US Land Grabbing Policy: From Turtle Island to Chattogram

Tracing centuries of American land grabs from North America to Afghanistan and Bangladesh

The United States (previously named Turtle Island), from its very inception, expanded across Turtle Island (Kachhapa Dvīpa > कच्छप द्वीप) through actions that can only be described as systematic land grabbing. The first British settlers, driven by persecution under James I, brought the Puritan zeal to the shores of this continent, displacing and slaughtering the original inhabitants to claim their land. Turtle Island (कच्छप द्वीप)—also known as Abiayala (in Guna Native language)—became a haven for myriad outlandish European religious sects with the means to cross the Atlantic. They weaponized their Christian faith, turning spiritual fervor into justification for seizing territory, erasing native societies, and installing their own colonies.

Long before these arrivals, the Lenape people told the story of the “Great Turtle,” in which Kishelamàkânk, the Great Creator Spirit, dreamt the Earth into being, envisioning mountains, forests, animals, and humans with their ceremonies. The Guna people speak of their land as ancient and mature, steeped in experience, a richness that early Christian settlers exploited violently. Lacking firearms, the native peoples were no match for the settlers’ deadly technology, and thus the “persecuted” Christians killed and displaced them, erecting churches, colonies, and eventually the United States in 1775. By 1776, Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, notably omitting references to Christ or God, fully aware of the prior generations’ land-grabbing impulses, and the U.S. Constitution, ratified a decade later, followed the same secular omission.

Expansion was driven by the ideology of Manifest Destiny, a doctrine asserting that white Americans were divinely destined to spread their civilization across the continent. Framed as inevitable, beneficial, and morally righteous, it rationalized conquest while denying the sovereignty of Native American and Mexican inhabitants. The nation’s territorial growth relied on multiple mechanisms of acquisition. Native Americans were subjected to coerced treaties, forced relocations such as the Trail of Tears under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the breaking up of communal lands via the Dawes Act, enabling white settlers to claim millions of acres.

Financial transactions masked territorial grabs, such as the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which ignored the claims of Native nations. Revolts in Mexican Texas led to U.S. annexation in 1845, provoking war with Mexico, which culminated in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, gifting the United States over 500,000 square miles of land, paid for but obtained through coercion and military conquest. The Oregon Treaty with Britain in 1846, spurred by the slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight,” expanded U.S. holdings further, while the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 finalized the contiguous 48 states, purchased for railroad ambitions rather than necessity.

The United States’ territorial history is inseparable from conquest, coercion, and the ideological justification of divine entitlement. Military aggression, forced treaties, ethnic cleansing, and racialized claims of superiority defined its expansion, framing land theft as a moral duty. While cloaked in legality through treaties, purchases, and congressional acts, these expansions were fundamentally imperialist, prioritizing territorial gain over the sovereignty, rights, and lives of Turtle Island’s original inhabitants. This legacy reverberates today in discussions of reparations, tribal sovereignty, and the nation’s enduring identity.

Much like the historical patterns of expansion across Turtle Island, the United States has long demonstrated a tendency toward territorial and strategic ambition beyond its borders. Afghanistan, a rugged and ancient land with its own centuries-old civilizations, has recently resisted such impulses. President Donald Trump’s call for the U.S. military to return and reclaim Bagram Airbase was met with firm rejection. Kabul made clear, through its foreign ministry, that while dialogue with the United States remains possible, no military foothold would be permitted. Taliban officials echoed this stance, dismissing the notion entirely.

Zakir Jalal, speaking for Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, emphasized that engagement with the United States must occur without any foreign troops stationed on Afghan soil. The message underscores Afghanistan’s determination to assert its sovereignty, resisting what might be interpreted as a modern iteration of the land-grabbing tendencies historically demonstrated by the U.S. This scenario, while couched in diplomacy, mirrors centuries of American expansionism: the projection of power, attempts at territorial influence, and the expectation that local authorities yield to U.S. designs—an expectation Afghanistan has firmly rebuffed.

The contrast is stark: where Turtle Island’s original inhabitants lacked the means to resist, Afghanistan, shaped by decades of conflict and geopolitical awareness, is able to say no, preserving the autonomy of its land and asserting that foreign ambitions—military or otherwise—will not dictate its future. The historical echo is evident: the U.S. continues to test boundaries, but not all lands are as vulnerable to external seizure as those once were in its own colonial past.

In 2025, the land-grabbing tendencies of the United States manifested yet again, this time on the fertile and strategic plains of Chattogram, Bangladesh—a land once woven into the tapestry of Greater India. Cloaked in the pretense of a military exercise, the presence of American forces was less about drills and more about signaling power, projecting influence, and testing the sovereignty of a nation with a proud and ancient heritage.

Bangladesh, with its rivers, ports, and centuries of cultural resilience, stands in stark contrast to lands historically vulnerable to foreign seizure. Yet the pattern is familiar: the rhetoric of “security,” “training,” or “strategic partnership” becomes the veil for implicit territorial ambition. Like Turtle Island before it, like Afghanistan before it, this region confronts a foreign power accustomed to equating presence with ownership, influence with control.

Chattogram, once a vibrant node of trade and culture in Greater India, now finds itself a theater in which historical memory and modern geopolitics collide. The attempt to militarily entrench in Bangladeshi soil echoes the centuries-old American practice of using pretexts—whether “Manifest Destiny,” “freedom,” or “exercises”—to assert dominion over lands far from home. But the lesson of history is clear: land rich in history, culture, and vigilance cannot be seized merely through force or show of arms; it requires the consent of those who have nurtured it for generations.

This episode in Chattogram is thus not merely a military maneuver; it is a continuation of a centuries-long narrative of American expansionism, one that seeks to stretch influence across continents, even as the people of the land assert the enduring right to sovereignty, identity, and autonomy.

Tanmoy: 22/09/2025