In Conversation with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

The Trump administration has started sending people to Guantánamo, using the naval base that houses the notorious “war on terror” prison as a holding site for immigrants it wants to deport. The administration has pledged to build a tent city to detain as many as 30,000 people there, calling to mind the 1990s, when tens of thousands of Haitian asylum seekers were held at the island camp for months on end in horrific conditions.

For journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of the new book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, the administration’s use of Gitmo is the perfect example of the ideology guiding Donald Trump’s foreign policy, which sees weak points in sovereignty as places to exploit. In a new piece for The Atlantic, she names this line of thinking “national globalism.” Abrahamian is also a contributing editor to Lux, so we chatted this week about nation-state-sized loopholes in the world order. —Cora Currier

CORA CURRIER Clearly, Trump is using the specter of the counterterrorism side of Guantánamo — which people still believe holds the “worst of the worst” — to equate immigrants with terrorists and to say that they deserve whatever treatment they get.

ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN It’s absolutely a scare tactic, and it’s high drama, flood-the-zone, whatever we want to call it. The other thing that I think they’re angling for — and it remains to be seen how useful it’s going to be for them — is to somehow evade responsibility even further by sending people offshore. They’re doing this also in Panama: there were Afghan, Iranian, Uzbek, and Chinese asylum seekers sent to Panama, first to a hotel, and now apparently to a camp in a forest, where U.S. law doesn’t apply as clearly. Guantánamo is a little bit more complicated because U.S. law has been found to apply there, but it’s still far away and hard to get to. In Panama, journalists could just walk up to the hotel and call out through the window and get people’s cell phone numbers — you can’t really do that in Guantánamo because it’s a heavily militarized, heavily guarded place. The amount of accountability, transparency, and, down the line, due process is likely to be pretty minimal.

CC Generally, you have to get there by military transport. During the last Trump administration, there was a long period where they just weren’t allowing reporters in at all. 

AA Yeah, the ACLU says they can’t even get a hold of people there — and that’s lawyers who know what they’re doing, who have dealt with this problem before, so God help any reporter trying to navigate the system.

CC Or a detained immigrant’s family member, or a protester… We often find ourselves saying this, but the problem didn’t start with Trump. It’s the most extreme example of outsourcing immigration control, which has long tried to “push the border south,” to get Latin America to do more border enforcement for the U.S., and to extend the apparatus of border security outposts around the world after 9/11. In your piece you mentioned El Salvador, now jumping in with an offer to incarcerate people for the U.S. You see all of this as part of an ideology you’re calling “national globalism.” Can you explain the term and point to where else in Trump’s policy you see it at work?

AA The way I define national globalism — connotation very much intended — is the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests. I write about the offshore world and extraterritoriality and weird jurisdictions; I noticed that in the first few weeks of the second Trump term, they were homing in on places that don’t completely fit our idea of what a country is or what national jurisdiction is. The Panama Canal, the second-biggest free economic zone in the world, built by the U.S., administered by the U.S. for a long time, is very much part of Panama geographically — but historically, in its management and its construction, its nationality has been not-quite Panamanian. Guantánamo: This is a place that is owned by Cuba and rented against Cuba’s will by the Americans, so the sovereignty has always been a little bit up in the air. Again, there have been many lawsuits over the years that have established the U.S.’s responsibility to treat people as they would on U.S. soil, but the fact remains that territories outside the U.S. open up possibilities for exploitation and abuse. And then there’s wackier stuff like Greenland. Greenland was colonized by Denmark for a long time. Now it governs itself, but Denmark still has a lot of power over it — and again, you can see the parallels. Greenland is a little indeterminate, so the Trump administration seizes on that as something that they might be able to buy. They see a weak spot in the sovereignty of the place. And perhaps most depressingly, there are the plans for Gaza, a place that world leaders have bent over backwards to classify as somehow indeterminate, or less-than or non-sovereign. It makes perfect sense in this line of thinking that the Trump administration would see a weak spot, see an opportunity, and think, “well, this place is kind of up for grabs. Why don’t we go for it?”

This isn’t a new thing. I mean, Australia sent migrants offshore to Nauru and Manus Island. China has been building special economic zones pretty much all around the world at ports, in Central Asia, and in Southeast Asia. I think this ideology, which has been thriving for the past 20 years, is coming home. First with Trump’s executive order trying to get rid of birthright citizenship — he thinks he can separate land and law. And this zany freedom cities plan, to make deregulated zones at home, looks an awful lot like what China did in the ’70s and ’80s in Shenzhen, for example, to create manufacturing outposts. 

The important point to remember here is that it’s very easy to fall into a binary of nationalism versus globalism, as though nationalists have some consistent ideas about territory and borders and law. But that’s really not the case. They are completely willing and able to look beyond their borders for spaces to do their dirty business and advance their domestic interests. So when they talk a big game about sovereignty and taking back control, it’s really only about their own. They don’t care about anybody else’s.

CC I think it’s a really helpful rejoinder to the tendency among some on the left to think, well, a stopped clock is right twice a day, when Trump does something you might call anti-interventionist. There is actually a certain logic at work here.

AA It’s the opposite of isolationism. It’s just really targeted. 

CC You had one line that summed it up: “If you’re incredibly rich, cruel, or clever, the world can be your loophole.”

AA I write a lot about the stuff that ultra-rich people do to get around the rules. There’s a misconception that they’re breaking the rules. Rich people love rules, they love laws. They just want the law to be what they want it to be. I think I recognized, in these announcements and efforts from the Trump administration, a kind of logic that is shared with oligarchs who are hiding their money or the accountants that are helping them do it. It’s one thing for an individual to go out of their way to get around the law, but it’s another for the world’s most powerful country to do so as well.