In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September 2025, President Donald Trump struck a sharply paternalistic tone directed not at the Global South but at Europe itself. This language of authority and guidance recalls the imperial tones of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901):
“The East is a tangled skein, a labyrinth
of bazaars and holy men, of spies and
intrigues, where only the wise hand can
guide the fates of millions.”
Just as Kipling cast the West as the natural tutor of the East, Trump positioned the United States as the tutor of Europe—an inversion that highlights how imperial hierarchies endure, reappearing in new guises on the global stage.
Rudyard Kipling’s earlier poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) is perhaps the most famous literary defence of empire. Written at the moment of America’s annexation of the Philippines, the poem urges Western powers to “civilise” colonised peoples under the guise of moral duty. It glorifies domination as sacrifice, portraying subject peoples as “half-devil and half-child,” incapable of self-rule. Critics saw immediately that this was no altruistic appeal but propaganda—an attempt to sanctify greed, racism, and violence. Henry Labouchère’s satirical The Brown Man’s Burden mocked Kipling’s hypocrisy, while Indian nationalists condemned the poem as patronising and insulting, a blunt expression of Western arrogance.
Two years later, Kipling’s novel Kim dramatised the same vision in fictional form. The tale of a young boy entangled in espionage during the “Great Game” presented India as exotic, timeless, and in need of British management. Indian characters are vibrant but fixed, rarely allowed full individuality, while British figures are rational, strategic, and indispensable. Even as Kipling captured Indian landscapes and spiritual practices with colour and admiration, his narrative reinforced a core ideology: empire is necessary, the colonised cannot govern themselves, and British intervention is both heroic and morally obligatory.
Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism helps illuminate this pattern. Kim exemplifies how Western literature constructed the East as romanticised yet dependent, turning knowledge into a mechanism of power and justification for rule. Kipling’s work was part of a vast cultural machinery: adventure novels, travelogues, imperial histories, and world exhibitions all portrayed colonies as chaotic, childlike, or morally immature, thereby making empire appear a civilising necessity. These cultural stories embedded paternalism deep in the Western imagination.
Whether through Kipling’s verses and adventures in Kim, Victorian travelogues, IMF loan agreements, or Trump’s UN speech, exploitation has always required a story to justify itself
The lived reality, however, was one of extraction, not uplift. Britain celebrated its “gifts” to India—railways, schools, legal codes—but each of these served imperial priorities. The railways were designed not to integrate India for its own benefit but to funnel raw materials—cotton, jute, opium, tea, grain—swiftly to ports and to move troops quickly to crush dissent. Schools and universities created a narrow elite of intermediaries for the Raj rather than offering a broad-based education. Courts protected the property of colonial merchants and zamindars while repressing peasant unrest. These institutions, far from civilising tools, were mechanisms of control and profit.
Dadabhai Naoroji’s famous theory of the “drain of wealth” exposed the scale of this system. Taxes from Indian peasants, profits from trade monopolies, and salaries and pensions for British officials all flowed steadily to London. Indian industries, such as textiles, were deliberately dismantled so that British manufacturers could dominate global markets. Grain exports continued even during devastating famines, when millions died, showing the brutal priorities of imperial economics. By modern estimates, this drain amounted to tens of trillions of dollars in today’s currency. Far from being a noble burden, the empire was an extractive machine—enriching Britain while impoverishing India.
This logic did not vanish with decolonisation. It reappeared in new guises, particularly through international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Their Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) often required indebted nations to slash public spending on health, education, and welfare to ensure repayment. These measures mirrored the colonial pattern: foreign interests were prioritised over local well-being.
Debt repayments, trade liberalisation, and privatisation funnelled resources outward, while local elites collaborated in the process. The rhetoric shifted from “civilisation” to “development,” but the ideological structure remained the same: exploitation was reframed as responsibility, domination as benevolence. Just as Kipling’s poem and novel had been cultural vehicles for legitimising control, so too do today’s development reports, aid narratives, and corporate campaigns serve as modern bureaucratic equivalents.
But the survival of this logic is not confined to the Global South. The White Man’s Burden, once framed as a North–South dialogue, has also appeared within the West itself. Trump’s UN speech illustrates this mutation. Though addressed to European allies, his rhetoric employed the same ideological mechanism: recasting superiority as paternal duty. Migration and climate policies were cast as existential errors, simplified into morality tales, while American “guidance” was framed as indispensable.
He condemned “open border” policies, warning that uncontrolled immigration was “ruining” European nations, and held up U.S. border controls as a model, even accusing the UN of enabling migration. On climate change, he dismissed it as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” derided renewable energy as a “green scam,” and instead praised “clean, beautiful coal.” He further queried the UN’s very purpose, charging that it was “not living up to its potential.”
Just as Britain cloaked its drain of India in the language of uplift, Trump’s “concern” for Europe conveniently aligned with America’s protectionist and fossil-fuel agenda. The ‘burden logic’ persists: dominance reframed as benevolence, extraction as service.
The lesson is clear. Whether through Kipling’s verses and adventures in Kim, Victorian travelogues, IMF loan agreements, or Trump’s UN speech, exploitation has always required a story to justify itself. Empire or funds, guns or loans, paternalism or nationalist warnings—the message is constant. Dominance is dressed as duty, greed as service, and extraction as moral responsibility. The White Man’s Burden, though updated and repackaged, continues to shape the structures, stories, and power dynamics of the twenty-first century.