Well before Donald Trump takes the oath of office to begin his second term as president, the man is already spooking the global community with his obsession with making Canada a U.S. state, taking over the Panama Canal and purchasing Greenland from Denmark, all harebrained plots he’s rolled out multiple times over the last couple of weeks.
Is Trump actually going to actually attempt to put these land grabs into practice? Who knows; the man’s a wrecking ball, and it’s often not clear in what direction exactly he’ll swing. He’s notoriously influenceable by those around him, who can change his mind or reshape his thinking with some well-timed encounters or TV hits.
The notion of buying Greenland, for example, reportedly first came from billionaire Ronald Lauder and was adopted as a pet project by Trump after the then-president saw a map and noted — and we wish we were making this up — that Greenland was very large. “I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different,” he said, per reporting in the New York Times. Yes, Greenland is in the northeast corner of the continent.
As goofy as Trump has made these ideas — also posting on his social media site about “Governor” Justin Trudeau and using his trademark nonsensical syntax and grammar — this is a manifestation of an outdated idea of territorial expansionism and imperialism.
These are all sovereign countries, and allies to boot, and there are no disputed claims in the least. All three have been very up-front about the fact that these entreaties are not welcome, and Trump’s continued insistence can only be read as straying from odd towards threat. Beyond these territorial claims, Trump has also played fast and loose with national sovereignty in other ways, threatening for example to invade Mexico to fight drug cartels.
Ultimately, he doesn’t have to do anything concrete for this to be rather damaging for our international relations, reputation and global standing. Negotiations with Canada or Denmark over anything now will live in the shadow of the president’s stated desire to wrest territory or sovereignty from them. Other countries will wonder who’s next — will the Amazon catch Trump’s eye next, setting off a diplomatic crisis with a cluster of different Latin American nations? Will Taiwan have to worry about not one but two global superpowers encroaching?
Speaking of which, this is all excellent ammunition for the other global imperialists, including China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the latter of whom has now spent years fighting a brutal war of territorial conquest in Ukraine. Every single time that U.S. diplomats or allies raise concerns or complaints over these expansionist designs, the despots will be able to point the finger at Trump and his insistence on growing our borders outwards.
We’ll remind Trump and his followers and allies that he ran at least in part on the idea of stepping away from foreign wars and entanglements. An excellent way to set off a conflict is to start too openly coveting another country’s land; let’s not get to finding out just how much is too much.