Donald Trump is a firm believer in the theory that the best way to normalize an idea, no matter how crazy it may be, is to repeat it many times. And this is how the president-elect of the United States resurrected this Monday his old aspiration of taking control of Greenland, an autonomous territory belonging to the kingdom of Denmark. It is the largest island in the world that does not form a continent: a vast portion of land and ice between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans with a small population (56,000 inhabitants), but rich in natural resources and geostrategic value.
Trump, who has been with increased expansionism for several days, in which he has claimed control of the Panama Canal, opened the door to a “soft” invasion of Mexico and fantasized about annexing Canada, returned this Monday to put the issue on the table from Greenland. He did it, almost out of the blue, inside one of his messages on the social network he owns, Truth. In it, he announced that Ken Howery will be his ambassador to Denmark. After singing the praises of Howery, another transplant from Silicon Valley in the US Executive – he is co-founder of PayPal and the venture capital fund Founders Fund – the president-elect only needed one sentence to slam the geopolitical board: “For the For the purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States considers ownership and control of Greenland to be an absolute necessity.”
Trump already said in 2019, during his first round in the White House, that he was considering the possibility of buying Greenland. He even canceled a state trip to Denmark when the rulers of the Scandinavian country, a founding partner of NATO and a member of the European Union, responded that the island is not for sale. This Monday, the Prime Minister of Greenland, Múte Egede, repeated it on Facebook. “Greenland is ours,” he wrote. “We are not for sale and we never will be. We must not abandon our years-long struggle for freedom. However, we must remain open to cooperation and trade with everyone, especially our neighbors.” Since 2009, the island has had the possibility of declaring its independence, but, united by strong ties to Denmark, there is nothing to indicate that it is planning to exercise that right.
With Greenland, Trump completed a series of announcements that have set off alarm bells in chancelleries around the world. On Saturday night, and again in Truth, he threatened to regain control over the Panama Canal if American ships did not get reduced rates for using it. He also expressed his desire to prevent the passage from falling into the “wrong hands,” in reference to China, an enemy power.
Mexican cartels
The next day, he repeated that message at a conclave of the ultraconservative youth proselytizing group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona. There he also announced that he plans to designate the main Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.” This measure could open the door to fulfilling the wishes of the members of the hardest wing of Trumpism, who have advocated carrying out selective attacks in the southern neighbor to eliminate the leaders of these criminal groups or bomb fentanyl, drug laboratories. which will kill about 70,000 Americans in 2023.
On Monday, Trump returned to the Panama Canal, when he posted on Truth an image of the infrastructure, whose government is governed by an agreement from the days of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), with an American flag waving in the foreground and the message : “Welcome to the United States channel!” The Panamanian president, the conservative José Raúl Mulino, flatly rejected the suggestion as an affront to the country’s sovereignty.
The map of Trump 2.0’s imperial ambitions is completed by Canada. The president-elect said last week – once again, on his social network – that “many Canadians want to become the 51st state.” In November, he threatened the northern neighbor with the imposition of 25% tariffs on imports, which led to a visit to Mar-a-Lago by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has held the position since 2015 and who this year He faces re-election weakened.
Trump, whose talent for cruelty is beyond doubt, delights in calling him “governor” of the “Great State of Canada” and does not hide his desire for him to lose at the polls. It does not seem difficult for something like this to happen: Trudeau faces the campaign weakened, harassed by a housing crisis, a health system in decline, growing immigration and the same ideological war between progressives and conservatives that is waged without quarter in many advanced societies .
As historian Daniel Immerwahr explains, although the United States is founded on the myth of anti-imperialism (independence from the English), it is a country whose history can be told through expansionist aspirations such as those that now subjugate Trump. First was the conquest of the West and the Texan bite into Mexico. Then, the overseas adventures, with the annexation of dozens of uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the purchase of Alaska, the absorption in 1898 of the remains of the Spanish empire, the addition of Hawaii, Wake Island and American Samoa , and the United States Virgin Islands. The last phase came at the end of World War II, when the country’s surface area had reached its peak, some 135 million Americans lived outside the continental zone, and Washington decided to release most of those territories. The Philippines gained its independence, Puerto Rico became a commonwealth, and Alaska and Hawaii became states in their own right.
“I don’t know to what extent Trump’s aspirations are credible,” Immerwahr explained in an email on Tuesday. “I do believe that we are facing a return to an older vision of power, where security is achieved through the surface. After 1945, the United States has sought more diffuse forms of influence, through trade pacts, security partnerships, arms flows, and bases. All of this requires close connections with foreign governments. Trump’s vision of a strong America, by contrast, appears to be a vast expanse of land, enclosed within high walls. He wants power over the world, but no presence in it. So, instead of getting the strategic benefit of Greenland by operating a military base or trading with Denmark, he is trying to buy it back.”
To the historian, all this takes him back “to the bloody days of [el presidente] “Teddy Roosevelt.” And although he considers it “tempting” to see it as “the return [de Estados Unidos] to an imperial era,” he recommends not forgetting “the hundreds of military bases that the country has outside its borders like a kind of empire.” A “pointillist empire,” he calls it in his book. “Trump is clearly more comfortable with an older form of power projection.”
Some of the gains in US territory were possible thanks to purchase and sale agreements like the one Trump now cherishes. In 1803, Washington bought Louisiana from France for $15 million and, 84 years later, Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. The US Virgin Islands come from a 1917 payment of 25 million to… Denmark. Trump is not even the first president to set his sights on Greenland: Harry Truman even offered $100 million for the island in 1946.
Today, as then, during the height of the Cold War and the struggle with the Soviet Union, it is a piece of land coveted for its strategic location. And not only by virtue of the old rivalry of the powers: the melting of the Arctic promises to open new shipping lanes, as well as commercial and naval competition from which Beijing does not intend to be left out. Also new is the value of Greenland’s rare earth mineral reserves, necessary for the design of the most advanced technology.
A month before he returns to power, it is difficult to know how serious he is about what Trump promises, or threatens, in terms of international politics. It’s part of his strategy: throw out crazy ideas, repeat them until they’re not crazy, and then wait to see which ones he follows through with. In the case of Greenland, the idea of its purchase was received in 2019 almost as a joke. That joke might not be so funny now, with Trump’s return to the White House unleashed.
