President-elect’s bullying tactics as leader of the world’s foremost power inevitably send worrying signals across the globe
Even before he becomes president, Donald Trump is causing dismay with his idiosyncratic diplomacy. He has more-than-once questioned Canada’s independence, claiming that it would be better off if it became the 51st US state. He has humiliated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by referring to him as the Governor of Canada. He has also issued a map showing Canada as part of the US. He is ready to use economic force to achieve his objectives, he said.
Trump has also laid claim to Greenland, arguing that the US needs this Danish territory for security reasons. Casting doubt on Denmark’s legal ownership of Greenland, he has threatened to take it by force if necessary. His son has visited Greenland, presumably as part of this take-over mission, which the US ambassador to Denmark has also been mandated to pursue.
The president-elect has also laid claim to the Panama Canal, completed by the US in 1914 and transferred to Panamanian sovereignty in December 1999. Trump’s grouse is that the Chinese have taken control of the waterway’s administration and high costs of transit have been imposed on US ships using it.
He has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on Mexican (as well as on Canadian) exports to the US, in violation of the 1994 NAFTA agreement. Trump has also announced that he intends to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, as this would have a beautiful ring to it.
These bullying tactics by the world’s foremost power inevitably send worrying signals across the globe. Trump has come back with a thumping majority, with the Republicans gaining control of both houses of Congress, and this has given him added confidence in his own political instincts and solutions to various issues on his internal governance and foreign policy agendas. His approach to international relations could well become more disruptive when he takes over on January 20.
The US is a huge country – the fourth largest in the world after Russia, Canada and China. Its population is far larger than that of Russia or Canada, and it has enormous natural resources. It is the largest economy in the world, with the GDP of over $30 trillion, and is the biggest military power. It virtually controls the international financial system through the US dollar as the principal reserve currency. It uses sanctions as a tool to pressure other countries to abide by the rules that it sets. It dominates the international system as no other country does.
One can ask why Trump seeks territorial expansion. The US, by virtue of its geographical position, with no hostile neighbors and protected by two oceans, is not under any direct security threat, other than that from Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal in the unlikely case of total war, and China’s growing nuclear capacity. The security of US forces can be threatened, but far away from its shores, because they are deployed all over the globe as part of an extended military alliance system. The US faces threats in distant geographies where it is present because of the role it has assumed as the world’s policeman.
This bid for territorial expansion for security or access to resources is very disturbing. It bound to give an incentive and provide a justification for other countries to pursue similar ambitions in their own regions or neighborhoods. The West’s discourse of adherence to international law, a rules-based order, respect for sovereignty, adherence to the UN Charter and so on, is repudiated by the principal upholder of these norms of international conduct.
An earlier view was that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) project was inward-looking, protectionist and non-interventionist. That was an error because, logically, making a country that remains the world’s foremost power despite China’s rise and eastward shifts in global economic power, great again, would suggest that Trump intends to retrieve the relative loss of power by the US vis a vis others and to make America the incontestably supreme power again. The thrust behind such an ambition is to dominate.
It is this ambition that has surfaced openly through the territorial and other claims that Trump is making. He has taken the unusual step of issuing a map showing the entire North American continent, Greenland included, as part of a United States, without any concern about how this cartographic aggression will be seen, not only in Europe or Canada but also internationally.
This act can only encourage and politically legitimize territorial claims by other countries to lands or seas that don’t belong them, and to do it for reasons of security or for control over resources. Can the US then contest China’s claims in the South and East China Seas? Beijing is also making unacceptable claims to Indian territory and showing this in their maps. Is Russia then wrong in seeking control over parts of Ukraine for security reasons?
Ironically, the territorial claim over Canada and, in particular, Greenland, is to contest Russia’s dominance of the Arctic shipping route, which will become increasingly vital for trade and resource reasons as it becomes more navigable and the seabed becomes more accessible.
The desire to exploit the resources such as oil, lithium, and others apparently abundant in Greenland reflects an absence of environmental concerns about the damage that would be caused to the territory’s pristine and fragile ecology.
The 2006 documentary of former US vice-president Al Gore, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, about the emerging human challenge of global warming and climate change, includes dramatic scenes of glacier melt in Greenland. One rationale offered for Trump’s claim is that the takeover of Greenland will be part of his plans to make the US a dominant energy power, an ambition seen as indispensable in the context of humongous energy needs for Artificial Intelligence.
Europe’s response to Trump’s territorial claims on Greenland, a Danish territory, reflects how its dependence on US for security has limited its margin of maneuver vis a vis Washington DC. Brussels’ approach is defensive, subservient, an attempt to temporize, to avoid a confrontation. There is no condemnation at all.
Denmark’s prime minister acknowledges the security concerns of the US, Chancellor Scholz makes a platitudinous statement to the effect that the “inviolability of borders applies to all.” French foreign minister Barrot has avoided mentioning the US by name, while remarking that the EU would “not let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are.”
The European Commission refused to “go into the specifics” when asked to comment on Trump’s claims. Von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, and Antonia Costa, the head of the European Council, stated evasively that the “EU will always protect our citizens and the integrity of our democracies and freedoms” and, rather pointlessly, that “we look forward to a positive engagement with the incoming US administration, based on our common values and shared interests. In a rough world, Europe and the US are stronger together.”
The contrast between the EU’s positions on Russia in Ukraine versus that on the US potentially taking Greenland exposes Europe’s geopolitical drift and weakness.
