Yes, melting ice is making huge deposits of rare earths accessible, essential for microchips and advanced technologiesand therefore the fruitfulness and strategic position of Greenland (and its oil) could allow the United States greater control over new Arctic routes and increased energy independence; therefore, they are a geopolitical target.
No, the allusions of Donald Trump on the possibility of Canada becoming the 51st American state are not just a dig at the outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeauto the Canadian Democrats and Liberals and their representatives in the USA, and would theoretically have a basis due to “the enormous trade deficit and the subsidies that Canada needs to stay afloat”, as he himself declared Trump.
And yes, the Panama Canal area and its trade are at risk of coming under China’s complete controlwhich continues to build ports and hubs nearby for the sale of Chinese products to foreign markets; which is why, if you want to eliminate the Chinese presence in the Americas and perhaps even overthrow by economically strangling those regimes considered hostile, such as Cuba and Venezuela, you can even think about occupying it.
But all this cannot ignore an upstream analysis: first of all, These ideas aren’t exactly new to U.S. politics; second, Greenland, Canada and Panama are in the expansionist aims of the new Trump administration because the world has changed and imperialism is once again a political horizon, cleared – even before legitimizing – by the aggressiveness of the other empires competing with the United States, i.e. Russia and China.
Therefore, not only does the next American four-year period promise to be full of twists and turns, with possible new borders to be drawn and conflicts to manage, a sign of the USA’s forceful return to its own imperialist vision. But Washington’s move – assuming that the new Administration really wants to persevere along these lines – is also a reflection of the choices made by China, which does not hide its desire to attack the island of Taiwan to annex it to the continent and reduce it to a dependent region from Beijing; and by the choices of Moscow, which on 24 February 2022 dusted off the idea that to maintain itself as such an empire must expand and annex, waging war where necessary. Consequently, Trump’s “outbursts” could be ascribed (at least in part) to the heading “reaction” to the hostile policies of his principals competitor.
With something new: those who suggest these moves to the tycoon’s ears today are no longer just the “savvy” strategists at the Henry Kissingerthose cultured twentieth-century figures who came from political science academies or similar, nor are they the prerogative of neoconservatives alone. Today these ideas mostly circulate on the boards of big tech companiesthose private companies that are turning from “unicorns” (companies worth more than a billion dollars) into wolves hungry for money and personal success.
That is, subjects who put economics and finance before politics and diplomacy. Not only that Elon Muskbut also numerous other new managers who, on occasion, mock the institutions and don’t care about the rules of international relations, just as they don’t care about the consequences of their words (and actions). The exception is the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has always called for aggressive actions by the US in Latin America: of Cuban-American origin, his idea is to expand the US presence first and foremost in the “backyard” or rather the two Americas. It is probably to him that we also owe the bizarre idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Why on earth, is the reasoning in right-wing circles in the United States, should America strive to moderate, contain, fight in rugged, distant, exotic places like the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe, when all this what is the use of the American empire already located a stone’s throw from home? The same “lesson” that Trump would like to impart to Hamas and militias hostile to Israel in the Middle Eastern region is little more than the search for a stage through which Washington can continue to exercise its military superiority. But those places are no longer a strategic objective for America; at least, not since the United States became energy independent. This vision has penetrated the world of US conservatives and, although it may not be so far-fetched from a geopolitical point of view, it is certainly very dangerous.
In short, the second Trump presidency is moving towards imperialism 2.0 led by ultra-rich, brazen and right-wing technocratswho would like to lead America towards definitive global dominance through the ruin of other nations and other international institutions, even or primarily friends, such as NATO (“let’s raise the ceiling on military spending to 5%” says Trump) and the Union European.
It will not escape most that Greenland is a possession of Denmark and that, as a member of the EU, Trump’s attack is also an attack on the sovereignty of our continent. But the idea is convincing in the president’s mind, for three reasons: the first is that Greenland is home to a major US military base, the Space Force by Pituffik (here is the hand of Musk, leader in the aerospace sector with SpaceX); furthermore, it is rich in raw materials for the chips underlying new technologies (Musk again, with Tesla And Starlink); finally, climate change has made the Arctic shipping routes potentially relevant and, if in the possession of the USA, they could represent an even shorter way to set a foot in Europe and dominate it. Furthermore, Denmark is a monarchy and, in Trump’s view, this must appear anachronistic to him at the very least (certainly, the man has no respect for institutions he does not fully understand).
Canada is also formally a monarchy, which depends on the British crown: as a member state of the British Commonwealth, it is part of the fifteen realms whose head of state is the sovereign of the United Kingdom. Consequently, although independent, today if anything it answers to London and certainly not to Washington.
Perhaps only the strategic and commercial value of Panama – which re-established diplomatic relations with China in 2017 and which since then, like other areas of Latin America, has been the scene of substantial infrastructure investments by China – could really convince the White House to commit politically, economically and if ever militarily in the Central American quadrant, considered the “number one enemy” of the United States Trump it is and remains the Beijing regime. In this sense, the “pivot to Asia” policy of Barack Obamathat is, the American strategic repositioning towards the Asian continent, has not changed with the new Republican administration. Also because the projections of empires transcend the short-term policies of individual administrations.
Ultimately, Donald Trump he is not yet officially the new president of the United States who has already upset international relations, especially among allied countries. As they say, we’ll see some good (or bad) things.
