolated events. Neither is the government’s stance over immigration policy and citizenship. They’re rooted in longstanding struggles for power, justice and equality.

This is what makes the academic subject of American studies – in decline in UK universities – so relevant. American studies examines the nation’s history, literature, politics and social movements. By doing so, it helps contextualise current conflicts. Political polarisation, racial tensions, culture wars and debates over identity are placed within a broader historical framework.

During Trump’s presidencies, the US has projected a more muscular, transactional approach to global affairs. At the same time, it has also reconfigured its own traditional ideals. This shift has affected everything from security and trade to climate and technology.

Expanding our understanding of how American society, culture and politics works helps us anticipate instability. This could be through formal education like an American studies course or through building our own knowledge.

The American experiment

America has long understood itself as an “experiment” rather than a finished nation. It’s a political project constantly being tested, revised and debated. This idea is embodied in the US Constitution. It was designed not as a fixed blueprint but as a living framework, capable of change through amendments.

American history is rife with examples of how democracy has been an ongoing (and flawed) project, not a completed one. The nation’s history is marked by struggles over who gets to participate in the democratic process. This includes the exclusion of women, the LGBTQ+ community, African Americans and Native Americans, and the fight for voting rights and civil liberties. Understanding this history can help contextualise the current political landscape. It reminds us that the issues we face today are not entirely new.

American studies can’t fully explain the present without grounding students in the Constitution’s foundational architecture. This includes the separation of powers into equal branches, the system of checks and balances, and the assumption that no single person or institution should dominate the republic.

These principles have been challenged before. During the Civil War, the survival of constitutional democracy itself was at stake. During the McCarthy era – a period of persecution of people with left-wing views in the 1940s and 50s, led by US senator Joseph McCarthy – fear eroded civil liberties. Understanding what is occurring during the Trump administration therefore requires situating him not as an anomaly outside the system, but as a stress test within the American experiment. This stress reveals both the vulnerabilities and the resilience of the constitutional order.

Past and present

Trump’s recent capture of Maduro follows months of military campaigning and years of strained relationships. The possibility of a US-led invasion of Venezuela stems back to 2017, when Venezuela slid towards political unrest. The erosion of democracy, accusations of human rights violations and economic collapse led to humanitarian crises.

The US has a long history of interventions, peace operations and force-backed diplomacy that long predates this event, such as in Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). These examples all fit into a long tradition of US intervention rooted in the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and later expanded by the Roosevelt Corollary (1904). Together, these doctrines supplied the ideological and legal justification for US involvement in Latin America.

Read more:
The ‘Donroe doctrine’: Maduro is the guinea pig for Donald Trump’s new world order

The mounting tension over America’s heavy strategic interest in Greenland echoes cold war anxieties. It is reminiscent of the great-power rivalry, strategic geography and militarisation that defined that era.

More significantly for global relations and stability, it potentially jeopardises the future of Nato. As The US is one of Nato’s principal architects, guarantors, and its military backbone, this is alarming. America’s historical association with the alliance has been defensive and leadership-driven.

The recent killing of Renee Good by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis has refocused the debate over America’s immigration enforcement. The expansion in power and visibility of ICE fits into a long history of questioning “What is an American?”. It’s been a topic of debate since the 18th century.

Debates over immigration reflect deeper questions about national identity. The US vice-president, J.D. Vance, questioned New York City’s then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s American citizenship. He linked American identity to the American civil war. This raised a highly problematic – if not shocking – interpretation of “Americanness”.

By looking back at these historical moments, we can better understand the root causes of contemporary problems. In short, understanding America’s past is a vital tool for understanding and navigating the global present.

Sarah Trott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why everyone should be a student of American studies – https://theconversation.com/why-everyone-should-be-a-student-of-american-studies-273385

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dafydd Townley, Teaching Fellow in US politics and international security, University of Portsmouth

One year into his second term of office, Donald Trump’s foreign policy aspirations have led him to variously lay claim to Canada, the Panama Canal and, most contentiously at present, Greenland. He has kidnapped the head of state of Venezuela, saying that the US can run the country and exploit its oil, and he has issued threats against the sovereignty of Colombia, Mexico and Cuba.

Whatever the 47th president’s motivations, his expansionist vision has echoes of a little-known organisation that flourished briefly in the middle decades of the 19th century: the Knights of the Golden Circle. The Knights were a secret society founded in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1854 by Virginian doctor George W.L. Bickley.

Membership of the group is largely hidden from historians due to the secretive nature of the organisation. But legend suggests that its leaders included the likes of confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (who would go on to be the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan) and Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

The society’s name was chosen to reflect the wealth that would be created by establishing a slaveholding empire that would initially consist of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The so-called “Golden Circle”, with its headquarters in Havana, Cuba, would encompass much of the world’s supply of cash crops such as tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar and coffee, and the production of each depended on significant enslaved workforces.

The initial intention was not to have an independent empire but to annex the area to the American south, strengthening the cause of slavery. But the group shifted tactics as tensions escalated in the late 1850s, especially after the the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) that ruled that African Americans were not and could never be citizens. And as the abolitionist movement in the north gathered pace, the Golden Circle society adapted to support the secession of the southern states from the Union to be absorbed into the other Golden Circle territories.

The exact number of members of the Knights of the Golden Circle is unknown. Bickley claimed it had 115,000 members at one point – although this seems unlikely due to Bickley’s failure to raise troops to invade Mexico.

The Knights’ goals were not simply territorial expansion. They were ambitions of ideological conquests rooted in the continuation of slavery, as viewed through the lens of a “manifest destiny”: the idea that the white man should expand its dominance across the continent of America to the exclusion of native populations.

While the organisation’s influence was limited, it reflected the 19th-century American premise that territorial expansion could forever secure a social order built on hierarchy and chattel slavery.

Trump’s Maga vision

Fast forward to the present day, and American imperialist expansion no longer wears the uniform of secret societies such as the Knights. Instead, it emerges through presidential rhetoric, policy signalling and deliberate ambiguity.

On January 20 2025, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. His first year in office has seen profound changes both in his own country and across the globe. In this series, The Conversation’s international affairs team aims to capture the mood after the first year of Trump’s second coming.

Under Trump, America’s ambitions in the western hemisphere have been framed as annexations driven by hemispheric dominance. Trump unironically called it the “Donroe doctrine”, a personalised and transactional reinterpretation of the Monroe doctrine’s core claim: that the Americas are solely within the United States’ sphere of influence.

Where the 1823 Monroe doctrine warned European powers against further colonisation while professing American restraint, Trump’s version dispenses with the pretence of mutual sovereignty. It treats neighbouring states not as equals but as strategic assets or bargaining chips. The language is typically Trumpian (blunt and improvised) but it argues that external powers have no role in the governance of the western hemisphere, and that the United States has the final say-so.

Cuba is at the centre of this worldview. While Trump has not openly advocated annexing the island, he has attempted to use coercive pressure as a substitute for territorial control. Efforts to disrupt Cuban energy supplies and renewed talk of regime change echo traditional American treatment of Cuba as an unfinished project. Consequently, Trump’s Cuba policy resembles the establishment of an informal American empire.

The Knights of the Golden Circle imagined Cuba not just within the American sphere of influence but as territory to be absorbed. Their obsession with Havana as the Golden Circle’s centre reflected an understanding that southern power depended on control of the Caribbean. Trump’s posture is less explicit, but the strategy is very similar. Cuba is viewed as a prize within America’s reach and yet denied.

The same logic appears elsewhere in the Americas. Trump’s threats toward Mexico blur the line between cooperation and coercion. America’s neighbours’ sovereignty becomes negotiable when framed as an American security problem. Pressure on Venezuela and Columbia also reflects a willingness to treat political outcomes in the Americas as matters of US entitlement.

What distinguishes the so-called Trump corollary from previous American hemispheric dominance is its tone. It is unapologetically hierarchical and dismisses multilateral norms. It harks back to a time when the US could act first and justify itself later. Where cold war policymakers cloaked intervention in ideological language, Trump’s rhetoric is strikingly transactional. Influence is something to be purchased or compelled.

This brings the comparison with the Knights of the Golden Circle into sharper focus. The Knights had a secret vision of empire, brought to life by slavery and racial hierarchy. Trump’s ambitions are in the public sphere, filtered through state power. But both reflect that geography confers entitlement and that the Americas exist in a fundamentally different moral category.

In this light, Trump’s policy is not a radical break with American history but an unvarnished return to its imperial ambitions. The map may no longer be redrawn by conquest, but the logic that once animated the Golden Circle, one of hemispheric control as destiny, has not disappeared. It has merely learnt to speak in the idiom of modern populism.

Dafydd Townley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 19th-century plan for a slaving empire based in US deep south and Caribbean resonates with Trump’s foreign policy today – https://theconversation.com/19th-century-plan-for-a-slaving-empire-based-in-us-deep-south-and-caribbean-resonates-with-trumps-foreign-policy-today-272871