President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the United States had reached a deal on the security of Greenland had many European leaders breathing a sigh of relief. The crisis over the strategic island had resulted in growing tensions between the U.S. and key allies.
Trump’s declaration caught many by surprise. Yet, the U.S. wasn’t created purely by conquest and military force. Rather, America was built on what the current president might call the “art of the deal.”
For more than two centuries, American policymakers and diplomats acquired territory through diplomatic agreements and land purchases. Indeed, most of the present United States and its territories were acquired through deals, not war. This overlooked fact upends the conventional narrative.
It has become customary for many on the progressive left to depict the United States as wantonly aggressive; a colonial power that, via bloody conquest, effectively stole much of its territory. At the heart of this narrative: America was not only born into sin, it thrived under it. The U.S. is irredeemable, and the existing order must be toppled. Statues must come down, lawmakers must kneel, and penances must be made.
In fact, America’s rise to global dominance was hardly unusual. Other global powers had to contend with their own restive native populations and perilous borders. Yet America’s upbringing was unusual in a special sense. The United States was providentially endowed with both great leaders and good fortune. And this has made all the difference
It has been a common refrain to hear that the U.S. was blessed by geography, separated by oceans from the often war-torn continents of Europe and Asia, and with only two comparatively weaker neighbors, Mexico and Canada. But this is very much a twentieth-century development. At its birth, the nascent U.S. was surrounded by enemies, many of them vastly more powerful and with imperial designs of their own.
When the United States came into existence, it inhabited a small portion of North America and was heavily reliant on the Atlantic seaboard for its commercial needs. Most of what we today think of as the U.S. was not, in fact, ours. Not yet.
Great Britain, France, and Spain all had a presence on the continent. And they had centuries of established rule, navies, powerful banks, and a credible currency. Many had forts and military forces. Virtually all believed that America’s existence would be a temporary aberration, and it was only a matter of time before they could swoop in for the kill. All recognized that whoever dominated the continent would control the future.
As Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, observed in his book America in the World: “In the 1790s, the Mississippi Valley, the strategic heart of power for North America, was still a contested buffer region” where “continental powers were colluding to control” and seeking to lure settlers into the new western territories and states away from loyalty to the United States.
Looking back from the vantage point of 2026, it is easy to take for granted that America would successfully navigate these rocky waters. Yet many of our founding fathers were less certain. Indeed, the situation was so perilous that in an 1801 letter to an American diplomat in Paris, then-President Thomas Jefferson declared: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possession of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”
Paranoia was rampant, and early American frontiers were awash with foreign spies, both real and imagined. Jefferson’s own disgraced vice president, Aaron Burr, was even implicated in a Spanish plot to seize territory. James Wilkinson, a top U.S. Army General appointed by Jefferson to oversee the national defense, was himself a Spanish spy, given the codename “Agent 13.” The international system was in flux, and the Napoleonic Wars were in full swing. America found itself smack dab in the middle. It was not an easy time to be a new power, much less one that was viewed as a potential menu item for European armies and navies.
Henry Kissinger, the late U.S. Secretary of State, famously wrote that there’s “no such thing as an American foreign policy” and believed that American statecraft was largely ad hoc. The U.S., he argued, came into being by happenstance and good luck. But fortune only gets one so far. Superpowers don’t just happen to appear on the map. They are created. And it took both luck and skill for the U.S. to extricate itself from being surrounded by established powers that could, if they so desired, smother America at her birth.
To be sure, there were significant missteps. In 1807, Jefferson, hoping to avoid being drawn into the burgeoning power conflict between Great Britain and France, opted for an embargo on all, crippling his presidency and the nation’s economy. Under his successor, James Madison, the country foolishly opted for war with Britain. That conflict ended as a stalemate, but not before the nation’s capital was burned and its dreams of seizing Canada repulsed.
But by that point, huge swaths of the West had been secured. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase remains one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of all time. Napoleon had once hoped to regain France’s foothold on the continent. But the Emperor, distracted by a slave revolt in Haiti and at war with much of Europe, needed to cut his losses and curtail, if briefly, his enormous ambitions. He offered most of the American West for pennies on the dollar. With the stroke of a pen, Jefferson doubled the size of the nation. Yet Benjamin Franklin’s adage — “A republic, if you can keep it,” — remained in force.
The United States now had what military strategists call “strategic depth.” But holding, maintaining, and protecting it from enemies abroad required work–and additional deals.
James Monroe, the last of the Founding Fathers to occupy the Oval Office, was deeply concerned with Spain and America’s southern flank. Monroe’s skilled Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, inked treaties to forestall Spanish ambitions and ensure American security. With the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, Spain renounced its ambitions in Florida and the Pacific Northwest. In exchange, the U.S. renounced claims on Texas. This was the United States being pragmatic; the massive territories in the Southwest would have to wait. For now.
Two decades later, the Tyler administration made a deal with Great Britain, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, securing most of America’s northern borders and acquiring thousands of miles of territory. Both agreements were reached amid saber-rattling, but ultimately, diplomacy won out. The U.S. and Mexico had no such luck later in the decade. The two fledgling nations went to war, with America emerging victorious. Deals reached in the war’s wake would lead to America securing the Southwest. The U.S. was now a continental power.
America’s next greatest threat was itself. Slavery wasn’t just a moral abomination, it hindered Western expansion and development. The American Civil War resulted in a scale of carnage previously unseen in the Western world. A battered and shocked country needed time to both recover and turn to developing and settling its new lands. This required careful and pragmatic diplomacy. Here, too, circumstances would conspire to help the United States.
For most of the latter 19th century–and well into the 20th–Great Britain was the dominant naval power. As Washington learned during the War of 1812, the United States couldn’t beat Britain. So, eventually, she joined them. The U.S. largely acted as what international relations today call a “free rider.” At the time, Britain had the budget and the means to police the Western Hemisphere, and the U.S. was mostly content with saving money and letting them do so.
America began addressing its lack of power projection in the 1880s, eventually culminating with President Theodore Roosevelt and his “Great White Fleet” of ships and their journey around the world from 1907-09. Additional territories were acquired in the preceding and immediate years, many of them key to America’s expanding navy and growing commercial ambitions. Some were seized from Spain during the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Others, from Alaska (1867) to Hawaii (1898), were variously purchased or annexed. In some cases, the threat of the use of military force wasn’t far away. But deals were struck and bargains made. In 1917, for example, the U.S. acquired the U.S. Virgin Islands, then known as the Danish West Indies. For $25 million, the U.S. secured a strategic naval base in the Caribbean.
HOW THE U.S. LOST LATIN AMERICA
Some decried these moves as imperialism. Mark Twain, for example, was an arch critic of the Spanish-American War. All were made in a rapidly shifting global environment, with other rival powers threatening to make their moves.
America as we know it today wasn’t built overnight. It was cobbled together, purchased, and fought over. The moves made by Trump’s predecessors showcase skillful diplomacy and keen pragmatism. To obtain territory it deems essential, the United States will use force when necessary, but she is always ready to make a deal.