No joke this time

policy

Over the past two days, President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that he has plans for American territorial expansion, saying the United States has each security concerns and industrial interests that may best be addressed by closing the Panama Canal and Greenland to be brought under American control or full ownership.

Trump's tone had not one of the trolling jocularity that surrounded his repeated suggestions in recent weeks that Canada should change into America's “51st.” State,” including his references to the country’s embattled prime minister on social media as “Governor Justin Trudeau.”

Instead, on Sunday, Trump made clear in naming a brand new ambassador to Denmark – which controls Greenland's foreign and defense affairs – that his initial offer to purchase the country could change into a deal the Danes won't refuse in the approaching term can.

He appears to covet Greenland each for its strategic location at a time when melting Arctic ice is opening up latest trade and maritime competition, and for its reserves of rare earth minerals needed for advanced technology.

“In the interest of national security and freedom around the world,” Trump wrote on social media, “the United States of America believes ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

On Saturday night, he accused Panama of allowing American ships to transit the canal and suggested that unless that modified, he would abandon the Jimmy Carter-era treaty that returned all control of the Canal Zone to Panama.

“The fees charged by Panama are ridiculous,” he wrote shortly before the fee increase scheduled for January 1st. “This complete ‘rip-off’ of our country will stop immediately.”

He further expressed concern that the channel could fall into the “wrong hands,” an apparent reference to China, the channel's second-largest user. A Hong Kong-based company controls two ports near the canal, but China has no control over the canal itself.

Unsurprisingly, the Greenland government immediately rejected Trump's demands, because it did in 2019 when he first recommend the thought. “Greenland is ours,” Prime Minister Mute B. Egede said in a press release. “We are not for sale and never will be. We must not lose our long fight for freedom.”

The Danish prime minister's office was more reserved, writing in a press release that the federal government “looks forward to working with the new administration” and offering no further comment on Trump's comments.

After Trump brought up the Panama Canal again in a speech on Sunday, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said in a video: “Every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zones is and will continue to be part of Panama.” He added: “The sovereignty and independence of our country are non-negotiable.”

But the president-elect's comments — and the not-so-subtle threats behind them — were one other reminder that his version of “America First” is just not an isolationist creed.

His aggressive interpretation of the phrase is harking back to the expansionism or colonialism of President Theodore Roosevelt, who consolidated control over the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. And it reflects the instincts of an actual estate developer who suddenly has the facility of the world's largest military to back up his negotiating strategy.

Trump has often suggested that he doesn’t all the time view the sovereignty of other nations' borders as sacrosanct. When Russia invaded Ukraine, its first response was not to sentence the blatant land grab, but relatively to declare that President Vladimir Putin's move was an “act of genius.”

Even now, as Trump seeks an agreement to finish the war in Ukraine, he has never said that the country's borders have to be restored, a key demand of the United States and NATO – he has merely called for a “deal” to finish it Fights promised.

In the cases of Greenland and Panama, each industrial and national security interests play a job.

Trump's desire for Greenland became clear in his first term, when a wealthy New York friend, Ronald S. Lauder, the New York cosmetics heir, put the thought in his head.

In the Trump White House in 2019, the National Security Council suddenly began coping with the small print of how the United States would accomplish a land acquisition of this magnitude. Trump repeatedly pressed this point with Denmark, but he repeatedly rejected it.

Trump was not the primary president to make these arguments: Harry S. Truman desired to buy Greenland after World War II as a part of a Cold War technique to exclude Soviet forces. Trump could make a parallel argument, especially as Russia, China and the United States fight over control of Arctic routes for merchant ships and naval facilities.

Arctic experts haven’t dismissed Trump's Greenland offer as a joke.

“Not many people laugh about it today,” said Marc Jacobsen, an associate professor on the Royal Danish Defense College in Denmark who focuses on Arctic security.

Jacobsen noted that the response in Denmark to Trump's latest offer was one among anger (a Danish politician). called it “An unusually strange way to be an ally”). But, he said, Greenlanders, who’ve long sought independence, could try to make use of Trump's interest as a possibility to further strengthen economic ties with the United States.

Since 2009, Greenland has had the suitable to declare independence, however the vast territory of about 56,000 people remains to be heavily depending on Denmark and has never chosen that path. Trump's interest could open a possibility for further US investment in Greenland, including in tourism or rare earth mining, he said.

“Was it crazy when the US acquired Alaska? “Was it crazy when the U.S. built the Panama Canal?” asked Sherri Goodman, a former Pentagon official and senior fellow on the Wilson Center Polar Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Goodman, whose book “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security” focuses partially on the Arctic, said the United States has a powerful interest in ensuring that China, specifically, doesn’t establish a powerful presence in Greenland.

China's ambitions within the Arctic have grown, with plans in 2018 to construct infrastructure and develop shipping routes vacated by climate change. Goodman said the United States should proceed to forestall China from gaining a foothold on North America's doorstep, but said Greenlanders must determine their very own fate.

“We want all of these areas close to our own mainland territory to protect ourselves and also to prevent an adversary from using them to our strategic disadvantage,” Goodman said. “On the other hand, there is international law and order and sovereignty, and Greenland is still part of Denmark.”

When it involves Panama, Trump can also hold a distant personal grudge.

In 2018, Panamanian cops evicted the Trump Organization from the Trump International Hotel in Panama City after a protracted legal battle between the president-elect's family and the property's majority owner. Trump's name was announced later. The company had entered right into a contract to administer the property.

David L. Goldwyn, who served within the State Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that Greenland has vast untapped natural resources, including greater than 43 of the 50 so-called critical rare earth elements used to make electric vehicles and wind turbines and other clean technology.

“If Greenland chose to develop these resources, it would certainly be a significant alternative to China, although it is China's ability to process these minerals that gives it its current advantage,” he said.

But Goldwyn said that along with Denmark's sovereignty, Trump might find that Greenland's indigenous communities don't want mining and resource extraction as much as he does.

“It is highly unlikely that resource extraction could be forced on an unwilling population,” he said. “A more fruitful path could be to work with the Danish government and the people of Greenland to develop these resources safely and sustainably.”