Amid losing a war with Iran, the Trump administration has intensified military, economic, and legal pressure against Cuba in recent months, creating fears of a new military intervention in the Caribbean. If Trump continues down this path, he will bring Washington’s long imperial tradition in Latin America back to the very place it began in 1898.

This was the year that Americans “went to the aid of Cuba,” and, “by beating Spain,” “won an empire.” At least that’s what Donald Trump and other middle school students would have learned in the 1950s if they read Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders (1954), number 41 in the bestselling Landmark Books children’s history series. Roosevelt waved his sword, the rough riders advanced up San Juan Hill, and in the end, “we got the whole Philippine Archipelago, Puerto Rico and Guam, plus a few coral spits like Wake Island.”

Critics have consistentlylamented that Americans remain ignorant of this history, and in denial about their country’s imperial past. Trump, they argue, is now exposing the ugly truth lurking beneath the facade of Washington’s liberal rhetoric.

Americans, like other peoples, have always preferred an idealized account of their role in the world. Mainstream versions of U.S. history extol moral victories like World War II while downplaying all the occupations and annexations to tell a heroic story of the United States as a global champion of democracy. But, in many cases, empire wasn’t hidden; it was carefully co-opted.

In fact, over the course of the Cold War, U.S. historians and politicians were often quite sophisticated in incorporating the darkest chapters of U.S. history into a triumphalist narrative that sought to justify Washington’s expansive role in the world. Rather than ignore U.S. empire, they offered a sanitized version of its flaws, before concluding that the good intentions animating the entire imperial enterprise had finally found their proper outlet in the country’s more principled Cold War policy.

The tragic irony, on display in Trump’s foreign policy today, is that the narrative worked all too well. Because he’s convinced that the U.S. liberal internationalist tradition really was selfless, Trump has instead embraced gunboat diplomacy with a glee that was already unseemly in the 1950s.

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If Americans remain in the dark about their imperial history, they can’t totally blame their education. A wealth of mainstream instructional material from the early Cold War shows how effectively patriotic history incorporated imperialism into a narrative of U.S. virtue and redemption.

These rhetorical efforts drew on the undeniable fact that, from the time of the revolution on, Americans conceived of their country and its republican government in opposition to European empires. Of course, Americans shared many of the same racist attitudes as their European peers and relied on many of the same violent techniques to colonize the continent and promote their economic interests around the globe. Yet they remained deeply ambivalent about formal territorial empire.

For critics, including both those on the left as well as some old school British imperialists, this was the height of hypocrisy: Stealing Native land wasn’t any better if you eventually made it a state; invading Caribbean islands wasn’t any better if you declined to actually annex them. But for many Americans, these distinctions helped sustain a sense of moral superiority.

Of course, the United States did actually acquire a formal empire. But for both pragmatic and principled reasons, it remained much smaller than, say, Great Britain’s. As a result, discussing U.S. imperialism could actually serve as an opportunity for Americans to tell themselves they weren’t actually all that into imperialism.

One particularly revealing example comes from The American Pageant. The first edition of this high school history textbook appeared in 1956—just a few years before Trump entered high school himself. It’s clear from the illustrations alone that this is not a book trying to hide U.S. empire.

The back flap provides a map of “the United States and its possessions,” showing the many territories and military bases that Washington controlled around the world. Strikingly, the Philippines is still included—though with a label explaining that it had been granted independence a decade previously.

The text is equally willing to talk about imperialism without ever quite confronting it. The tone might best be described as forgiving, as captured in the author’s claim that the United States “trampled on a lot of toes” in Latin America. Yes, the United States was an imperial power, but, according to TheAmerican Pageant, it “[fell] through the cellar door of imperialism in a drunken fit of idealism.” Perhaps, the book hints, it was Europe’s bad example that helped lure Americans to the cellar door in the first place.

In rare moments, the writing—by Stanford historian Thomas A. Bailey—can be genuinely critical. Manifest destiny, for example, reflected a “dangerous spirit of bellicosity,” while “the so-called rape of Panama” epitomized Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick diplomacy. More often, though, the tone is exculpatory. The United States’ counter-insurgency war with the Philippines was a “sorry” affair:

Many of the primitive natives used barbarous methods, and inevitably the infuriated American troops were dragged down to their level. … Atrocity tales rocked and shocked the United States, for such methods were not representative of America’s better self.

At the end of the book, it becomes clear why the (relentlessly whitewashed) story of U.S. empire is so ideologically important. The final chapter includes an overview of the new global challenge facing the United States: Having proven their vitality through relentless territorial expansion, Bailey suggests, Americans must now channel their better selves to defend freedom around the world.

“Starting as a few struggling colonies,” The American Pageant explains, “we ultimately emerged as a vast empire, stretching magnificently from Maine to Manila, from Panama to the Pole.” In doing so, the country proved “that democracy could succeed on a continental scale” providing “an enduring inspiration for liberals the world over.” From now on, the “open frontier” of the United States was “in the laboratory, in industry, and in human welfare,” and the United States was “the world’s last hope.” “The American people did not seek this oppressive responsibility,” but “into our hands has been thrust the torch of leadership for the free world.”

A very similar map, combined with a very similar narrative, appears a decade later in TheAmerican Heritage Pictorial Atlas of United States History. An elegant coffee table book intended for students of all ages, the Pictorial Atlas promises readers a more profound understanding of their country and its place in the world.

Introducing the period of U.S. “expansion,” between 1865 and 1914, the authors declare it a “superlative” era of “exploitation and development.” Yet they immediately go on to say that “whether what happened was superlatively good or superlatively evil is less easy to decide.” Fueled by the “acquisitive spirit” of the Gilded Age, the Atlas explains, Americans “were looking greedily toward the Far East and toward Latin America.”

The tone, again, is not uncritical but profoundly forgiving. Even if U.S. motives were initially impure, “a fundamentally humane spirit eventually took over”:

The American overseas became a missionary as well as an exploiter, and if, like many missionaries, he often tried too hard to impose his own values on other peoples, he often contributed to their welfare.

Like many other accounts, the Pictorial Atlas quite candidly presents “imperialism” as inseparable from, and ultimately redeemed by, “the emergence of the United States as a world power.” The idea of the United States being drawn against its will onto the global stage helps reconcile the contradiction. Many citizens “had thoughtful reservations about colonialism,” even as the country “acquired a tidy little empire” stretching across the Caribbean and the Pacific.

For the authors, the United States was a reluctant hegemon, uncertainly answering Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 call to “take up the White Man’s burden.” Americans, the authors explain, “did not don the cloak of world power and influence gracefully, and for many years it rested uneasily upon their shoulders.” Yet ultimately the United States was forced to accept this new role, “whether it liked it or not.”

In the early Cold War, students were expected to understand that imperialism was at once proof of U.S. vigor and, at the same time, a negative foil for the country’s true calling. As the Landmark history of the Rough Riders concludes:

We have turned our backs on the evils of empire, and yet we are a bigger world power than we were at the end of 1898. In those days, orators talked about “our high and sublime mission in carrying the torch of civilization around the world.” They were well meaning, no doubt. But today we know that the highest mission of civilization is not grabbing but sharing.

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TheAmerican Pageant and TheAmerican Heritage Pictorial Atlas embody a once-popular attitude toward the U.S. role in the world—one that, with some inevitable partisan variation, underpinned the country’s bipartisan foreign policy consensus for decades. The narrative was not uncritical, nor was it based on simple ignorance about the United States’ many flaws. Rather, it presented U.S. foreign policy as a constant struggle between the country’s baser instincts and its better angels. As Jake Sullivan, who later became Joe Biden’s national security advisor, wrote in a 2019 Atlantic essay trying to reclaim U.S. exceptionalism, what “separates the United States from past superpowers” is its “capacity for self-appraisal, self-correction, and self-renewal.”

What stands out about Trump’s approach to foreign policy is that he has simultaneously targeted this narrative on two fronts. The old, liberal internationalist vision of U.S. global engagements contained a fair dose of problematic propaganda, but it has been replaced by pure militaristic id. By promoting a jingoistic version of U.S. history, Trump has rejected the premise that the United States has any room for self-improvement. And by embracing the most nakedly self-interested motives for neo-imperialism, he has also rejected the very idea of improvement itself.

Even in the 19th century, the rhetoric of imperial expansion at least gestured to a broader, supposedly civilizing mission, or promised some economic development in the colonies. Now, the president’s approach to foreign policy is all about grabbing rather than sharing. He has long lamented that, after invading Iraq, the United States didn’t just “take the oil.” In explaining his Venezuela intervention, he quickly dismissed any talk of democracy, and insisted instead that, this time, “we’re gonna take back the oil.”

Left wing critics were right to warn that when textbooks whitewash U.S. imperialism, they make it easier to imagine the United States’ liberal internationalism as purely idealistic. Sadly, though, Trump has revealed the limits of that argument.

If Americans simply aren’t interested in having a principled foreign policy, the moral judgement that historians attach to the country’s past actions no longer matters. To the extent that historic interventions are viewed as effectively acquisitive, they serve as precedents for the administration to follow. To the extent that they are seen as naively idealistic, the administration is content to simply ignore them and intervene more aggressively from its own acquisitive motives.

The United States is now writing a chapter that will be difficult for future historians to sanitize. Many on the left hope that as a result, Americans will be stripped of their illusions and forced to confront how violent and exploitative their country has always been. But then what? The problem is that whether you see the sins of the United States as resulting from misplaced idealism or something much darker, and whether you actually believe the country has shown a unique capacity for self-improvement, there’s still not much to do now besides hope it can do better.