Eugene Doyle
Trump said last week that the U.S. is prepared to use military force to assert control over Panama and Greenland.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes. People don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it but even if they do they should give it up because I’m talking about protecting the free world,” he said.
The world’s largest island is bigger than France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, and Belgium combined. It’s literally bigger than Texas (300% bigger)—and the U.S. wants it.
Think about that. The U.S. may pose a greater risk to the territorial integrity of the European Union than the Russians do. If they get antsy with the U.S., Trump will “tariff them”.
The Danes, like the rest of Europe, are frightened of the U.S. In response to Trump’s Greenland gambit, Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen timidly said this week that Denmark was “open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can co-operate, possibly even more closely than we already do, to ensure that American ambitions are fulfilled”.
To ensure American ambitions are fulfilled. And this was the country that gave us the Vikings. If Ragnar Lodbrok, Eric Bloodaxe or Bjorn Ironside had been around when Donald Trump Junior swooped into Nuuk for his photo op this week, his skull would have been used as a drinking tankard for a blót sumbl feast that same evening.
Top independent strategists have for years despaired of the strategic brainlessness of U.S. foreign policy—the Midas Touch in reverse, as Professor Mearsheimer calls it. Wherever they went–from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza–Americans embroiled themselves in conflicts of little strategic worth and left behind piles of bodies, millions of implacable enemies and a litany of failures.
Trump’s rough wooing of Canada to become the 51st state, and his threat to use military force to seize both Greenland and the Canal, speak to a back-to-basics focus for American imperialism—a shift in U.S. policy that will bring it closer to its core strategic interests.
That’s quite appropriate for a man who counts President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) as a role model. There is a whiff of the Rough Rider (Roosevelt’s cavalry which kicked over the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898) about Trump’s recent utterances.
Outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York you could see a magnificent statue of Teddy Roosevelt, cowboy kerchief around his neck, six-shooter hanging off his hip, astride a proud steed with two bare-chested Noble Savages, an African and an American Indian, walking on either side of the great white man. I particularly like the slightly punkish metal spikes sticking out of his hair to stop birds shitting on his head. After 82 years, the city finally woke up to the fact that this was a racist, colonialist trope and took the statue down in 2021.
It is ironic that just four years after doing so, an even bigger monument to Roosevelt is going up: Trump redux is lifting entire passages out of the Roosevelt playbook.
Roosevelt greatly increased the influence and interests of the United States, building on the recent seizures of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba and Guam. He wanted to Make America Great and to do so he would “speak softly and carry a big stick”.
Big stick diplomacy–the willingness to use the military–was increasingly unleashed to assert U.S. hegemony and business interests. General Smedley D Butler, author of War is a Racket, spent his entire 33-year career (1898-1931) enforcing the rules as defined by Theodore Roosevelt and his successors. Smedley eventually realised he was fighting as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism”. Like thousands of Marines he fought for the U.S. in countries up and down the Americas, Caribbean and Asia, including Cuba (1898), Venezuela, Panama, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and China.
Roosevelt’s greatest legacy was the building of the Panama Canal. The U.S. intervened militarily in Panama to drive out the Colombians and “liberate” Panama so it could build the Canal. He said that the people of Panama rebelled against Colombia “literally as one man”—to which a senator retorted, “Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt!”
Is history repeating itself—as tragedy or comedy? If Trump’s threats all sound either nuts or 19th century, it’s because it is both those things—which doesn’t mean they won’t happen.
Here’s where it gets interesting. I think Trump has a very good point for a number of reasons (clue: none of them relate to international law or respect for the sovereignty of nations). Greenland has a ton of energy, fishing and mineral resources the Americans would love to lay their hands on. The Arctic maritime routes are slowly opening and if you look at a map of the Arctic you’ll realise the U.S. has very little real estate, to use Trumpspeak, up there and Russia has a vast amount.
The third reason is equally important: incorporating Canada and Greenland into the U.S. would give the country an enormous boost at a time when it is slipping behind China in all critical areas.
According to the IMF, the Chinese have already overtaken the U.S. in share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity (19%-15%). By 2035 this gap will likely explode out to 25% to 14% in Beijing’s favour. How should the U.S. respond? Its current China containment strategy of sanctions, tariffs and threats is failing as China’s manufacturing and tech sectors greatly outperform the U.S. Military planners say the U.S. would almost certainly lose a conventional war against China over Taiwan; the U.S. is already losing its proxy war in Ukraine. A course correction seems inevitable.
Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of “the rules-based international order”, the self-serving system that touted international law as long as it didn’t apply to the U.S. and its allies. The Canadians, the Danes, the Panamanians and the rest of us should wake up to reality and see we are objects, we are mere things to the Americans, not allies with some deeply shared “values”. Trump is refreshingly candid: he wants stuff and he’s prepared to dispense with the preachy posturing that we got with Blinken and Biden. America is not your friend.
(Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. Courtesy: Pearls and Irritations, an Australian platform for the exchange of ideas from a progressive, liberal perspective, with an emphasis on peace and justice.)
