[[link removed]]

TRUMP WANTS TO BRING BACK THE AMERICAN IMPERIUM  
[[link removed]]


 

Timothy Noah
December 23, 2024
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Don’t worry, the president-elect's plans to seize Greenland and
the Panama Canal aren't serious. But they sure are weird. _

Graffiti is drawn on the sidewalk at the Trump International Hotel
referencing President-elect Donald Trump's recent comments that the
U.S. should own and control Greenland and the Panama Canal., Robert
Nickelsberg/Getty Images

 

Something about the holiday season seems to inspire nostalgia for the
American imperium
[[link removed]]—that
epoch from 1898 through the first decade or so of the 20th century
when the United States sought unapologetically to become an imperial
power. Two decades ago, then-Vice President Dick Cheney caught hell
for sending out a Christmas card that said, “And if a sparrow cannot
fall to the ground without attracting His notice, is it probable that
an empire can rise without His aid?” Now Donald Trump is celebrating
Christmas with threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, control of which
Congress turned over to Panama
[[link removed]] in
1978, and to open an entirely new theater of conquest by seizing
Greenland from Denmark.

Cheney’s words were borrowed from Benjamin Franklin, who, as
Franklin biographers Edmund S. Morgan and Walter Isaacson explained
to me
[[link removed]] at
the time, did not have in mind the conquest of foreign lands.
(“Empire” did not, the late Morgan told me, “carry the kind of
freight it carries today.”) But that didn’t get Cheney off the
hook. By December 2003, United States troops had deposed Saddam
Hussein in Iraq. Combat operations wouldn’t end until December 2011
[[link removed]] (and even today about 2,500
troops remain
[[link removed]]).
One year earlier, President George W. Bush had adopted a military
doctrine
[[link removed]] of
”pre-emption” that permitted
[[link removed]] “anticipatory
action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time
and place of the enemy’s attack.” Under those circumstances,
nobody felt like cutting Cheney any slack.

Trump’s Panama Canal comments appeared Saturday on Truth Social and
were repeated at a rally Trump held later the following day in
Arizona. The two
[[link removed]]-part
[[link removed]] Truth
Social post was unusually long for Trump. “The Panama Canal is
considered a VITAL National Asset for the United States,” it began.
It was “was built at HUGE cost to the United States in lives and
treasure—38,000 American men died from infected mosquitos in the
jungles during construction.” Carter, Trump wrote, “foolishly gave
it away,” and now “the fees being charged by Panama are
ridiculous.” If “the principles, both moral and legal, of this
magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed then we will demand
that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without
question.”

The GOP cult of William McKinley
[[link removed]] is
on the march. We already knew Trump admired this much-derided
president for his tariffs. Now it appears he’s also taken a fancy to
McKinley’s “Remember-the-Maine” conquest of Cuba and the
Philippines.

There’s a dash of the Gipper as well. Trump’s rhetoric echoes
Ronald Reagan’s belligerent mantra about the Canal when Reagan ran
unsuccessfully for president in 1976. “We bought it, we paid for it,
it’s ours,” Reagan said at the time, “and we should tell [Panama
leader Omar] Torrijos it’s going to remain ours.” Even Reagan
halted this saber-rattling after the treaty was ratified; by the time
Reagan met Trujillo’s successor for the first time in October 1982
his previous opposition went unmentioned
[[link removed]].
Instead, Reagan said he was “looking forward to a warm working
relationship.”

It may not surprise you that Trump mangled his facts about
Panama, overstating by more than 600 percent
[[link removed]] the
number of Americans who died building the Canal (only some of them
from malaria). Indeed, if we based sovereignty on the sacrifice in
lives building the Panama Canal, then the waterway would rightfully
belong to France, which began construction in 1881 and abandoned the
project to the United States seven years later after losing about
20,000 workers. _Nous l’avons acheté, nous l’avons payé,
c’est à nous !_

Moreover, Carter never “gave away” the Canal because the
Canal _never belonged to the United States_, a point Carter explained
in a February 1978 address to the nation
[[link removed]].
“We have never had sovereignty over it,” Carter said. The United
States never “bought” the Canal, but rather rented it and the
surrounding Canal Zone from Panama, paying annually for the privilege.
All the 1978 treaty did was cancel the lease while granting the United
States the right to intervene militarily should any nation threaten
the Canal’s neutrality—a neutrality under threat, the BBC’s
Mark Wendling and Jake Horton pointed out
[[link removed]]this week, only from
the United States itself. After Panama’s president, José Raúl
Mulino, replied to Trump that “Every square meter of the Panama
Canal … belongs to Panama and will continue to belong to Panama,”
Trump reposted it [[link removed]] with
the comment, “We’ll see about that!”

Panama charges ships $400,000 to traverse the canal. That’s hardly
ruinous for the multibillion-dollar shippers and suppliers that use
it. Transit slowed in recent years because drought lowered water
levels in the Canal, in turn reducing the number of ships that could
pass through. That in turn led to supply-chain-disrupting traffic
jams; in August 2023 the number of vessels waiting to pass
through reached 160,
[[link removed]] delaying passage by as much
as 21 days. Panama started auctioning off rights to jump the queue,
which doubled the cost of transit for shippers that availed themselves
of this short cut. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that the Central
American nation has taken economic advantage of the situation, but
Trump’s complaint is a bit rich coming from the guy who sells $60
“God Bless the USA” Bibles
[[link removed]].
(The “Inaugural Edition” will set you back $70.) In any event,
Trump is bluffing. We aren’t going to invade.

Buying Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark is a project
Trump suggested
[[link removed]] during
his first term, calling it
[[link removed]] “a
large real estate deal.” The Danish prime minister said back then
that Greenland wasn’t for sale (prompting Trump to cancel a visit
to Denmark [[link removed]] in a
huff). Indeed, it isn’t clear Denmark could sell Greenland if it
wanted to, given a power-sharing agreement under which the world’s
largest island mostly governs itself. Greenland was a Danish colony
from the 18th century until 1953
[[link removed]], at which time it
became a Danish district with two representatives in parliament; in
1979 Greenland became almost entirely self-governing. (The intricacies
of the arrangement may be somewhat familiar if you watched the fourth
season of _Borgen_ [[link removed]].)

Even so, Trump posted Sunday (while announcing on Truth Social
[[link removed]] that
Ken Howery was his choice for ambassador to Denmark) that “For
purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the
United States of America feels that the ownership and control of
Greenland is an absolute necessity.” This time the offer was
rebuffed by Greenland’s own prime minister
[[link removed]].

Why would Trump even want Greenland? Our military already has a base
there,
[[link removed]] so
it can’t be for national defense.  

The island is rich in natural resources, including a few rare-earth
minerals of commercial importance and of course oil (though the United
States has plenty of the latter already). The presence of these
natural resources would put the price at $1.7 trillion, _The
Washington Post_’s Christopher Ingraham estimated in 2019
[[link removed]],
which means buying Greenland would probably cost more than $2 trillion
today. (That’s assuming Denmark were willing to sell, which, again,
it is not.) No way would Congress appropriate $2 trillion to buy
Greenland. Instead, we’d have to invade. That would mean waging war
against NATO, since Denmark and Greenland are both member nations.
China and Russia, I figure, would take NATO’s side. In the unlikely
event that human life survived this conflict, the United States would
inherit not only Greenland’s natural resources but also
Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants, most of them Inuit fishermen—a
population sufficiently impoverished that Denmark must subsidize the
country to the tune of more than $500 million annually.  

These flirtations with neoimperialism are of course nonsense.
Trump’s not going to take back the Panama Canal or seize Greenland
any more than he got Mexico to pay for his idiotic border wall. The
Panamanians, the Danish, and the Greenlanders don’t take these
threats seriously, and neither should you. It’s just our senile
president-elect spouting off again.

Timothy Noah [[link removed]]

Timothy Noah is a _New Republic_ staff writer and author of _The Great
Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do
About It_.

* Trump
[[link removed]]
* Greenland; Panama Canal;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]