WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s campaign excursions into foreign policy were few and far between. He promised to build a stronger military and keep the country out of war. He said he would bring peace to Gaza and end the war in Ukraine on “day one,” never offering details.
Last week, Trump waded boldly into global affairs — but he barely touched on those purported priorities. Instead, at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, he focused on a list of obscure, arguably eccentric goals: acquiring Greenland from Denmark, absorbing Canada as a very large 51st state, and retaking control of the Panama Canal.
The president-elect said he would bring all three territories under U.S. control through economic coercion, but did not rule out using force to seize Greenland and the canal.
It sounded like a revival of 19th century gunboat imperialism, or at least a throwback to the global system that dominated before World War II — “spheres of influence,” in which great powers dominated their regions and smaller countries knuckled under.
As so often with Trump, it was hard to know whether to take him seriously.
After all, he also pronounced that he will give the Gulf of Mexico a new name, the “Gulf of America” — presumably under a hitherto unknown presidential power as renamer-in-chief.
And he didn’t raise the prospect of invading Greenland or Panama unprompted. Reporters at his news conference asked if he would rule out the use of force — a question he almost invariably answers, no matter what the context, with “no.”
Still, his saber- and tariff-rattling deserves to be taken seriously.
Trump’s threats against less powerful countries reflect the basic principles of Trump’s worldview, factors that will likely make his second-term foreign policy chaotic and destabilizing.
He likes to throw his weight around, often by slapping tariffs on other countries. In his first term, he threatened to blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada until both countries agreed to modest changes — which the president then trumpeted as a historic success. He’s trying the same gambit now to muscle Denmark into giving him Greenland.
He has never embraced the idea of a “rules-based international order,” a system that subjects great powers and small countries alike to prohibitions on invading or coercing their neighbors. Building such an order has been a central goal of U.S. foreign policy since World War II, when Germany and Japan sought to dominate Europe and East Asia by force.
One element of that order has been a U.S.-devised system of military alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Trump thinks it’s a scam devised by foreigners to swindle Americans into defending them.
“They want protection,” he complained last fall. “They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know. The mob makes you pay money, right?”
Canada and Denmark, as members of NATO, shouldn’t have to worry about the United States scheming to grab any of their territory — but for the next four years, they will.
Another element of the rules-based order is the principle of self-determination, under which the citizens of a country have the right to decide who rules them. Trump apparently never heard of it. He never even paused to ask Greenlanders, Canadians or Panamanians whether they want the United States to move in.
The irony is that Trump’s bullyboy approach has already backfired.
Take his ambition for a stronger U.S. presence in Greenland. It’s not a crazy idea; the island, which lies along Arctic sea lanes and holds vast reserves of oil and rare earth minerals, would be a major strategic asset. And the impoverished Greenlanders might welcome U.S. investment — if they could be confident that they would benefit from it.
But the way Trump presented it as a hostile takeover threat made him unlikely to succeed.
“Officials in Greenland are elected by the people,” his former national security advisor, John Bolton, said last week on CNN. “You keep talking about buying them as if it’s a real estate deal, you’re hardening their positions — you’re pushing them into a corner that will make it very difficult to achieve the real American national interest here.”
In Canada, too, Trump’s bullying produced a backlash across the political spectrum. Trump claimed that “many Canadians” like the idea of losing their sovereignty; a poll found that the actual share was 13%. “Canada will never be the 51st state, period,” said Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader who is Canada’s closest thing to Trump.
And in Panama, Trump’s suggestion that the United States might retake the canal drew a predictable response. “The canal is Panamanian and belongs to Panamanians,” President José Raúl Mulino said. “There is nothing to talk about.”
Worst of all, Trump’s assertions that the United States has a right to control territory in its neighborhood whether the inhabitants like it or not damages broader U.S. interests across the globe.
“That’s exactly the same position Xi Jinping has on Taiwan,” Bolton pointed out — and Vladimir Putin’s justification for his invasion of Ukraine, too.
If Trump bulldozes ahead to try to rebuild a 19th century sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, that will not only strengthen Chinese and Russian claims to spheres of influence in Asia and Europe; it will weaken the alliances the United States needs to push back against them.
That would be a very bad bargain — especially for a president who considers himself a master dealmaker.
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