[Donald Trump’s Imperialist Designs: A New World Order
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 poured fuel on a tense world waiting with trepidation for his second term when a reporter asked him if he could rule out force to seize back the Panama Canal or to take over strategically important Greenland.
Trump’s 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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
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