Trump, Greenland, and the resurgence of the Monroe Doctrine

The New York Post summed it up best. Popular newspapers Wednesday's front page The photo showed Donald Trump pointing to a map of the Western Hemisphere, where Canada became the “51st country,” the Gulf of Mexico was renamed “America’s Gulf,” the Panama Canal was reborn as “Pana Maga,” and Greenland became “Our Land.” Its main title was the “Donroe Doctrine,” a play on the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 when the United States declared that hemisphere was off limits to European intervention. To my knowledge, Trump never mentioned the fifth president of the United States, James Monroe. But by refusing to rule out military action to seize any nearby property he might imagine, Trump is giving a strange rebirth to this principle.

This time it was the exclusion of China, not Europe, that provided the rationale. By contrast, Trump often points to William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, who greatly admires McKinley's 1890 tariff law (which McKinley introduced while he was a congressman). But it is McKinley's later actions as president that are most relevant to this note. In 1898, he seized the remnants of the collapsed Spanish empire, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. His successor, Teddy Roosevelt, made his name by leading the volunteer unit “Rough Riders” in the Cuban portion of the Spanish-American War. McKinley and Roosevelt embody the explicitly imperialist chapter of US history.

Should we take Trump's land expropriation threats literally? I doubt very much that Trump would go to war with Denmark, a NATO ally, or flood the Panama Canal with US paratroopers. But it is not unlikely. America invaded Panama in 1989 to oust and then imprison its strongman, General Manuel Noriega. Twenty-three American soldiers and 314 Panamanian soldiers lost their lives in that little war.

The most likely outcome is for a fearsome Panama to offer Trump preferential rates for American shipping to get him off its back. Meanwhile, Denmark may grant US companies favorable rights to explore for minerals and fossil fuels in its part of the melting Arctic. There is always money behind Trump's threats. I think Trump is joking when he threatens to seize Canada, a less digestible piece of real estate. But seriously, who knows? It seems that we are living in a real science fiction novel.

History has a funny way of shedding new light on events. The fact that the thirty-ninth US president, Jimmy Carter, died just days before Trump revived US sovereignty claims over Panama is an ironic development. Carter staked his presidency on returning the canal to Panamanian sovereignty to undo what he saw as Teddy Roosevelt's immoral theft of land. In addition to his moral motive, Carter's move was also tactical; His goal was to condense the Monroe Doctrine into history while trying to undermine the Soviet Union's equivalent assertion of its sphere of interest in Central and Eastern Europe. Carter was a man of his word. Trump is not like that.

The basic rule of Trump's approach to foreign policy is simple. He believes that the world is a jungle in which larger predators eat smaller ones. He has great respect for the other big beasts, specifically China and Russia, and feels carte blanche towards the smaller beasts. There is an upside and a downside to the Trump doctrine. The advantage is that its operation manual is very easy to disassemble. Trump's dealings are transparent. The disadvantage is that it has no moral boundaries.

The stock market, or the US Congress – which is less likely – may dissuade him from seizing another country, but he will not feel any remorse. She, along with countless others, has often denounced the hypocrisy of Washington's “liberal international order.” We will miss these hypocrites when they are gone.

This week I turn to Richard Porter, a former senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis and a former member of the Executive Committee of the Republican National Committee. Although we disagree on a lot, Richard is a good friend. Richard, are you concerned that Trump's deal-based approach may be self-defeating? Why would any country make a deal with a man who might tear it up if he saw a new advantage?

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• My column this week looks at Elon Musk's war on America's allies. Write: “America did not elect Elon Musk.” Yet he is acting as Donald Trump's de facto co-president. Musk's self-appointed duties include advocating for regime change in allied democracies. . . His silence on Russia and China speaks louder. Here is also my point America's farewell to Jimmy Carter At the National Cathedral on Thursday.

• My colleague Martin Wolf offered this An honest and intellectually non-negotiable assessment The recently deceased Manmohan Singh, the architect of India's economic transformation in the 1990s, and Narendra Modi's predecessor as prime minister. Having known Manmohan a little, I would like to double down on what Martin wrote about his humility and kindness. He was a brilliant man and was in the right place for India at the right time. Equally remarkable and valuable was the decency of his character.

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• Finally, I highly recommend Henry Farrell's Substack book, Programmable Mutter, on the impact of technology on politics, especially his note on Why has Silicon Valley shifted to the right? And again here Dystopia PKD. PKD stands for Philip K. Dick, the science fiction novelist. Farrell convinced me to read Dick's book Do Androids dream of electric sheep? Which was the inspiration for Blade Runner. I wish I could describe it as an escape.

Richard Porter answers

Self-defeating? On the contrary, Trump is working to advance American interests even before he takes the oath of office. Consider that it pushed Mexico to stop the flow of immigration, US companies to ditch DEI, banks to ditch the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and Facebook to stop censoring speech.

Boom! America is back, baby! And if you love America and free enterprise, it's a breath of fresh air.

All human affairs are transactional. What is different about Trump is not that he deals, but rather his style of dealing.

First, Trump is perpetually, instinctively and explicitly alpha, and uses every psychological strategy in our master playbook to set the terms for our national advantage. He uses his imposing physical size, handshakes, strong language, facial expressions, threats (or are they bluffs?) and other strategies to create uncertainty, unbalance counterparties – and change everyone's calculations about the terms under which a deal should take place. It is happening.

Second, Trump is always optimistic, comfortable taking calculated risks, and thinking outside the box. He instinctively seeks to create, expand, acquire and build, and intelligently looks for ways to alter the odds of success in order to achieve improbable success.

Third, he is unashamedly American. He is not ashamed of our history, is not influenced by less important countries, and is not afraid to defend our interests.

To paraphrase Roosevelt, America has a big stick – and Trump is not the type to speak softly. America has been a self-deprecating giant, charging our friends in NATO and trying to curry favor with adversaries by offering them money (Iran) and favorable trade and regulatory terms (China and the G7).

Other countries do business with us because we provide a market their industries need to access, the capital their industries need to grow, protection from evil, and the chance to become great with us again. America is the primary nation. We don't need to give up on making the world better, we can stand up and demand that of others too, and get the best possible deal for ourselves in the process.

Your feedback

And now a word from our swamps. . .

In response to “The battle for the working people”:

“In this new world where so much has been automated, there is no longer a practical path from education to productivity. As automation replaces workers, knowledgeable individuals are retained to do the necessary exception handling, but no training is provided for the next generation; the manual labor that It was used to train people. We are in a critical period of time when my generation (the baby boomers) is ready to retire but no one around us wants our job. The failure to work with the next generation in the United States is why we are looking abroad! —Sarah E. Davis

“The argument that H-1B visas are about providing wages is incorrect. This is almost entirely about the need for high-level engineering and related Talents It is in short supply among the American people. Let's be clear: it's not about quantity, it's about quality. The left's arguments against this are merely an implicit anti-capitalist position, while the arguments by some on the right come from a lack of understanding of how the modern world works. This is troubling enough in itself, but what is even more troubling is that there are groupings of left and right who completely agree to accept mediocrity. -Henry D. Wolfe