Many people still don’t have the stomach to follow politics these days after the disappointment of the last election and the return of the Trump three-ring circus to Washington. It’s depressing and nerve-wracking, even if you just hear snippets in passing or read a few paragraphs of a news story about billionaires at Mar-a-Lago or strange D-list celebrity political figures being lifted into positions of great responsibility. There’s only so much you can take.
But I do wish that everyone could bring themselves to watch at least some of the president-elect’s press conference on Tuesday. Yes, much of it was the standard lunacy about showerheads and whales and windmills. He always plays his greatest hits. But he’s got some new material that I think people should be aware of.
I’ve been saying for years that his schtick about being some kind of peacenik was a crock. First of all, it was obvious that he adopted that pose in order to position himself as the opposite of both Bush and Obama who were criticized for their foreign policy. He has almost no understanding of international affairs, even now, so his shorthand decision-making was simply to say that anything his predecessors did was stupid and made the world laugh at us as he promised to reverse their policies. Sometimes he even did it, as with the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He simply tweaked NAFTA and pretended that it was genius. And he left Afghanistan a terrible mess for his successor which allowed him to condemn it all over again. But generally, beyond kvetching endlessly about NATO not “paying its dues” and crowing about his love affairs with all the world’s worst despots, Trump really didn’t have a foreign policy.
But he did have a worldview.
His central conceit all the way back to 2016 was that he’s a man of peace who wanted to put America first. People misinterpreted it as a sort of pacifist isolationism. It was not. He wanted to spend massive sums to build up the U.S. military to make allies pay up for protection and he believed that tariffs should be used as economic weapons to dominate other countries. In other words, he believes that U.S. power should be used to bend the world to his will.
His recent comments about Mexico, Canada, Panama and Greenland show that this strategy has matured beyond just extorting money from other countries at the end of some very big guns, both military and economic, and has now become a full-fledged policy of territorial expansion.
In that typically crazy press conference on Tuesday, he made the startling announcement that he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His loyal hatchet woman, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, promptly announced legislation to do just that so that the government could get to work changing all the maps. The fact that the Gulf of Mexico has been called that since before there was a United States of America makes no difference. Trump wants it and he’s going to make it so.
That wasn’t all, however. Earlier in the day we had all been treated to reports that Donald Trump Jr. and activist Charlie Kirk had been dispatched to Greenland to take the temperature of locals to see if they wanted to be annexed by Donald Trump. It was embarrassing, needless to say.
And when asked in the press conference if Trump actually planned to seize the island, and the Panama Canal as well, Trump said it was necessary for national security, the same rationale Vladimir Putin used to invade Ukraine which Trump called “savvy” and “genius” at the time. It is quite clear that Trump is serious about this. When asked directly, he would not rule out using the military to accomplish his goal.
He is also quite serious about using U.S. troops to stage military operations in Mexico, ostensibly against the drug cartels. And for all of his “joking” about Canada being the 51st state as a way to emasculate Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he conceded that he only planned to use economic force to bend Canada to his will, which was very restrained of him.
The Atlantic’s David Frum discussed what a change this was from the way the world has been organized since the end of WWII when the world was in rubble and the United States made the decision to help rebuild it:
Americans sought to achieve security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States became the center of a network of international cooperation—not only on trade and defense, but on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues.
And yes, we also exploited other countries, chased phantom ideological goals and otherwise betrayed our ideals but this was central to how we organized our tremendous military and economic power in the world. After the searing experiences of two world wars, a global Great Depression and the long slog of the Cold War, the hard-won lesson was that everyone was safer and more prosperous under mutual cooperation. The international institutions, alliances and treaties that sprang from that understanding were devised to at least make it difficult to completely abandon those ideals.
That concept is no longer operative under Donald Trump. Here you have one of Trump’s glib minions openly wondering why America shouldn’t expand its territory. It’s as if the last century never happened.
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With Trump saying that the U.S. needs Greenland and the Panama Canal for national security reasons it’s pretty clear that they are laying the groundwork for military action. (Nobody is going to “sell” either of them.) I doubt that there will be any serious actions, economic or otherwise against Canada because America does lots of business with them. But Trump is stirring up a tremendous amount of resentment for no good reason. And we have every reason to believe that he’s serious about some kind of military action in Mexico. (And don’t be surprised if he proposes a Venezuelan invasion. He wanted to do it in his last term.)
Nobody voted for any of this. It wasn’t even a “vibe” in last November’s election.
Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion which he thought from the beginning made perfect sense. His Defense Secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, put it in terms Trump probably liked very much. He called it “Putin’s give me my shit back war”:
I have always said that even if you believed that America’s role in the world was too broad and too expensive and perhaps outdated, just taking a wrecking ball to it without anything to replace it would be a horrible mistake. Well, Trump has something to replace it now. When he says “America First” he means “America Uber Alles .”
And guess what? Other countries aren’t eager to go along with that. So they’re arming up:
What could go wrong?
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