James Cheshire, UCL

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a golden age for polar mapmaking in the US. Major magazines such as Time, Life and Fortune commissioned a generation of famous cartographers – who had come of age in the second world war – to explain the new geopolitics to a mass audience that was highly engaged after the catastrophic global conflict they had just lived through.

Their maps were large, dramatic and designed to be spread across kitchen tables and classroom desks. And they also offered a very different perspective to the mainstream maps we have become accustomed to today.

I’ve spent the past four years unearthing maps from the late 1940s and early 1950s to research a book about a largely forgotten map library at my university, and I am always struck by how consequential they feel to the global arguments of their era. Not least because they invited debate from their readers who were asked to become global strategists by discussing the next moves in the game of geopolitics.

These maps didn’t just illustrate the world – they implored people to think about it differently. As the world enters a new period of international relations and global tensions, it’s worth considering the different perspectives maps can offer us.

With each new US foreign policy intervention – such as the US president’s current preoccupation with taking over Greenland – I have often wondered if these maps of global adversaries could have percolated into a young Trump’s mind. The world must have seemed a menacing place and it is shown on these maps as a series of threats and opportunities to be gamed, with the “Arctic arena” as a major venue.

The consensus encouraged by the maps was that of alliances, most notably Nato, and US opinion tended to endorse what Henry Luce, the influential owner of Time and Life magazines, called the “American century” in which the US would abandon isolationism and take on a global role.

Whatever one thinks of that worldview, it was frequently framed in terms of collective responsibility rather than individual dominance. Luce argued that the “work” of shaping the future “cannot come out of the vision of any one man”.

As we can now see with Greenland, Trump has taken the geography of threats and opportunity shown on these influential maps but reached a very different conclusion: an “America first”, resulting from the vision of the US president himself.

Dawning of the ‘air age’

The skilful of the cartographers of the era played with a range of map projections that offered different perspectives of geopolitical arenas. The master of this was Richard Edes Harrison who is described by the historian Susan Schultern as “the person most responsible for sensitizing the public to geography in the 1940s. [The public] tore his maps out of magazines and snatched them off shelves and, in the process, endowed Harrison himself with the status of a minor celebrity.”

Edes Harrison adopted many projections in his work – but for maps of the Arctic, he alighted on the azimuthal equidistant projection. While this creates maps that distort the shapes of countries, it enables the correct distances to be shown from the centre point of the map.

The projection became widely used in the 1940s and 1950s (and was indeed adopted for the UN flag in 1946) because it proved effective at demonstrating the wonder of the burgeoning “air age” as commercial flights followed great circle routes over the Arctic.

This contrasted with the roundabout routes that needed to be followed by ships and it also mapped the countries that bordered and occupied the Arctic with a much greater sense of proximity and threat.

Missiles and bombers were just as able to travel over the top of Earth as were holidaymakers – and this created a juxtaposition exploited by cartographers. Rand McNally, a renowned map publisher, for example, published a collection of maps entitled Air Age Map of the Global Crisis in 1949.

These set out “the growing line-up of countries and peoples behind the two rival ways of life competing for power in the 20th Century” – that is capitalism as embodied by the US and Soviet and Chinese communism.

Those who bought it were told: “Keep this map folder! It may have great historic significance a generation from now.”

New world order

Donald Trump’s return to office has revived talk of a world moving beyond the assumptions of the postwar order — weakening alliances, acting unilaterally, treating territory as leverage. At the same time, maps remain one of the most trusted forms of evidence in public life.

A Mercator-shaped worldview, widely used by digital maps can distort reality – for example, making Greenland much larger than it is.

Cartographers have long known the strengths and limitations of Mercator, but Trump’s approach to foreign policy is a further reminder of the perspective we lose when we depend on the standardised views of Earth that digital maps encourage (some have also speculated that Mercator’s exaggeration of Greenland’s area heightens its real estate appeal to Trump).

Maps are powerful things and in times of crisis, or rapid change, we turn to them to help explain events and locate ourselves within them. But they can be just as much about arguments as they are facts – and Trump knows this.

The maps of the 1940s and 1950s were about a fresh (American) perspective to create a new world order. They instilled Trump’s generation with a sense of the geopolitical rivalries that tend to get washed out of generic digital maps that are most widely consumed today.

Nearly 80 years on, this order may be creaking – but the maps are still there to remind us of what’s at stake.

James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mark Shanahan, University of Surrey

Federal immigration agents in the city of Minneapolis are accused of having wrestled a 37-year-old intensive care nurse called Alex Pretti to the ground and then shooting him dead. The killing took place just over a mile from where another American citizen, Renee Good, was allegedly fatally shot by federal agents weeks earlier.

The latest incident prompted angry protests from people in Minneapolis who want the immigration enforcement operation in their city to end. We spoke to Mark Shanahan, an associate professor of political engagement at the University of Surrey, to address several key issues.

Why has sending in federal immigration agents caused such trouble in Minnesota?

Since returning to the White House in January 2025, the national guard has been deployed to several US cities to quell what have generally been Donald Trump-inflated crises, with illegal migration among the most prominent. However, in December, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump did not have authority for such deployments.

So, since then we have seen federal agents with US Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement taking the battle largely to minorities in cities with Democratic party leadership as part of the president’s violent attack on illegal immigration, a situation he has described as “the greatest invasion in history”.

Minneapolis is a Democrat-run city in a Democrat-led state. The governor is Tim Walz who ran for vice-president on the Kamala Harris ticket against Trump in the 2024 election. Walz has faced allegations, which he denies, of overlooking alleged widespread fraud in the financing of public safety net programmes, supposedly involving segments of the Somali-American community.

While most of these allegations have been refuted, they gave Trump reason to send in federal agents. This has ramped up tensions between state officials and the administration, causing brutal and unnecessary deaths in the community and pitting ordinary Minnesotans against federal government officials.

How does the situation in Minnesota reflect the second amendment right to bear arms?

It’s a reversal of virtually all of the second amendment debates that have been seen in recent years. The second amendment was introduced to the US constitution in 1791 through the Bill of Rights due to a deep mistrust of centralised military power and a desire to ensure that the newly formed federal government could not disarm the populace.

The founding fathers envisaged a “natural right of resistance and self-preservation”. Trump’s actions in sending in armed federal agents to conduct enforcement operations in various states appear to fulfil the founding fathers’ concerns.

The agents are trampling all over not only citizens’ second amendment right to bear arms (officials seemingly connected Pretti’s killing to him carrying a weapon) but also their first amendment right to freedom of assembly.

How have the fatal shootings affected Trump’s popularity?

Trump’s popularity is on the decline. His failure to deliver on the economic promises outlined in his election campaign, scatter-gun approach to international relations and the widening gulf between rhetoric and achievement have all damaged his standing in the polls.

In a CNN poll published on January 16, almost six in ten respondents described Trump’s first year back in office as a failure with the president focused on the wrong priorities.

And what support he does have is ebbing rapidly as federal immigration agents appear out of control, targeting many more documented citizens than illegal migrants, spreading fear and operating as if they are above the law.

With what looks like high levels of gaslighting coming from Homeland Security officials, voters are turning against the increasing autocracy of this administration, believing in the evidence widespread across the media rather than highly contentious statements from Trump’s lieutenants.

Is it unusual for former presidents to speak out the way Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have?

It certainly is. There is a longstanding tradition in the US of, and implicit agreement among, former presidents to avoid public criticism of the incumbent. Such reticence to speak is generally a sign of respect for the office and an acknowledgement of the unique and difficult challenges of the presidency.

But Trump 2.0 is no normal presidency. The 47th president’s style is both combative and retributive, and there seems to be an increasing feeling of it being out of step with the desires and best interest of the country he leads.

Trump’s march to autocracy creates crises where he regards himself as the hero the country needs to overcome its ills. His predecessors take a different view.

Whether it’s Obama calling out the assault on core American values or Clinton’s condemnation of the “horrible scenes” in Minneapolis as “unacceptable” and avoidable, Democrat past presidents have not held back. Notably, the only living previous Republican president, George W. Bush, has so far kept his own counsel.

What can be done to prevent further violence?

Most simply, Trump could end the deployment of federal immigration agents to Minneapolis and refrain from similar actions in the future. He is clearly looking for an off-ramp and sending his “border czar”, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis to direct operations could be the first step to de-escalation. But Trump abhors being called out as wrong and, at least beyond Minneapolis, is far more likely to double down on the immigration enforcement activities.

Realistically, the most likely de-escalator is Congress showing some teeth and refusing to fund further federal immigration enforcement activity. Democrats could force another government shutdown over the issue, and need just a handful of Republicans to flip in order to refuse to sanction a 2026 budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

At a public level, the greater the scrutiny of immigration enforcement agencies, the closer the fact-checking of official statements and the more cohesive the opposition to Trump’s deportation policy, the greater the chance of effectively opposing it.

It is midterm year – and the greater the public pressure, the more likely Republican legislators are to cleave away from the Trump line. While he currently controls the levers of power, that control remains fragile. Even Trump may soon realise that overt, violent, coercive autocracy is not a vote winner.

Mark Shanahan, Associate Professor of Political Engagement, University of Surrey

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.