Donald Trump’s imperialist designs on Greenland, Canada and Panama often sound like the ramblings of a real estate shark who equates foreign and trade policy to a hunt for new deals.
But there’s method in his expansionist mindset. Trump, in his unique way, is grappling with national security questions the US must face in a new world shaped by China’s rise, the inequalities of globalization, melting polar ice and great power instability.
His attitude also embodies the “America First” principle of using US strength to relentlessly pursue narrow national interests, even by coercing smaller, allied powers.
Trump’s musings about terminating the Panama Canal Treaty especially show the preoccupation of the new administration with the encroachment of foreign powers into the Western Hemisphere. This isn’t a new concern — it’s been a constant thread in American history, dating back to the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s when European colonialists were the threat. The issue endured through the communist scares of the Cold War. Today’s usurpers are China, Russia and Iran.
Trump’s belief, meanwhile, that the United States should rule supreme in its own sphere of influence is also an important hint about how he might manage key global hotspots, including the war in Ukraine and potentially even Taiwan.
But his 21st century neocolonialism is a huge risk and appears certain to run headlong into international law. And Trump could compromise America’s power by trashing alliances built up over generations and alienating its friends.
Trump keeps military force on the table
Trump poured fuel on a tense world waiting with trepidation for his second term on Tuesday when a reporter asked him if he could rule out force to seize back the Panama Canal or to take over strategically important Greenland.
“I’m not going to commit to that, no,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago. “It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
Canadians were relieved to learn that the president-elect won’t be sending the 82nd Airborne across the 49th parallel. He said he’d only use economic force to annex the proud sovereign democracy to the north and make it the 51st state.
As often with Trump, his threats came with a mixture of malice and mischief. And there was a characteristic element of farce as the president-elect’s son, Donald Jr., flew the family’s Boeing to Greenland, with a bobblehead of his father perched on the cockpit control panel. “Make Greenland Great Again!” the president-elect posted on his Truth Social network shortly before his son landed.
It’s unlikely Trump will get what he wants with Canada, Panama or Greenland. So his strategy might be aimed at getting better deals for the US — perhaps a discount for American vessels transiting the key waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, greater American access to rare earth minerals in Greenland and sea routes revealed by melting polar ice, as well as a new trade deal with Canada that might advantage US manufacturers. Trump would be sure to portray any of these as a massive win only he could have achieved, even if they end up being rather cosmetic like his first-term US-Mexico-Canada pact.
But Trump’s threats flesh out one of his foreign policy rationales: that each country should aggressively pursue their goals unilaterally in a manner that will inevitably profit strong, rich nations like the United States.
“As president, I have rejected the failed approaches of the past, and I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s okay — that’s what you should be doing,” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in 2020.
This is a doctrine distilled from a life in which Trump has tried to always be the most aggressive person in every room in pursuit of “wins” over weaker opponents. This explains his remark that Denmark should hand over Greenland, a self-governing entity inside its kingdom, because it’s important to US security. If not, Trump said, “I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.”
The president-elect also characterized the US decision to hand over the Panama Canal in 1999 under a treaty signed by Jimmy Carter as folly that squandered the advantages of US power. He claimed falsely that American ships were discriminated against in transit fees and that China, not Panama, was operating the waterway. (Beijing-owned firms do run some ports in Panama). “We gave the Panama Canal to Panama. We didn’t give it to China, and they’ve abused it,” Trump said just before Carter’s body arrived in Washington before Thursday’s state funeral.
Trump’s tough-guy approach also explains why he sees little distinction between US allies and adversaries. He, for example, complained Tuesday that Canada, America’s closest geographical friend, was freeloading off the US defense umbrella and therefore should be a state rather than a nation. Such a view repudiates the US-led liberal order that sees alliances as investments that multiply American power and protect democracy and freedom.
The US may be retreating from the world, but it’s doubling down in its backyard
Sending troops to grab the Panama Canal or Greenland might contradict Trump’s campaign trail warnings that the US should avoid new foreign entanglements. But it exemplifies the “America First” ideology. A retreat from the old world in a Trump second term could be be replaced by “continentalism” that might “displace globalism,” argued Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Foreign Affairs last May.
This would update the doctrine unveiled by President James Monroe in 1823, to which President Theodore Roosevelt later added a corollary — that the United States should protect life and property in Latin American countries.
While Trump has set off global consternation with his new Panama Canal rhetoric, he first broached a tougher line in America’s backyard in his first term. “Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers,” Trump told the UN General Assembly in 2018. “It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe that we reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs.”
His policy represented a split with the Obama administration that is consistent with Trump’s backlash politics. In 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
The 21st century Monroe reboot targets China, Russia, Iran and their business, military and intelligence partnerships in nations like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Marco Rubio — a surprising pick for Trump’s secretary of state given his traditionalist foreign policy leanings — is on the same page as his new boss on hemispheric affairs. The Florida senator said at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2022 that China was wielding economic influence in a way that hurt regional economies and boosted cartels that export fentanyl and violence across US borders. “They do this because they know that chaos in Latin America and the Caribbean would severely hurt us, destabilize us, who they view as their primary and central rival,” Rubio said. “We simply can’t afford to let the Chinese Communist Party expand its influence and absorb Latin America and the Caribbean into its private political-economic bloc.”
How Trump’s tough talk could backfire
Trump’s expansionist vision reflects supreme confidence heading into his second term, which he’s determined to use to leave an era-defining mark on America’s global role.
And his personification of the principle of the strong triumphing over the weak might also inform his approach to other global issues — most notably the war in Ukraine. In a striking moment Tuesday, Trump said he understood Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fear that the nation he invaded could join NATO. “Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feeling about that,” the president-elect said.
The possibility that Trump could accept Russia’s terms was already a concern. His former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, recorded one moment when Putin drew an analogy between his illegal claims to Ukraine and historic US concerns about its hemisphere. “Putin used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him,” McMaster wrote in his book “At War with Ourselves.” He added: “to suggest moral equivalence between U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin cited the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
Trump’s bombast may delight his supporters. But many foreigners think it’s arrogant. An attempt to seize the Panama Canal would be regarded as geopolitical piracy. Invading Greenland would make a mockery of international law.
And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — whose already doomed career suffered a final blow because of Trump’s tariff threats — lampooned Trump’s designs on the Great White North on Tuesday. “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” he wrote on X.
This reaction shows the downside of Trump’s approach. His bullying of America’s friends may alienate whole populations. Some foreign policy experts fear American threats and pressure in Latin America may actually push nations closer to China.
And insults about Canada being better off as the 51st state are likely to harden public opinion there against the incoming US president and make it harder for the next prime minister to clinch deals with him.
“Greenland is not MAGA. Greenland is not going to be MAGA.”