In a speech in Arizona last month, as the country settled in for the holidays, President-elect Donald Trump made a flicker of news: Lamenting that “they” took William McKinley’s name off the country’s tallest peak, he promised his administration would “bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it.” This notion could be merely another attempt to stick it to Barack Obama, who, following the state of Alaska’s wishes, officially renamed the peak Denali in 2015. But it’s telling that Trump would venerate the twenty-fifth president, a Republican who from 1897 to 1901 charted America on an imperialist course that resulted, during his foreshortened term, in the United States taking Guam and Puerto Rico and annexing the Philippines and the Republic of Hawaii. It also happens that McKinley’s administration struck the deal with Britain that would allow for the eventual construction of the Panama Canal.
Which bring us to this month, in which Trump has expressed his desire to take the canal, which the U.S. controlled until 1977, as well as Greenland, a Danish territory that the U.S. has never laid any claim to (though American troops did occupy it for defensive purposes during World War II). In both cases, Trump has refused to rule out deploying the military to get what he wants. That’s not all. Trump also apparently covets Canada, and has pledged to make it America’s fifty-first state, albeit merely through “economic force.” It’s a positively McKinley-esque vision—in its expansionist ambition, anyway, if not its design.
It is tempting to discount all of this as trolling because, well, Trump is trolling. We are all experienced hands now when it comes to Trump’s nonsense, so we are rightly skeptical that he will pursue Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal to the extremes he has suggested. And yet, he is also serious enough about these ideas—or at least serious enough about whatever cracked strategy lies behind them—that he’s willing to ignite bitter feuds with several key allies right as he’s about to take office. And that, in fact, reveals an important truth about his approach to foreign policy more broadly, which is driven almost entirely by his desire to appear strong—or, more to the point, his fear of looking weak. This is why he picks senseless fights with smaller allies while avoiding brawls with the strongmen he so greatly admires.
Trump’s powers of media manipulation are often overstated, but—conscious or not—he has always had a knack for conjuring distracting baubles. It’s not clear that he benefits by diverting attention from serious issues (what he will do about China, Ukraine, and the wider Middle East) onto unserious ones like taking Greenland. But he has successfully and effortlessly focused the attention of the media away from those issues while providing red meat to his base, which is suddenly eager to acquire a giant, largely uninhabitable island in the North Atlantic.
But if you happen to be a Republican looking to backfill Trumpism this week, there are economic and geopolitical arguments for his imperialistic turn. Even if the 55,000-odd Greenlanders were the kindest, smartest, or most attractive people in the world, they would be of little interest to any world government. But Greenland possesses vast quantities of minerals and oil, as well as a position in the North Atlantic that has become increasingly vital as ice caps melt and governments begin vying for a larger prize: whatever treasures lurk beneath the Arctic. The Panama Canal, meanwhile, is a vital shipping route, and taking control of it would allow Trump to do one of the few things he clearly loves to do as president: punish his enemies and reward his friends via access fees.
As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)
In fact, these manufactured feuds are boosting his ego as we speak, and that’s by design. Trump’s blinkered worldview sees democracies as weak and dictatorships as strong: China is massive, and North Korea has a nuclear bomb, while Russia should be America’s best friend—conflict with any of them risks devastation and all-out war. Given his early appointments, Trump may very well end his second term mired in devastating conflicts in South Asia or the Middle East. But he is beginning it looking for a low-risk way to look strong.
Trump may even be mimicking the autocrats he admires. Over the last several years, as he brooded in quasi-exile at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump has watched Russian President Vladimir Putin gobble up territory in Ukraine while China’s Xi Jinping lays the groundwork to take Taiwan. Everywhere you look a large, powerful nation is grabbing territory from its smaller, weaker neighbors. Why should America sit on the sidelines?
So he’s picking fights with allies, particularly smaller ones—and, if all goes well, he’ll end up with something he can present as a “victory” to his base without the risk of wider, devastating conflict. He won’t get that from Kim Jong Un or Xi or Putin. But he just might from Denmark or Panama. In fact, the Danish foreign minister said recently that his country is “open to dialogue” about cooperating with Trump to protect U.S. interests in the Arctic. Sounds like a win!
This is, ultimately, all that matters to Trump. One could argue that he sees this as an opportunity akin to Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Granada in 1983, which was a P.R. exercise intended to restore a sense of optimism and strength in a nation still traumatized by its defeat in Vietnam. But Trump has never cared about the mood of the nation, only the—all too fleeting—mood of Donald Trump. Acquiring land, whether it be valuable (the Panama Canal) or mostly just very big (Greenland) is exactly the kind of legacy boost our first real estate tycoon president has always lusted after. For Trump, there is no difference between real strength and the appearance of strength, and acquiring land would make him look strong, like that nineteenth-century president whose name was so unfairly stripped from that Alaskan peak.
Trump’s foreign policy motivations may be narcissistic, but the stakes are real. On January 20, he will return to the White House with the world in a significantly worse state than it was eight years ago, when he first took office. Tensions with Iran are arguably higher than they have been since the hostage crisis began in 1979, and the country is believed to be on the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb. A strike on its nuclear facilities, whether by the U.S., Israel, or one of its many Arab enemies could quickly devolve into a regional war or worse. The incoming Trump administration will be filled to the brim with Iran hawks—and many eager for a confrontation with China. Given the increasingly desperate and fierce fighting in Ukraine, it is not far-fetched to imagine a situation that triggers NATO’s collective defense provision. In comparison, the world in 2017 was downright placid.
On the campaign trail, Trump talked a lot about Iran and China and said nothing about Greenland or the Panama Canal. Now that he is president-elect, the situation has reversed. It’s easy to see why. Surveying the current geopolitical climate, he surely sees several perilous conflicts on the brink of erupting into protracted, devastating wars. Trump is profoundly ill suited for the complexity of the geopolitical situation he is inheriting. He disdains all forms of diplomacy except escalation; his only “diplomatic” move is to issue threats of increasing belligerence and derangement. But doing so against leaders like Putin and Xi risks not only inflaming tensions but exposing his own weakness. Were he to spar with one of them like he has been with Denmark or a lame-duck Canada, he may have to back down or even lose. In short, Trump fears such dictators for the same reason that he admires them. They’re the strongmen he has always desperately wanted to be—and would be, in his mind, if only our pesky democracy didn’t limit his full potential.
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