Trump's imperial dream: A man, a plan, a canal — Panama! (Oh, and Greenland too)

Once again, Donald Trump has stepped in it. As usual, in doing so he has offered us the chance to learn something, even if it’s a lesson most Americans would rather ignore or forget. 

The “it,” in this case, is foreign policy, one of many areas where our president-elect holds a completely unmerited belief in his own expertise. But here’s the thing: Trump’s tirade of Christmas Day social media posts about Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal was blatantly inflammatory and insulting, not to mention well beyond self-parody with its characteristic Random Capitalization for Effect and ponderous pseudo-statesman-speak ("For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World ..."). But it wasn’t quite as stupid as it seemed.

One gets the impression that young Donald had a competent but defiantly old-school teacher back in 10th-grade U.S. history or whenever it was, and that some fragments of that pre-Vietnam patriotic ideology have stuck with him. We could say roughly the same thing about Trump’s protectionist, nationalistic views of macroeconomics, which had been abandoned by mainstream economists by the late 1950s. In both cases, he has accidentally horseshoed himself into spectacularly ill-informed opinions that nonetheless capture something of the contemporary zeitgeist. 

Trump’s jibes about Canada becoming the 51st state, and his suggestion that hockey legend Wayne Gretzky should run for prime minister (or “governor” — by Trump’s standards that’s a zinger), may have made headlines north of the border, but were arguably the least interesting aspects of his Yuletide manifesto. Even through MAGA beer-goggles that’s an implausible scenario, and the “51st state” thing is a venerable Yank insult to direct at Canadians (or for rival factions of Canadians, on occasion, to direct at each other). 

From the pre-1776 British colonial days to the present, the notion that Canada is nothing more than an adjunct or dependency of the U.S. (or an off-ramp, as with enslaved people before the Civil War or draft dodgers of the 1960s) has been woven into the frenemy relationship between the two countries. It’s not quite true but also not entirely falsifiable, and other small nations next door to current or former superpowers have similar complexes. (Talk to Ireland, Belgium, Austria and Finland about this; no doubt there are other examples.)

For the record, if Canada were a U.S. state — which, to be clear, is pure trollery and one million percent not going to happen — it would be larger in geographical terms than the other 50 states put together, but just barely the largest by population (in a dead heat with California). To the extent that Trump’s comments are calculated or strategic, which is always an open question, he’s mostly just taunting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose imploding approval ratings have opened the way for the MAGA-curious Conservative Party under Pierre Poilevre to win next November’s national elections. (Trudeau has earned a spot alongside Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel on the list of “Foreign Leaders American Liberals Swooned Over But Definitely Shouldn’t Have.”)

Trump’s impromptu musings on Greenland and Panama, however, have a different quality, something like a bratty schoolboy tripping over a rock and exposing a nest of scorpions. In terms of contemporary and respectable international relations, of course, his pronouncements are ludicrous and his facts are wrong: There is no evidence that “the wonderful soldiers of China” are “lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal,” and it’s an instructive but gruesome historical distortion to imply that “we lost 38,000 people” during the canal’s construction. 

(Distracting side note: Where did that “lovingly” come from, and why does Trump think that applies to his imaginary Chinese soldiers? Is it an attempt to deflect from accusations of racism? That’s overthinking things, but there’s a level of malevolent, sophomoric invention to Trump’s social media prose that I find impossible to quantify.)

Trump’s number might not be too far above the canal’s actual body count, but fewer than one percent of the known deaths were Americans. Most of those who died, in fact, were Caribbean laborers imported during the first, failed attempt to build a canal in the 1880s under a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had directed construction of the far simpler Suez Canal (all of which is at sea level). 

In other words, as Trump at least partly comprehends, the colorful histories of both Panama and Greenland, although radically different in many ways, are inextricably connected to the 500-year history of conquest, colonialism and imperialism. No easy summary is possible in either case, and the narrative long predates America's global rise: Panama was the site of one of Spain's first colonies in the Americas, and the launching pad for Spanish conquest of the Inca civilization; Greenland was first settled by the Norse more than a thousand years ago, and is technically still part of the kingdom of Denmark.

Trump’s fantasy narratives about the U.S. reclaiming control of the Panama Canal or purchasing Greenland from the Danish government seem grandiose and delusional largely because of who's offering them and how — but they’re not new ideas and he didn’t invent them. They’ve been part of the paleoconservative liturgy since well back into the Cold War years, and were probably poured into his ear by some foreign policy dinosaur who still privately laments that “we lost China” and surrendered in Vietnam. There was considerable right-wing opposition to the 1978 Panama Canal treaty negotiated under Jimmy Carter, and buying Greenland was briefly floated by both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations (as well as nearly a century earlier, bizarrely enough, by Andrew Johnson). 

If this pseudo-neo-imperialism doesn’t seem to fit with Trump’s supposed aversion to overseas military entanglements, it’s because that too involves the suspension of disbelief: Trump is only opposed to foreign wars after the fact, if they turn out to be painful and expensive. He’d be delighted to invade some small and powerless country that can’t fight back, and then hold an expensive victory parade.

Indeed, Trump’s visions of renewed American empire are a subset of the larger turn-back-the-clock MAGA fantasy, in which pretending to undo many decades of recent history will somehow restore full employment at decent wages, gallons of milk and gasoline for under a dollar and, oh yeah, unquestioned white male hegemony. Buying Greenland and grabbing the canal represents an imaginative attempt, from within the Trumpist worldview, to cut through the Gordian knots of 21st-century global politics: Why the hell did “we” — meaning the colonial and imperial powers — give all that stuff away in the first place? Let’s take it back! 

It’s probably missing the point to take these supposed proposals too seriously — even if, checking my notes, I see that the person making them is about to become the most powerful individual in the world. Greenland is finally on its way to full independence, and according to its actual government is not for sale. The canal has been under Panamanian sovereignty for 25 years, under the terms of a fully ratified bilateral treaty. 

But it’s also no good for normie Americans to clutch their collective pearls and protest that such ideas are deeply offensive and morally outrageous and that we would never — or, in the most noxious of all Yank self-soothing phrases, that this is not who we are. Yeah, it pretty much is! The world knows better, and after his own fashion so does Donald Trump.

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Panama only exists as an independent republic (if that’s even the correct term) because the U.S., in cahoots with the dubious French engineer and entrepreneur Philippe Bunau-Varilla, encouraged a revolutionary junta to declare independence from Colombia in 1903 and then, almost immediately, sign over the rights to build the canal. Since then, Panama has gone through a dizzying array of military coups, populist uprisings, political assassinations, student riots, canceled or overturned elections and flirtations with right-wing or left-wing autocracy, along with at least five U.S. military interventions. Gen. Omar Torrijos, who negotiated the Panama Canal treaty of 1978 with Jimmy Carter, was a military dictator who died three years later in what could be called a conveniently timed plane crash.

Greenland’s forbidding environment, at the outermost boundary of the European and North American world, have long made it one of the strangest places on earth. It may be the only country whose “indigenous” population (the Inuit people, who account for 90 percent of the modern population) arrived after the first European settlers — Norse communities founded by Erik the Red before the year 1000, which themselves disappeared or died out under mysterious circumstances after almost 500 years. Since the 18th century, the enormous icebound island has been a Danish possession or territory under various arrangements, although it gained home rule in 1979 and voted for self-government (but not quite full independence) in 2008. 

Trump’s lust for Greenland has surely been fueled by Mar-a-Lago conversations with climate-capitalist vultures who see the island’s warming temperatures and rapidly melting ice sheet as opening numerous opportunities for pillage, including uranium ore, oil and gas, rare earth minerals, iron and zinc, along with enormous quantities of cold-water fish that can now be harvested year-round. No doubt he’s also been told that the Chinese government is ramping up investment in Greenlandic infrastructure projects, in deals that the island’s government, frustratingly enough, gets to make all by itself.

Somebody needs to tell Trump and Elon Musk — whose clammy fingerprints are all over these pseudo-brilliant schemes — that there’s one big reason why Greenland hasn’t declared independence: Danish taxpayers still fork over an annual block grant of nearly $600 million, which accounts for at least one-fourth of Greenland's GDP. When you consider that 56,000 people live in Greenland, or roughly the same population as Manhattan — as Manhattan, Kansas, that is — I mean, do the math. At those prices, Trump might just decide to let the Chinese have it.