When Donald Trump looks at the globe, what does he see? We know that in the president’s eyes, other nations may be abject “shithole countries,” shiny real-estate opportunities, or potential candidates for the 51st state. There’s no question that people, goods, and ideas from other lands are less welcome in the United States than they once were. But for all his purported anti-globalism, Trump is no isolationist: Foreign states are still useful things. In his first few weeks in office, Trump has shown us how, in spite of its fixation on borders, the MAGA movement is embracing its own version of globalization.
Trump’s is not a politics of international cooperation and mutual support, as the cuts to USAID and digs against NATO make clear. Nor does he defer to corporate hegemony: He has no problem banning foreign businesses and threatening multinationals with tariffs. He seems to approach the world, rather, as a wily oligarch does—juggling offshore trusts, fictitious addresses, and numbered accounts to avoid taxes, litigation, and the rules and responsibilities that come with living in a society.
I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist reporting on the shadowy offshore world and its protagonists: the people who built it, the countries complicit in the system, the firms and oligarchs that profit from it, and the groups and individuals who get caught in the cracks. I recognize in Trump’s recent incursions a line of reasoning that I’ve encountered time and time again: that if you’re incredibly rich, cruel, or clever, the world can be your loophole.
Trump’s foreign policy treats the nations of the world less as sovereign, independent nations than as sites of arbitrage, evasion, and extraction. Call it “national globalism”: the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests.
The new administration’s international agenda so far has—not coincidentally—disproportionately focused on vulnerable territories that share a defining feature: They might offer the U.S. ways around rules, treaties, costs, regulations, or even the Constitution itself. Greenland. Gaza. El Salvador. The Panama Canal.
The most glaring example is Guantánamo Bay, which received its first planeload of undocumented migrants from the U.S. early this month. As of Friday, at least 126 migrants were detained at the naval station; Trump says it will accommodate 30,000. It’s not hard to guess what Trump hopes to achieve there, because the station has served a similar purpose before.
Most people associate Guantánamo with the War on Terror. But the U.S. has occupied the naval base for more than a century—renting it from the Cuban government consensually from 1903 to 1959, then somewhat less so once the Cuban Revolution scorched diplomatic relations.
Gitmo’s physical location in the Caribbean is strategically useful, of course. But its unique legal geography is an added perk: Being neither entirely “domestic” (the U.S. does not own it) nor “foreign” (Cuba does not control it), Guantánamo is a liminal space. It is out of sight, out of mind, and a perfect place to try to evade accountability.
In the ’90s, tens of thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers escaping political violence found themselves rerouted to Guantánamo. Many became trapped in what lawyers described as a “legal black hole,” detained in squalid camps, and denied the usual legal process to claim asylum. One lawyer representing a group of 158 Haitian detainees, many of them HIV positive, who were prevented from leaving the camp for 20 months, compared the conditions to Dante’s ninth circle of hell. The Clinton administration agreed to follow a judge’s order to free them in 1993—but only on the condition that the court would strike the case from precedent. The migrant detentions went on.
The U.S. government will not identify the migrants it’s now imprisoning at Gitmo. The ACLU and others have sued to get them access to lawyers, alleging that the detainees are already “incommunicado.” It’s unclear what will happen to these people—not least because they have already been on U.S. soil—but the camp’s location, culture of secrecy, and dark history will make accountability much harder to come by.
Gitmo isn’t America’s only plan for offshoring migrants. Panama has accepted more than 100 deportees originally from China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio said. Bukele’s administration has become synonymous with a brutal crackdown on crime. It’s conducted mass trials and been accused by Amnesty International of torturing prisoners in its overcrowded prisons. Now, in return for assistance developing its nuclear-energy program, El Salvador’s government has offered to put up America’s unwanted migrants—and potentially, U.S. citizens with convictions, too—in its jails, under its laws.
Last month, Trump said he wanted the U.S. to take control of the Panama Canal. Of course he did. Though the canal belongs to Panama, the U.S. built and governed it for much of the 20th century, and it now serves as the world’s second-largest free-trade zone, governed by an autonomous (albeit Panamanian) government agency. Trump also ordered Panama to sever ties with China, which controls ports adjacent to the canal via a Hong Kong company, and insisted that Panama stop charging U.S. vessels to use the thoroughfare. This is national globalism: free passage for me but not for thee (and definitely not for Xi).
It is unclear how seriously the Panamanians are taking this request, but even if they complied, it wouldn’t amount to much: There are only 185 U.S.-flagged cargo ships in the world. That’s because, under international law, shipowners can have their pick of flags, and given the choice, most opt for cheaper, less-regulated ones, like that of the Marshall Islands (which claims more than 4,000 vessels), Liberia (more than 5,000), or Panama itself (more than 8,000). Flags of convenience are a prototypical example of national globalism: the bald use of another country’s sovereignty to advance one’s own commercial interests. The practice of “flagging out” was, in fact, pioneered by American businesses in the 1920s and ’30s as a way to evade Prohibition, and later New Deal–era worker protections.
Trump’s proposal to take over Greenland reflects a similarly cavalier approach to sovereignty, but with murkier aims. Is it a real-estate play? A bid for rare-earth minerals? A tacit acknowledgment that climate change will alter shipping routes forevermore? Or is it all about some libidinal masculine desire for a new frontier?
That Trump will actually buy or invade the Danish territory is quite unlikely. But that he chose it as his target at all is instructive. Greenland is a sparsely populated former colony that enjoys a high degree of self-rule while depending on Denmark for its security. Greenland, like Gitmo and the Panama Canal, can be seen in the national-globalist imagination as betwixt and between—a natural place to exploit.
Then there’s Gaza. After close to a brutal year and a half of violence there, Trump entered the chat. First, he declared that the U.S. would simply take Gaza over and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” that could be filled with expats and multinational businesses. To do that, he said, Gazans would have to vacate (many would call a population transfer of this magnitude, with these intentions, ethnic cleansing). It’s highly unlikely that any of this will happen, but again, it makes sense that he seized upon a territory that world leaders have gone out of their way to classify as liminal, indeterminate, or somehow sub- or extra-national, against the wishes of the Palestinians who live there.
Trump is certainly not the first national globalist, nor is America the first state to embrace practices such as sending migrants to third countries.
Italy recently established a camp in Albania, for instance, and Israel has deported hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Uganda. Since 2001, Australia has, on and off, diverted asylum seekers to squalid detention centers in the nearby nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. The camps were directly inspired by Guantánamo. Australia offered the host states a cynical win-win: The poorer countries would get money to operate prisons, and Australia could make an example of a few thousand people, some of whom lived in the camps for years. Offshoring migrants also allowed Australia to claim it was not responsible for them under international law: After all, they were not on Australian land. Today, the majority have been resettled—but not in Australia.
In an analogous scandal that began in 2008 but is still ongoing, some 40,000 stateless people in the United Arab Emirates have semi-forcibly been given passports from Comoros, a nation they have never known, just so they can remain classified as “foreign” nationals without citizenship rights in the UAE.
National globalism is wily that way. It uses foreignness and territorial indeterminacy to its advantage. And no nation has mastered it better than the country Trump sees as America’s most threatening competitor—China.
The use of specialized carve-outs has helped China attract industry: through semiautonomous territories such as Hong Kong, which offers common-law courts and low taxes, and enclaves such as Shenzhen, which since the ’70s has been more open than the rest of China to foreign businesses and migrants. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which finances foreign ports, infrastructure, and real-estate developments in other countries to advance its own economic interest, can be seen as a much more ambitious version of what Trump might hope to achieve in Greenland and Panama. (Ironically, the overseas Chinese projects were themselves conceived to counter U.S. influence in the region.) On the borders of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, Chinese companies have invested in the creation of quasi–extraterritorial cities where they can invest currency and where gambling, scams, and other kinds of illicit activity are common.
Some of China’s partners, like Kazakhstan, are willing, if not equal, participants; others, like Laos, are poor and small and don’t have much choice. There are more than 50 Chinese special economic zones in Africa. What’s always clear is who’s calling the shots.
The philosophy of national globalism—a combination of nationalism, mercantilist economics, and neocolonial exploitation—is what unites the flags of convenience and the billionaires hoarding their art collections in top-secret Swiss warehouses. The defining feature of the national-globalist worldview is this: Land and law are not, and should not, be inextricably linked. If your own law doesn’t work for you, you can find a better one in another country or jurisdiction: moving your assets offshore, renouncing your citizenship and buying a new passport, or, if you’re a government, moving entire populations to a place where you are not technically responsible. These maneuvers purport to follow the letter of the law, but they don’t embody its spirit; the Australian refugee-law scholar Daniel Ghezelbash calls it hyperlegalism.
It’s unclear how much of these ideas Trump will carry out abroad. But he isn’t confining himself to other countries. He’s ready to bring national globalism home.
In 2023, Trump pledged to build “freedom cities” on federal land that would “reopen the frontier” and, presumably, free businesses from the usual rules and regulations. “Freedom Cities could address two major challenges confronting the United States: a sclerotic bureaucracy and a stagnant society,” wrote Mark Lutter and Nick Allen, experts who promote special economic zones like China’s.
The irony, of course, is that carving out land for deregulated islands of industry is how other countries sought to attract American industry in the first place. It worked because it lowered costs and unleashed a regulatory race to the bottom. What Trump would actually be doing is bringing the long hours, low wages, and poor conditions of offshore jobs back home to America.
By picking and choosing which rules to play by—foreign, domestic, or something conveniently in between—national globalism undermines democratic rule, replacing the idea of “one land, one law, one people” with something fractured and piecemeal.
Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order exemplifies this. The Fourteenth Amendment says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” That’s universality based on territory: Being born here is enough.
Does birthright occasionally grant citizenship to people born here by chance? Absolutely. Is it a perfectly fair system? No. But what is citizenship if not chance?
The Trump administration has made the specious claim that children born to people without the right documentation are somehow not under its jurisdiction, and could therefore see their citizenship claims denied, or perhaps even have their citizenship revoked. If nothing else, it is a transparent effort to establish two classes of people. And for national globalists, only one of them matters.
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