US President Donald Trump is, in many ways, a throwback to the Victorian, or even the pre-Victorian age. His belief in national growth through the physical acquisition of territory, and in Great Power relations based on “might makes right,” and mutual acceptance of “spheres of interest,” speaks to the ways and principles of a long bygone period. His policies will ultimately fail. Those who live in the Western Hemisphere will pay the price for this, in the short term, but the American people will pay it in the longer term.
To start with the acquisition of territory, Trump’s fascination with Greenland, which he has threatened to acquire by force, if necessary, is the most blatant case in point. While a strategic case can be made that the West in general, and the US in particular, should control the rare minerals which are believed to be there in abundance, the simple fact is that the West already controls them. It’s not as if Greenland or Denmark would ever refuse to sell these minerals to the US; why would they do that?
But Trump’s approach to international trade does not accept the notion that other nations, even if they are allies, can control vital resources; he believes that they must be in American hands. This seems to have as much to do with US prestige and economic interests than Western geostrategic goals. Similarly, the US already has military bases in Greenland and could almost certainly expand them by agreement with Greenland and Denmark if it felt it needed to. It does not need to “own” Greenland to secure its interests there.
Canada and the Panama Canal are more nuanced issues. In the case of Canada, it seems that the President has taken it into his thinking that the US “subsidises” Canada’s existence by hundreds of billions of dollars each year. If this is the case, if Canada cannot pay its own way, why should it exist as an independent nation? No serious economist or trade expert accepts Trump’s view, which is based on a highly skewed and selective understanding of Canada-US economic relations. Most see the relationship, in its totality, as essentially balanced and mutually beneficial; in some areas, Canada is ahead, but in others (the ones Trump refuses to recognise), the US is ahead.
A design behind the chaos?
This leaves two options as to how this situation should be understood; either Trump really does believe his rhetoric, or he has other objectives and his threats are an attempt to create a form of leverage aimed at re-working the North American economy. If the latter is the case, it may be that he seeks to re-cast Canada-US trade (and that with Mexico) away from a system whereby equally advanced industrial economies (though obviously not equal in terms of size), benefit each other through the free exchange of goods and services, into a more mercantilist system whereby the hinterlands supply raw materials to the metropole, which exports finished goods back to them. It is perhaps a fear that this is the real Trump objective which led Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to declare that the Canadian policy of ever deepening trade and security relations with the US is now “over.” Time will tell if Canada really can re-cast its relationship with the US.
This, once again basically 19th century understanding of international relations and trade could also explain his fascination with the Panama Canal. Control of key trade routes, and particularly maritime “choke points” is woven into the fabric of how that age understood security and economic resilience. Added to that is Trump’s courting of the support of a domestic faction in the US which has never reconciled itself to the fact that President Jimmy Carter “gave away” the “American” canal in Panama, much of which now supports Trump.
It thus seems to be the case that the best strategy for the nations of the Western Hemisphere to deal with Trump is to wait him out, even though this will be painful in the short term. His political half-life is short and the American economy will falter seriously if the chaos he has unleashed continues. The repatriation of industrial jobs to America, which supposedly lies at the heart of his tariff strategy, will take a decade, if it happens at all. He will be long gone by then
