2026-09-08T04:01:29.561Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/08/politics/trump-arch-monuments-iran-war
罗马皇帝提图斯拥有一座凯旋门。拿破仑·波拿巴下令修建了世界上最著名的凯旋门。而威灵顿公爵的标志性凯旋门则是伦敦海德公园的入口。
如今，唐纳德·特朗普也想要一座属于自己的纪念性凯旋门。他最新的建筑狂热项目，或许比他第二任期内华盛顿特区的全面改造热潮，更能向历史揭示这位第45任和第47任总统的真实面目。
罗马的提图斯凯旋门纪念公元70年耶路撒冷被攻克之战。巴黎的凯旋门纪念拿破仑战争和法国大革命中的阵亡者，以及后续为国捐躯的法国将士。纪念威灵顿的凯旋门则是为了庆祝这位法国皇帝最终战败。
这段历史揭示了一个问题。
特朗普迄今为止缺乏能够配得上修建凯旋门的胜利。美国与伊朗的僵持暴露了美国实力的短板，而非彰显其主导地位。而他最近还将这场冲突斥为“小菜一碟”。
为了规避这个问题，这位总统将其计划在阿灵顿公墓附近修建的凯旋门——这座建筑将遮挡知名华盛顿纪念碑的视线——标榜为纪念《独立宣言》，每英尺高度代表1776年以来的一年。
但特朗普本人承认，他的建筑热潮是为了永久将自己的形象烙印在华盛顿。“等我离任后，没人会做这种事，”他最近在接受《纽约》杂志采访时坦言。
即便以他的行事标准来看，总统花如此多时间在纪念建筑上的做法也非同寻常。他在公然炫耀权力，同时透露出一种不受政治约束的心态——如果中期选举选民认为他对民众的经济困境漠不关心，可能会对此予以惩罚。
但特朗普不只是在试图重新设计华盛顿。这不仅仅是为雕像增添光彩；不只是修建一座凌驾于白宫之上的舞厅兼无人机发射台；也不只是搞砸了国家广场倒影池的翻新工程。
特朗普痴迷的不只是帝国的表象。他想要的是帝国本身。
他的外交政策充斥着炮舰外交、海上封锁、掠夺他国资源以及对地图的执念，这让人想起维多利亚时代的冒险主义——当时军事力量与贸易和金融霸权相辅相成。
特朗普还在利用美国自身的殖民历史，效仿他19世纪的榜样总统威廉·麦金莱发动关税战争。他还拓展了1828年的门罗主义，将美国对西半球的主张进一步强化。
特朗普显然算不上历史爱好者。他的外交政策源于其好斗的个性、“金钱财富即权力”的人生信条，以及强者可以欺凌弱者的观念。
但“美国优先”的意识形态鼓吹者也试图将他的民粹民族主义纳入官方文件，比如其政府的国家安全战略。白宫高级官员斯蒂芬·米勒曾在CNN节目中明确表示，世界的“铁律”意味着美国必须以实力、武力和强权进行统治。
当然，这与美国基于盟友体系和国际机构的外交信条形成了鲜明反差——正是这些原则让美国成为世界头号强国，并战胜了法西斯主义、日本帝国主义和苏联共产主义。特朗普渴望建立一个由独裁者统治势力范围的世界，由崛起的美国主导加拿大或欧盟等较弱国家。
这一切都带来了一些棘手的问题。
帝国的罪孽植根于左翼意识形态之中。数十年来，西方国家一直在回避这样一个问题：曾经遭受殖民枷锁压迫的国家应当得到何种补偿。
但特朗普的观点——尽管在政治上不正确——是否有几分道理？在后二战共识早在他上任前就已分崩离析的世界格局中，“美国优先”的权力博弈是否是一种合理的应对方式？在与中国争夺有争议资源的竞赛中，更加强硬的美国姿态以及更狭隘、更民族主义的美国利益定义是否合理？
还是说特朗普误判了美国的实力，也误判了对手和盟友在其强权面前是否会退缩？
他的时代错位的世界观是否意味着，他正在用19世纪的方式应对21世纪的地缘政治斗争？包括日益严峻的债券危机，以及北京-德黑兰-莫斯科-平壤轴心。
白宫正回望遥远的过去，以此塑造未来。
去年，出于针对中国的考量，特朗普政府为门罗主义补充了一项附加条款，更新了这项已有200年历史的、驱逐欧洲殖民者出美洲后院的通知。美国对拉丁美洲右翼民族主义者的支持，以及对加勒比和太平洋地区所谓运毒船操作员的法外处决，都在隐晦地传递一个信号：特朗普治下的美国实力超群，没有任何法律或对手能阻止它为所欲为。
帝国的心态也体现在特朗普与委内瑞拉的合作协议中，两国将共同开发17个油田。该计划旨在充实美国枯竭的石油储备、降低汽油价格，并减少对霍尔木兹海峡等脆弱的中东石油出口航线的依赖。
美国能源部长克里斯·赖特在周日明确了谁能决定委内瑞拉的命运。
“我们对委内瑞拉拥有巨大影响力。我们控制着该国石油的海外销售，”他在接受美国广播公司《本周》节目采访时表示。
“所以目前，他们被迫与我们合作，而他们也确实在与我们合作，”赖特说。“这吸引了数十亿美元的投资，并将该地区从冲突地带转变为商业地带。”
但代价是什么？
特朗普的协议合法化了他今年1月推翻独裁者尼古拉斯·马杜罗后留下的、通过压制选举窃取权力的政权。这让人想起那些从附庸国掠夺资源以充实本国财富的帝国。他也毫不避讳这种类比，9月1日他表示委内瑞拉的石油“价值难以置信”。
“我们将开采这些石油，”总统说道。
如今特朗普扮演着遥远的总督角色，决定委内瑞拉人何时才能自己决定未来。当被问及选举何时举行时，他说：“我只是认为他们还没准备好。你知道的，一切都还很新。”
委内瑞拉前石油部长里卡多·豪斯曼上周在接受CNN记者理查德·奎斯特采访时称该协议“是一桩丑闻”。
“我认为这是犯罪，”豪斯曼说。“我认为这是滥用权力。我认为这是美国历史上最具帝国主义色彩的行为。”
委内瑞拉是理解本届政府权力理论的关键。推翻马杜罗的大胆特种部队突袭行动让美国渴望新的“征服”。
“没人会为了格陵兰的未来与美国在军事上对抗，”突袭行动后米勒告诉CNN记者杰克·塔珀，并称美国“理应”拥有这片丹麦自治领地。
这种傲慢也将美国拖入了特朗普曾承诺永远不会打的战争。如今这场伊朗战争已进入第七个月，本周末美国袭击德黑兰的油轮并遭到报复性袭击，战火再次燃起。
伊朗战争：军事力量及其局限性的写照
德黑兰的常规部队已被击溃。前最高领袖阿亚图拉·阿里·哈梅内伊已去世。然而，建立在抵抗 perceived美国帝国主义基础上的革命政权，通过不对称战争和无人机战术存活了下来。它的韧性拖垮了美国海军力量，并挑战了美国在中东以外地区的实力假设。例如，现在还有多少人真的相信美国能在台海与中国打赢一场海战？
本届政府或许终于找到了通过霍尔木兹海峡的办法，并能遏制德黑兰的经济。但持续护航油轮将耗资巨大。许多分析人士认为，推翻德黑兰政权是白日做梦。而重新开放海峡不过是恢复战前现状。
在国内，美国人面临了有史以来最高的劳动节汽油价格。柴油价格周五创下历史新高——推高了运输成本，预示着新一轮通胀。消费者的愤怒因特朗普的另一项19世纪构想——关税——而加剧，这些关税不仅未能振兴美国工业，反而打击了每个家庭的钱包。
这些显然都不是能为特朗普凯旋门正名的胜利。
“只为留给我们安葬死者的土地”
对特朗普沉迷帝国的批评，并非认为美国的武力毫无价值。问题更多在于他如何使用这种力量。
80年来，美国的硬实力——为欧洲和日本提供军事保护伞，维护海上秩序——保护了工业化世界。但与之相伴的还有软实力，比如马歇尔计划，美国以解放者而非殖民者的身份重建了欧洲。“你知道，美国有史以来唯一的要求，尤其是在二战之后，就是不要土地、不要帝国，只要留给我们安葬死者的土地就够了，”前国务卿科林·鲍威尔常说——这句话出自如今已过时的共和党时代。
特朗普说得没错，欧洲利用了美国的保护，将资金投入到慷慨的福利体系而非国防上。但他不断攻击美国盟友，也在动摇美国全球霸权的根基。例如，美国、北美和欧盟联合起来对抗中国的贸易阵线，远比华盛顿单打独斗要有效得多。
与此同时，美国在伊朗的困境，以及加拿大总理马克·卡尼所称的特朗普与西方的“决裂”，都表明特朗普的帝国野心建立在刻板印象之上。他挥舞着大棒，却不明白帝国强盛的真正原因。罗马不是一天建成的，巴黎和伦敦的帝国也不是。这需要武力与外交的结合，需要建立新的联盟，需要掌握本地化的全球政治。
英国帝国史学者、帝国批判者艾伦·莱斯特表示，特朗普“纯粹从经济影响力或暴力军事力量的角度看待权力——有时这确实能奏效”。因此，在委内瑞拉问题上，无论特朗普在道德上做出了多少妥协，他的政权更迭都能为美国带来利润。
然而，萨塞克斯大学教授莱斯特认为，从长远来看，他的帝国主义注定要失败。“即便在巅峰时期，（英国）之所以能同时在多个地方投射力量，是因为它非常谨慎地分配军事力量，也是因为它与其他大国达成了各类协议的框架——而特朗普对此深恶痛绝，”莱斯特说。
英国通过避免消耗国力的战争、与奥斯曼帝国结盟、利用印度军队投射力量，以及皇家海军的制海权维持了其统治——而如今兵力分散、舰艇不足的美国海军或许无法效仿。
英国的帝国直到两次世界大战才被拖垮。特朗普在经历了美国9·11事件后的泥潭后，似乎曾意识到过度扩张的危险，在去年的就职演说中承诺，他的第二任期将以“我们永远不会卷入的战争”为标志。
但令人震惊的是，他又陷入了同样的老陷阱，而他耗资数十亿美元的伊朗冲突可能已经扼杀了他的帝国野心。
因此，美国重返19世纪的尝试可能只是昙花一现。如果真是如此，特朗普的新凯旋门可能最终不会成为个人权力的圣殿，而是总统愚蠢行为的纪念碑。
Why Trump’s dream of an arch is his most revealing legacy play
2026-09-08T04:01:29.561Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/08/politics/trump-arch-monuments-iran-war
The Roman Emperor Titus has one. Napoleon Bonaparte ordered up the world’s most famous example. And the Duke of Wellington’s iconic version is the gateway to London’s Hyde Park.
Now, Donald Trump wants his own ceremonial arch. And his latest architectural passion project may tell history rather more about the 45th and 47th president than other examples of his second-term Washington makeover blitz.
The Arch of Titus in Rome marks the capture of Jerusalem in AD 70. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris honors the dead of Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars and France’s subsequent fallen warriors. The arch honoring Wellington celebrates the French emperor’s eventual defeat.
This history reveals one problem.
Trump so far lacks the triumph to justify a triumphal arch. The US stalemate with Iran has revealed deficits in US power rather than demonstrated its dominance. And he recently dismissed the conflict as “small potatoes.”
To finesse this problem, the president billed his planned arch near Arlington Cemetery — which would obliterate sight lines for famed Washington monuments — as celebrating the Declaration of Independence, with a foot of elevation for each year since 1776.
But Trump has admitted his building spree is an attempt to impose his persona on Washington in perpetuity. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone,” he recently confided to New York magazine.
Even by his standards, the president’s decision to spend so much of his time on monuments is extraordinary. He’s flexing brazen power and revealing a sense of political impunity that midterm election voters might punish if they judge him indifferent to their economic plight.
But Trump is not only trying to redesign Washington. This is about more than blinging up statues; building a ballroom/drone launchpad that will overshadow the White House; or botching the renovation of the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool.
Trump isn’t just into the trappings of empire. He wants the empire itself.
His foreign policy — bristling with gunboat diplomacy, naval blockades, grabs for other nations’ resources, and a map fixation — recalls Victorian-age adventurism in which military might was matched with trade and finance dominance.
Trump is also tapping into America’s own colonial heritage, copying his 19th-century role model President William McKinley’s tariff wars. And he’s expanded the 1828 Monroe Doctrine to lodge a US claim over the Western Hemisphere.
Trump’s hardly a history buff. His foreign policy emerged through osmosis from a personality wired for confrontation, life lessons that monetary wealth equals power and a sense that the strong can bully the weak.
But America First ideologues have also tried to encode his populist nationalism in documents like his administration’s national security strategy. Top White House official Stephen Miller notably argued on CNN that the “iron laws” of the world mean America must rule with strength, force and power.
Of course, this is a stark breach with the US foreign policy creed based on alliances and international institutions that made the US the world’s preeminent power and prevailed over fascism, Japanese imperialism and Soviet communism. Trump aspires to a world of autocrats ruling geographic spheres of influence, with the ascendant US lording over lesser powers like Canada or the EU.
This all raises some difficult questions.
The sins of empires are embedded in the ideology of the left. And the West has for decades been trying to divert the question of what restitution is due to nations once under the colonial yoke.
But does Trump have a point — albeit a politically incorrect one? Is this America First power play a reasonable approach to a world in which the postwar consensus was fraying well before he arrived? In the race with China for contested resources, could a more muscular US posture and a narrower, more nationalistic definition of American interests make sense?
Or has Trump misjudged America’s power, and the willingness of foes and allies alike to wilt before it?
And does his anachronistic worldview mean he’s fighting 21st-century geopolitical battles, including a growing bond crisis and a Beijing-Tehran-Moscow-Pyongyang axis — with a 19th-century approach?
The White House is looking to the distant past to shape the future.
Last year, with an eye on China, it appended a Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, updating the 200-year-old eviction notice for European colonialists in America’s hemispheric backyard. Its support for right-wing nationalists in Latin America and extrajudicial killings of supposed drug boat operators in the Caribbean and the Pacific are an implicit statement that Trump’s America is so powerful that no law or rival can stop it doing exactly as it likes.
Empire vibes also cloud Trump’s deal with Venezuela to jointly exploit 17 oil fields. The plan is to fill depleted US reserves, lower gasoline prices and ease dependence on vulnerable Middle East export routes like the Strait of Hormuz.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sunday made clear who dictates Venezuela’s destiny.
“We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela. We control the sale of oil outside of their country,” he told ABC News’ “This Week.”
“So right now, they are forced to work in partnership with us and they are working in partnership with us,” Wright said. “It’s drawing billions of dollars in investment and it’s transforming that region from a region of conflict to a region of commerce.”
But at what cost?
Trump’s deal legitimizes the repressive election-stealing regime left behind when he ousted dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. It recalls empires that plundered resources from vassal states to swell their wealth. He’s hardly shying from the comparison, saying on September 1 that Venezuela’s oil was “unbelievable value.”
“We’re going to be taking that oil out,” the president said.
And Trump now poses as the distant viceroy who will decide when Venezuelans get to decide their own futures. Asked when elections would take place, he said, “I just don’t think they’re ready yet. You know, it’s very new.”
Former Venezuelan oil minister Ricardo Hausmann told CNN’s Richard Quest last week the deal “is a scandal.”
“I think this is criminal” Hausmann said. “I think this is abusive. I think this is the most imperialistic thing the US has ever done in its history.”
Venezuela is critical to understanding the administration’s theory of power. The daring special forces raid that ousted Maduro left it hungry for new conquests.
“Nobody is going to fight the United States, militarily, over the future of Greenland,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper after the raid, stating that the US “should have” the vast island, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Such hubris also led the US into the kind of war Trump promised he’d never fight. Now in its seventh month, the Iran war flared up again this weekend with US strikes on Tehran’s tankers and reprisal attacks.
The Iran war is a study of military might and its limitations
Tehran’s conventional forces are shredded. Previous Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Yet the revolutionary regime built on resistance to perceived US imperialism survived through asymmetric warfare and drones. Its resilience stretched US naval forces and challenged assumptions about Washington’s power beyond the Middle East. Who, for instance, now really believes the US could win a maritime war against China over Taiwan?
The administration might have finally stumbled on a way to get oil through the Iran-threatened Strait of Hormuz and to choke Tehran economy. But perpetually shepherding tankers would be massively costly. Many analysts believe regime change in Tehran is a pipe dream. And reopening the strait would simply be restoring a pre-war status quo.
Back home, Americans faced their highest-ever Labor Day gas prices. Diesel hit all-time highs Friday — hiking transportation costs and auguring yet more inflation. Consumer anger is deepened by another of Trump’s 19th-century fancies — tariffs, which haven’t revived US industry but have hit every wallet.
These are hardly the triumphs to justify a Trump arch.
‘Land to bury our dead’
The critique of Trump’s infatuation with empire is not that American might is worthless. It’s more about how he’s using it.
American hard power — a military shield over Europe and Japan, and policing of the seas — has protected the industrialized world for 80 years. But it was matched with soft power like the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe while Americans came as liberators rather than colonizers. “You know, the only thing America’s ever asked for, particularly after World War II, was no land, no empire, just give us enough land to bury our dead,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell often used to say — in a now-archaic Republican era.
Trump is right that Europeans took advantage of America by investing in generous welfare states rather than defense. But by endlessly attacking US allies, he’s also loosening the foundations of American global power. A combined US-North American and EU trade front against China, for instance, would be far more effective than Washington alone.
Meanwhile, the US struggles in Iran and what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called Trump’s “rupture” with the West suggest Trump’s imperial ambitions are built on caricatures. He’s wielding a big stick rather than understanding what made empires strong. Rome’s wasn’t built in a day; nor were those of Paris and London. It called for a mix of force and diplomacy, forging new alliances and the mastery of localized global politics.
Alan Lester, a British historian and critic of the Empire, says Trump sees power “purely in terms of economic leverage or violent, military-force leverage — and sometimes that works.” Thus, in Venezuela, Trump’s regime replacement could yield profits for the US, no matter the moral compromises he’s made.
Yet, in the long term, his imperialism is doomed, argues Lester, a professor at the University of Sussex. “Even at its peak, (Britain) was able to project power in so many places simultaneously because it rationed out its military force very carefully, and because of the framework of exactly the kinds of agreements with other powers that Trump finds anathema,” Lester said.
Britain kept its grip by dodging wars that would drain its power, through alliances with the Ottoman Empire; via its use of the Indian army to project force; and because of the Royal Navy’s dominance, which the overstretched and under-shipped US Navy may not be able to emulate.
Britain’s empire was only bankrupted by two world wars. Trump seemed to understand the peril of overreach after America’s post-9/11 quagmires, pledging in his inaugural address last year that his second term would be defined by “the wars we never get into.”
But, stunningly, he fell into the same old trap, and his multibillion-dollar Iran conflict may have already squelched his imperial ambitions.
So America’s excursion back to the 19th century may be short-lived. If so, Trump’s new arch may come to stand as not a shrine to personal power but a monument to presidential folly.
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